Collaborative e-Learning in the Life Sciences
This project created high-quality, online materials in life science that were designed and used across colleges and universities to support a shift in teaching and learning and enhance the educational experience. This project was one of 6 projects funded by the Scottish Funding Council under its e-learning transformation programme.
Collaborative e-Learning in the Life Sciences (CeLLS) was established as a collaboration between the Scottish Colleges Biotechnology Consortium (SCBC – Forth Valley, Adam Smith, Bell, Dundee and James Watt Colleges), Napier University, The University of Dundee, The Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) and The Interactive University Ltd (IU), a not-for-profit commercial company.
The major aim is to create and share core online materials for learning and teaching in Life Sciences (Scottish Credit and Qualification Framework (SCQF) Levels 7 and 8) to facilitate transformation to a more student-centred approach to learning and a blended approach to teaching.
What are the drivers for change?
The past decade has seen a period of rapid and sweeping change in learning and teaching in tertiary education. Widening access has contributed to dramatic increases in undergraduate student numbers, but the unit of resource and staff numbers available to support learning and teaching has not increased proportionately. Furthermore, funding changes have led to an increase in the financial burden of tertiary education to the student, and that has led to the need for students to generate an income stream to support their learning. Students and institutions have each had to try to adapt to the rapid pace of change with varying degrees of success. Institutions have learned, some more slowly than others, that methodologies that might have been appropriate 20 years ago are no longer uniformly applicable.
It became apparent that there needs to be a shift in the way that learners learn and teachers teach to try to address each of the above challenges. Strategies to accomplish this shift could include:
-
Reducing the need for a fully timetabled, face-to-face mode of delivery
-
Providing more flexible delivery of learning resources and activities so that learners can learn at a time and pace more suited to their own needs
-
Changing the emphasis of knowledge transfer from teaching to active learning
-
Changing deployment of limited staff time away from the more traditional and passive modes of delivery towards more effective and flexible modes of student support
-
Reducing the burden on individual staff time of preparing and updating course materials and in setting and marking formative assessments so that the freed time can be used for other initiatives
-
Sharing the burden of core content and formative assessment creation between institutions
Each of the academic partners that came together to form the CeLLS project saw the need for change within their own departments/schools/institutions, and viewed the project as a way to accelerate the process. The starting point was different for each partner because each was then at a different stage of maturity in relation to implementing e-learning; each partner nevertheless recognised that the project would facilitate transformation change no matter what the starting point.