Five minute interview

Marion Manton, e-learning research project manager talks about leading the Cascade project, which gives education organisations the opportunity to increase the effectiveness of their course administration.

What institution do you work for?

The Technology-Assisted Lifelong Learning (TALL) unit, which is part of the Department for Continuing Education at the University of Oxford.

What is your job title?

Elearning research project manager.

What does your job involve?

Doing research projects into e-learning but also supporting our development of online courses here in the department, the wider university and for other institutions as well. My responsibility is to make sure all the courses we produce work well as good examples of learning online.

What's the name of your project?

Cascade

How would you describe your project to friends outside of education?

Everyone across HE is now facing cuts in funding, but we were facing them three to four years ago due to the implementation of the government’s Equivalent or Lower Qualifications policy. We wanted to address this challenge by using the knowledge of our department in developing online learning. To do this, we looked at how to use technology to help us do more things more efficiently and save money, but we also wanted to investigate how we could improve what we offered more generally, in the face of increasing fees. We also wanted to see if there were new things that we could be doing that might give us new lines of work or improve what we’re doing.

Is it achieving its objectives at the moment?

We certainly met our objectives in terms of the projects. We’ve established several new services, and changed our practice in some key areas. But we’re always seeing ways of improving things and making them better.

What would you say are the lessons for the wider sector?

The big areas for us where savings could be made were around course administration, in particular online enrolment and payment, which gave us huge efficiencies, and online assignment handling. But another key theme that came out was examining the processes themselves – often some of the greater gains were as much about streamlining processes generally as about using technology to do this. The other three areas we looked at were VLE support courses; developing generic content that could be used in lots of different ways; and we did quite a lot of work looking at improving course design processes related to people using technology.

We produced a course design site with lots of examples of good practice and guidance that we originally made for the Department, but we are just about to release a publicly available version.

Who do you think will benefit most from your work?

I think the stuff that we do is becoming more and more normal – the non-traditional students are almost becoming the bulk of students – so all of our output and our inventions are very much focused on those kinds of learners. In particular, though, our outputs would be of use to senior managers and learning technologists, as well as other academics since we developed case studies targeted at these groups. Obviously, in the end, the ultimate beneficiaries should be students.

What has surprised you the most during the project?

Oxford is not an institution that people immediately associate with using openness to technology in teaching and learning, and some of our cohorts of students have an average age of 50-60. So what’s really surprised me during this project is how open people have been to technology. People who I would have talked to five or six years ago and would have been totally uninterested in engaging are much more interested and open and engaged in this whole area than they ever were before.

What has been the best part of managing the project?

For me, the best part has really been moving from only working with early adopters to working with people who are maybe a bit less confident with technology and who haven’t engaged with it in the past. You discover the things you can do to make a difference to their practice and really improve things for everyone.

What has been the worst?

I think it was an exceedingly ambitious project, both in terms of what we wanted to achieve and the breadth of stakeholders we involved, which meant it was a lot of hard work. At times, it felt very slow and that we were getting nowhere. In the end, it’s all been worth it but there were times where we never thought we would achieve anything.

What next?

Essentially, there’s not an area of work we started in Cascade that’s not continuing in one way or another. We’re very much looking at all the things we kicked off and just spreading them more widely in this department, the institution and beyond. Moving forward, we have been able to use the ways of working and connections established by the project to continue looking at how we can use technology to be more efficient, improve services and explore new areas.

Find out more about the Cascade Project.

Also about how to transform curriculum delivery through technology.

Read the final report about Cascade.

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