Posted October 2002 Source to sea
		Helen Penridge Learning Place Mentor Nambour and Mooloolaba District Year 7 students from three schools have worked together online, sharing information and developing self-regulation skills, in a unit on catchment management.

Helen Penridge, Learning Place Mentor for Nambour and Mooloolaba District, was interested in developing an online course where students could share information while undertaking real-world tasks. "Lots of schools do catchment units," Helen says. "I wanted to try an online unit linking several schools. This is the way kids communicate and we should be doing it in the classroom."

"I heard about the Learning Place even before it was actually up and running," Helen says. "I applied for a grant to develop the course and the Learning Place trained me to use Blackboard, gave advice, and helped in the course development. Really, you could say we learned together!"

The result was Source to sea, an eight-week online course on catchment management, designed for a teacher facilitator to run across one, or several, schools. In 2002 the course was run across Palmwoods, Mapleton and Mooloolah State Schools. Tony Yorkston from Mooloolah led the course and contributed to the activities.

Schools contacted each other in a weekly chat session to discuss content and present problems for group resolution.

Helen found this style of learning gave the students independence. "They helped each other with difficulties – it was real peer tuition. And teachers as well as students developed their ICT skills."

The course was successfully run again in 2004, and will be available to all schools in the future.

Helen believes online learning opens doors for students. "They learn new things and meet like-minded people outside their own school," she says.

An unexpected bonus, Helen says, was hearing about a student with communication difficulties, who had "really connected" with the course. "This was a special case where online learning was very successful," she says.