Its Easter, and fairly quiet in the Blended Learning Project. I came into the project almost by accident, because of my work in WebCT which was also serendipitous. Looking back on the last few months, progress has been made from a cautious start to the point where our conference was bursting at the seams. The starting point of the project was that the university wanted to expand the provision of eLearning, and one approach was to involve all the faculties with the aim of providing new courses which would be launched in September 2006. A team from Ultralab had been brought together, providing links to each of the faculties through a team with experience of eLearning at all levels in Education. My role was to use my experience of online facilitation to create a viable online community. The experience which was most relevant was the pioneering development of online communities for headteachers in the early days of the National College for School Leadership.

My first task for the project was to create an online community of practice for all those involved in the project. Looking back to the earliest discussions, the community was set up and ready for its first members on January 17th. The platform selected was WebCT, chosen from among the available options because it would also be the delivery platform of choice for the university. I expected that there would be advantages in matching the platform for the community of practice with the platform for delivery of undergraduate courses. I was also a little nervous that WebCT might not have the functionality needed for a discussion-based community which would share new resources as they were being developed. Early decisions were made about the WebCT interface, such as whether to keep to the standard graphics, how to use the permissions structure, what resources might be useful at the start and how to set up the discussion areas. Sarah was particularly helpful in making suggestions and decisions, and we worked together on defining the most basic starting point of all - the purpose of the community of practice. Without a clear purpose, the rest of the work could all be wasted. The aim had to be succinct and easily understood, and we ended up with the following statement:

Welcome to the Blended Learning Project area for discussions between course developers and Ultralab. This is an opportunity to explore E-Learning, for sharing strategies and helping each other to use the WebCT environment. The only people who can see and participate in these discussions are partners in the project.

I started by saying that the project is quiet over this Easter holiday. A measure of its success might be the number of messages to date - 258; not bad for a very busy group of lecturers, researchers, learning technologists and librarians.