The University of the Highland and Islands’s NAFC Marine Centre campus at Scalloway in Shetland is an internationally-renowned powerhouse of training, research and development. And now its courses are being opened up online to a potentially worldwide student body.
The NAFC (formerly the North Atlantic Fisheries College) offers a variety of courses for the full range of maritime industries (including the merchant navy, fishing and aquaculture), shore-based engineering, and recreational sailors. Now it is becoming a centre for remote learning, fuelled by demand in particular from the aquaculture industry. It began with students based in the outer Shetland islands like Unst and Yell, but spread to Orkney and mainland Scotland, as well as people working difficult shift patterns. Now students worldwide are able to benefit from courses delivered online.
“It’s gradually built up over the years,” says Stuart Fitzsimmons, NAFC section leader for aquaculture training. “People in remote areas who had trouble getting to college or who were working inconvenient shifts asked for more flexible learning, and it’s then been a case of developing our course material to fit around that.”
Remote learning using digital media platforms is not a new concept, but had never been tried by NAFC for short course delivery until 2017. An industry employer’s staff needed mandatory fish welfare training in order to obtain compliance certification.
“The problem was that staff were on well-boats, different shift patterns and in remote locations,” says Stuart. “So the standard face-to-face classroom based teaching was not a feasible option. Putting our collective minds together I got our resident IT guru Sathappan (Saro) Saravanan to develop the classroom course into an online course – he was already delivering this course so he knew the content well and had also developed other longer online courses in a different format.”
Time was a major issue for the employer concerned, so according to Stuart it was “all hands to the pumps” to get the necessary online course developed. Marketing and promotional assistance was obtained from JISC, formerly known as the Joint Information Systems Committee, the UK’s national body for developing digital academic services in further education.