North Coast TAFE teacher, Jeanne Smith and the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) preparation course team won the Innovation Competition at the 2011 Australian Moodle Conference held last month in Darling Harbour, Sydney.

The Ballina TAFE team’s e-learning resource for migrants was voted as the most “awesomely awesome” amongst entries from competitors from all around Australia in the university and training sector, and overseas.

The team was led by Project Manager, Jeanne Smith, (instructional design and development) with Lorraine Jenkinson and Julie Wykeham (content writers), Julianne Crichton (content writer and pilot facilitator), Marcia Owen (graphic designer), Rohan Langford (audio producer) and Carolyn Mueller (quality assurer).

Jeanne Smith, General Education Faculty e-Learning Contact and TAFE Library Hub Project Officer based at Lismore together with Dr Kate Jones, who is head teacher of General Education at the Great Lakes campus presented the latest faculty online courses at the conference.

The winning course design was in the Moodle format, an online educational platform which is great for students studying either at a campus, or offsite in a workplace or at home. Moodle sites contain a full-range of audio and visual resources, which makes learning fun, relevant and widely accessible.

Ballina Campus, Head Teacher General Education, Julie Wykeham said “This has been a great team effort, taking the IELTS Preparation Moodle from a vague concept to such a fine finished product.”

“It has required huge amounts of dedication and creative problem solving, and we are all very proud of the results.”