How Frontline is delivered

The course is delivered online through a cascade system.

When you subscribe, you select one of your staff to be your Frontline Co-ordinator. The Co-ordinator will manage the rollout of the course in your service and will be responsible for maintaining its quality.

The Co-ordinator will be supervised through the course by Opening the Book. They will experience the course as a Trainee, exploring the Modules and completing entries in their individual online Learning Log. At the end of each Module, they receive feedback from Opening the Book and, like any Trainee, must complete the work competently before being allowed to progress to the next Module. As they go through the course, the Co-ordinator will also work with Opening the Book to plan their rollout, thinking about how they will manage Supervisors and get best value from the course in the specific circumstances of their library service.

Once trained, the Co-ordinator has access to online tools to manage how the course is rolled out. The Co-ordinator supervises their first Trainees with Opening the Book available to help with any queries. They then select from Trainees who have completed the course, those who are in a good position to supervise others. No formal qualifications are required to act as a Supervisor other than having completed the course successfully.

There is a range of support on site to help Co-ordinators and Supervisors to assess competence and give peer support and constructive feedback.

It can be seen that the course rollout accelerates dramatically once several Supervisors are in place. Authorities with the fastest and most successful rollouts so far have tended to be those who have involved library assistants and senior library assistants as Supervisors, using energy and enthusiasm which has previously not had an outlet.