18percent April. 2016 | Page 33

Or LearnerNet? By Polina Cowley Thanks A few weeks ago I came to talk about my newly founded company to Foundation degree photography students at Coleg Llandrillo-Menai. It was very nice to meet a varied group of students who gave me a warm welcome. I’ve shown my photography educational app idea and had very helpful responses. I find it quite hard to build the company on my own, so I was very grateful for support. There were also very good suggestions on how to improve the app. From the ‘Tasks’ page on the right you can see how it got better following students’ suggestions about the Search button, option to create a Task your self and your organisation’s special section. What’s all this about? “LearnerNet” is a social education software platform. It provides students with gamified learning, competing opportunities, socialising and study related visits. It enables tutors to assign ready-made digitally assessed homework, review students’ progress and arrange competitions. It gives students freedom to learn, meet and compete. The vision is to provide enjoyable interactive social learning for higher education students from every corner of the world. You know what I’m talking about Moodle is an educational platform, but it organises rather than teaches. You might have seen other learning platforms like Blackboard or RMeasimaths. What makes “LearnerNet” different is that it’s trying to make learning effortless: do what you like, find friends with similar interests, discuss your experience with them or just learn alongside them by comparing your progress. Change Ph-club is changing into LearnerNet. The idea is to apply the pattern of photography educational app to other subjects. All the Tasks, Visits and Competitions will stay the same but you’d be able to do them in Art or Music, for example. This is what I’d like to find out now—is it a good idea? Will it work with other subjects or not? I’d love to hear from you –what do you think? There is a short video on our Facebook page: www.facebook.com/Phclub.co.uk And Twitter @PolinaCowley