TALL blog

In the latest JISC e-Learning Focus they are discussing VLEs at the heart of curiculum devlivery showcasing among other work our development of Moodle for online assignment submission during the Cascade project.  Inspired by the wordle used in the e-Learning Focus article, I decided to create one from the Cascade final report.  While this is obviously a very simplistic technique it does provide a surprisingly useful overview of the work of Cascade as below.  I think I may be using this again.

Cascade Wordle

Aimed at academic staff developing new courses and e-Learning managers and learning technologists seeking to encourage wider uptake of technology by teaching staff, this case study draws on the JISC-funded Cascade project’s experience of designing tools, systems and resources to enable academic staff to more effectively incorporate the use of technology in new programmes.

Using technology to support new course models that move a programme either fully or partially, online can allow for a much more flexible offerings to students.  However, to ensure this is done in an appropriate and sustainable fashion, staff have to be supported effectively in this process.  This can be done by:

• Ensuring technology use is considered at the right point in the course design process;
• Identifying where and how technology really addresses your needs;
• Providing support and guidance for those designing new programmes and wanting to take a more strategic approach to using technology in order to achieve maximum benefits;
• Providing information on the cost effectiveness and efficiency of different choices so that those designing new programmes can ensure their course is sustainable.

Read the full case study at:  Cascade Case Study 5: Maximizing effective use of technology in new programmes.

Aimed at e-Learning developers, this case study draws on the JISC-funded Cascade project’s experience of designing tools, systems and resources to enable academic and administrative staff to easily use a VLE to support course delivery.

This suggests that using technology to support a course delivered either fully online, largely face-to–face or via blended learning, can provide real value to both staff and students.  However, it is easy to do this in such a way that it creates more work without fully delivering on the potential benefits.  Avoid this by:

• Identifying where and how technology really adds value;
• Developing tools and procedures that make it easy for all staff to set up and use a VLE;
• Embedding support within existing cycles of work, wherever possible;
• Ensuring adequate support and guidance is available to prevent basic barriers;
• Providing cost- and time-effective options to ensure services are sustainable.

Read the full case study at:  Cascade Case Study 4: Enabling staff to easily use a VLE to support course delivery.

Aimed at staff responsible for coordinating the marketing of courses and managing student enrolments, this case study draws on the JISC-funded Cascade project’s experience of using technology to support the very first stage of the curriculum delivery process by making it easy for prospective students to find the course they wish to study and, where possible, to enrol and pay for their chosen course(s) online.

The project found that to encourage students to choose your institution, you should:

• Make finding courses as easy as searching on Google;
• Provide easily accessible information about all aspects of a course and the institution, and offer answers to common questions about what a course involves, both in pedagogical terms and practical ones;
• Provide testimonials or case studies of previous students’ experiences of studying your courses;
• Make enrolling on and paying for a course as easy and straightforward as possible, using online enrolment and payment wherever possible.

Read the full case study at:  Cascade Case Study 3: Using technology to support prospective students.

Aimed at e-Learning developers, this case study draws on the JISC-funded Cascade project’s experience of customizing the Moodle assignment module, to highlight the benefits and pitfalls of working with open source software.

This aspect of the Cascade project had two key challenges: (a) to specify requirements for enhanced assignment-handling functionality in Moodle; and (b) to develop the code itself.  Both proved far more challenging than anticipated.

The experience of the project suggests that customizing open source software to meet the institution’s bespoke curriculum delivery requirements can result in the development of a robust system offering improved services to stakeholders, however there can be pitfalls.  Key recommendations for other developers considering similar projects are:

• Define the processes involved before working on the development of software; a broken or unclear process cannot have an effective technological solution;
• Keep all stakeholders informed of what the final result will be, providing updates when the requirements/functionality change;
• Have everyone concerned with functionality and bug identification use an issue management system from the start of the project;
• Use version control to manage code, but keep it simple;
• Learn and work with the norms of the open source community for maximum wider benefit.

Read the full case study at:  Cascade Case Study 2: Customizing open source software: benefits and pitfalls.

