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Recently Phil Lidster from Birmingham City Council, the largest council in the country spent the day discussing the development of the Dynamic Learning Environment at the Council.

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Phil Lidster has worked for the last eight years at Birmingham City Council in human resource management, prior to this he worked in further and higher education. Phil’s job is to develop and implement the ICT part of the new Learning &Development strategy for over 58,000 employees. Birmingham City Council is presently going through a major business transformation programme. The transformation includes a strategic commitment to providing employees with the information and knowledge they need to do their jobs well and e-learning will play a key part of this strategy.

Birmingham City Council (CC) and Learning Pool go back a long way together. Birmingham CC was first involved with Learning Pool when it was owned by the IDeA in 2001. The Council was part of a collaboration of local authorities brought together to pilot the first authoring tool and to share Learning & Development (L&D) resources.

In the past few years, Phil has created courses and other content which sit on a part of the council’s intranet called People Solutions, dedicated to providing HR knowledge, and L&D opportunities. Employees can access information and complete e-learning courses on a wide range of topics, such as performance improvement, change management, partnership working and resolving conflict.

Currently Phil is looking at how to make their intranet ‘People Solutions’ more engaging and comprehensive in the knowledge and learning it provides.  They are planning to make a major investment in the DLE, making use of it as a collaborative learning environment, such as linking people up using communities of practice, blogs and wiki’s. They will be using the DLE as the platform for a new generation of e-learning,
 
“Learning Pool will be helping us make this leap to ‘knowledge management’, so that we can release the expertise that already exists in the workforce, and build upon new expertise”.

And finally here is what Phil Lidster thinks of Learning Pool;

“Learning Pool has developed enormously since 2001, particularly in the last two years. Without the dedication and support that Learning Pool provides, I would have struggled to develop People Solutions.  A ten minute call to Ben, or indeed any of the LP staff in the customer service team, saves me a lot of work, my problems is worked out almost immediately. Learning Pool has provided me with a better understanding of using ICT for learning, and has opened up many networking opportunities with other councils who are all in similar situations. They take a great interest in building partnerships and they encourage us to build networks, all at a fair price. With Learning Pool, you get value for money.”

To hear more about DLE’s, click here and learn what other councils think about Learningpool’s DLE and e-learning services.