JISC

This project addresses the e-learning needs of students in the area of higher education earmarked for the largest growth in the coming decade: Foundation Degrees. The demands of providing a challenging yet supportive learning environment for Foundation Degree students should not be under-estimated. There are all the usual pitfalls associated with the development of effective e-learning environments together with the challenges of bringing together HE institutions, partner colleges, employers and students studying at a distance. The project will work through all these issues to develop an effective system while continually evaluating developments to provide a critically reflective account of the pitfalls and success strategies to provide guidance and materials for others. The JISC programme of Theme 1 (exploring the learning, teaching and administrative implications of MLEs for lifelong learners) is therefore well timed to allow a more coordinated sequence of activities exploring, implementing and reporting on administrative and learning issues relating to the delivery of current and planned Foundation Degrees at University College Worcester and partner institutions.

Aims and Objectives

The overall aim of the project is to identify, test and evaluate ways to improve the use of a Managed Learning Environment to provide effective delivery of Foundation Degrees.

To achieve this, three broad objectives are sought:

1. To evaluate and develop the effectiveness of on-line learning across institutions
2. To investigate and improve communications and information transfer between staff, students and employers
3. To produce guidelines and recommendations on systems and working practices

Some specific objectives specified in the project plan are:

• Establish initial Development Cycles relating to the three Foundation Degrees
• Generate initial set of general guidelines for Foundation Degree practitioners and developers of new Foundation Degrees
• Develop and extend specific Development Cycles (DCs)
• Implement the broader issues arising from DCs into the arrangements for the new academic year (including Registration arrangements, approaches to staff development, use of learning technology etc.)
• Extend scheme of DCs to full range of courses running
• Broad changes to systems and working practices to be implemented and evaluated

Project Methodology

The project methodology follows a problem solving approach whereby the project team carries out action research, utilising “Development Cycles” that run one or more sequences of the following activities:

• Identify current situation, noting viewpoints from all participants
• Propose solutions and implement where possible
• Evaluate success of solution

Our approach is based on working with course teams to identify and try to solve problems, documenting issues and identifying successes and failures. We expect to cover both small-scale matters and larger broader issues which affect systems and working practices more fundamentally.

Deliverables

As well as providing a vital contribution to the MLE development plans of the participating institutions, it is expected that the findings will be fed back into Registry and Validation processes and provide cross-institutional guidelines for E-Learning support and staff development requirements.

The project therefore aims to benefit the institutions at numerous levels including the identification of how information processes can be managed within and between institutions and how a student perceives improvement to their course delivery.