As part of our Cascade project we developed a series of five case studies to highlight areas of our work where we had the most interesting or useful outputs.  The first of these looks at the senior management perspective and is titled Leveraging technology to drive business performance.  It focuses on developing internal capability through the application of technology (or e-administration) so that operational and institutional strategy, as well as administrative processes and procedures, are delivered more efficiently and effectively.  The case study covers the following topics: project planning, problem identification, cost benefit analysis, managing organizational change, consensus building and developing a clear methodology for the embedding of project activities, and provides key points for effective practice and a series of recommendations for others hoping to achieve similar objectives.
Read the full case study, at: Leveraging technology to drive business performance.

We are currently in the middle of piloting our new online assignment handling system as part of the Cascade project.  While we are finding out all the usual technical glitches, more than anything what testing this with real students, real course directors and real tutors, submitting real assignments has revealed is:

• how generous people can be in trying a new system for something which is so important to them.
• how you can think you have thoroughly mapped all processes in abstract but there will always be some aspect which nobody mentioned until it happens in practice.
• how completely random people can be.

While we certainly did not think our documentation and support assumptions were going to be perfect, with a lot of testing on trial assignments we thought we were probably on the right track, and for most of the process and the vast majority of  students and tutors we were.

However where things did deviate from our expected norms, they did so in unanticipated ways.  I won’t go into the minutiae here but it is certainly making us think about what are the issues you can plan for and design out, and what is going to happen no matter what you do.

As part of the Cascade project  one of the things we have been looking at is how to take the best of what we know about supporting our online distance learning students and use it to see how we should use a VLE to support students who are essentially studying face to face courses with the Department.  As part of this we piloted this activity with a few courses in  over the last academic year, including our Undergraduate Diploma in Archaeology and our Psychodynamic counseling Certificate, Diploma and MSc.  We’re still collecting feedback from our students (more on this later) but have finished our initial collection with staff.

Some of the findings have been reasonably predictable – using the VLE to easily contact students (especially during extreme snow) and to share materials are clear winners in the value stakes.  However some are slightly less so.  We have a lot of courses with many different sessional teachers, and while we did a good job at explaining Moodle to our core staff, piloting partners and students we did a less good job of engaging with these stakeholders, who often remained confused or oblivious about what Moodle was for and how they could use it.

So a new task for the summer to develop materials for this group.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/3267227227/

In the Cascade project we are in the middle of an intensive period of testing Moodle templates with departmental staff.  In the terms of our project the “templates” are Moodle courses with certain core materials and structures already in place which hopefully offer the following benefits to our staff:

1. Save them from recreating the wheel in terms of identifying resources, links etc
2. Ensuring all expectation setting and contextual materials are in place – what is unacceptable online behavior? does an online course support site mean my tutor will answer my emails 24 hours a day?
3. Improving chance of producing something which will be truly valuable to students from the start, rather than having to try and work out what might be useful from scratch.

We have shaped the templates from the results of our pilots over the last year or so as well as our experience in learning design and from the literature more generally .  With this in mind we were pretty confident that the elements we were including were likely to be appropriate and useful, however it is fascinating to actually work through the process with  practitioners.

I think what has really changed in the last few years is the baseline awareness of the sorts of things technology might be able to offer to support a course – this has moved on immensely even in the last couple of years – even if staff are not always confident of how to get the technology to do what they want.  It also feels like for many academics that their perceptions of their IT competence is often worse than the reality.  Moodle is easy enough to use,  that if you can add an attachment to an email you really should be able to get pretty far.

Having been involved in several research projects around the area of OERs (especially OpenSpires) and more specifically the reuse of existing content (Mosaic and Cascade),  it is really gratifying to see some of this work enter our mainstream course production practice.   A major benefit of Mosaic was a real tightening up of our approaches to reuse, copyright and IPR across our entire short course programme and this is now starting to really pay dividends.

An example is the course we are currently developing on Globalization, available in May.  Among other things, this course is using podcasts recorded by the author Jonathan Michie with the OpenSpires team.  As we will be providing transcripts to make the course fully accessible we can make sure that these are fed back to enhance the original OERs – a virtuous circle.