Cascading

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After over two years work we have reached the end of the JISC-funded Cascade project – wrapping this up and the final reporting requirements are a big part of the reason why I have blogged so little in recent months.  This was a huge project looking at a very broad cross section of activities in the Department for Continuing Educatiosplashn at Oxford.

Technology-enhanced curriculum delivery is a large area and has the ability to affect everything we do; therefore, it was essential to closely define the scope of the project. Following a detailed scoping exercise, we focussed on areas where using technology offered the greatest potential impact, either through financial efficiencies, greater effectiveness, or application across a number of activities. This resulted in a project that developed sustainable new services that provide:

  • VLE support for award-bearing courses, incorporating online assignment-handling and access to generic content;
  • Wider availability of online enrolment and payment services;
  • Support for the course design process.

We quantified the benefits these services offer the Department in terms of greater efficiency, improved service or innovation, and have developed tools, processes and documentation to streamline and embed them in our work.

The cuts in funding faced by the Department as a result of the ELQ policy is now being mirrored across Higher Education as a whole, making many of our project outputs more relevant than ever to a wider audience. In particular they offer:

  • Suggestions of areas where other institutions might achieve comparable benefits;
  • Information on how to achieve such benefits;
  • Shared outputs upon which others can build;
  • Open source code for enhanced assignment-handing in Moodle;

allowing others to benefit from our developments. All outputs are available on the Cascade project website’s outputs page, and in the next few weeks I will blog in more detail about some of these.

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About Marion Manton

I amSenior Manager: Learning Design and co-manager of TALL with David White. Previous to that I was eLearning Research Project Manager. As well as the day to day running of TALL I am responsible for the ensuring that all TALL programmes are best practice examples of learning online for their audience. I work closely with course teams to specify the learning they want to achieve with their programme and to identify the best uses of technology to do this. I also maintain currency with the latest research in eLearning, to ensure that TALL is aware of and exploits the best current knowledge of what works in terms of effective eLearning. My particular interests are in effective pedagogical models for different learning scenarios and how best to facilitate these by the appropriate use of technology. As well as the development of effective tools and processes to help academics identify these and translate knowledge of their subject and teaching into high quality online learning.