HORUS e-Learning Management (HeLM)
This project is being conducted by the team that developed Horus, an e-technology to help doctors-in-training learn in workplaces. It started out with the realisation that medical students were unaware what they should learn from their various workplace experiences, despite teachers' best efforts. Horus presents learners with their objectives and gives both general advice and objective-specific support to help learners achieve those objectives. It serves as a portfolio for learners to keep a reflective log of their learning and their attainment of targets prescribed by the curriculum. The same process of reflective evaluation provides teachers with feedback on the quality of the learning experiences they have provided. Horus can also record workplace assessments and help teacher and learner manage the appraisal cycle. It provides sophisticated tools to derive quality management data from learners' entries.
HeLM is an implementation project, which aims to increase the range of Horus services available to undergraduate medical students across a wider range of hospitals and other clinical workplaces. It will strengthen Horus support to in-depth reflective learning, extend the support to teachers as well as students, scope the application of Horus services to other higher education courses, and draw together learning and assessment within a single virtual learning environment.
The project is being conducted in the University of Manchester, largely within the School of Medicine, but extending to Pharmacy, Dentistry, and other courses within the University. The goal is to build capacity to conduct further research and development and to make the Horus toolset more widely available to the Higher and Further Education Sector.
Aims and objectives
Aim
Extend Horus learning management services to a wider range of applications, institutions, and stages in the lifelong learning continuum and link them to the JISC-funded UK Collaboration for a Digital Repository (UKCDR) and MANSLE projects.
Objectives
- Extend Horus's e-Portfolio services to support in-depth reflective learning
- Extend Horus to support teachers' learning from students' evaluations of their teaching
- Extend Horus to support the sophisticated administration process needed for flexible cross-institutional provision of workplace learning
- Extend the implementation of Horus services beyond medicine by scoping how the services could be applied to:
- Two other exemplars of workplace learning in higher education: Dentistry and Pharmacy
- Further education by deriving a requirements specification and scoping the extension of Horus's new services to the JISC-funded MANSLE collaboration
- Establish pedagogic and technical means of linking e-Learning to formative assessment by bridging Horus with UKCDR
- Build capacity that is sustainable and can be extended to the widely e-Learning community
Project methodology
This project will use a project management framework based on the UK Government Office of Commerce de facto standard, PRINCE2. To this end, the Project Board will be effectively the project management committee. This is composed of the Workpackage Leads as indicated in the bid document (which is effectively the Business Case). Thus, it will include academic staff with senior responsibility for the Manchester medical curriculum, including 2 Teaching Hospital Undergraduate Deans, members of the University Distributed Learning Unit, the School of Medicine VLE (MedLea) team, and the UKCDR project. The work of the project will be planned and agreed by the management committee and the project manager and carried out by the project team.
The above arrangement will facilitate close communication between workpackages and promote a unified approach to requirements gathering and evaluation methodologies, as well as achieving the appropriate degree of stage control indicated by the PRINCE2 method. This will work towards a robust project management model for objective delivery.
Other project staff will include a technical architect, one or more developers in the Horus team, and a postdoctoral research associate. The project will use an action research methodology, cycling between planning, design, testing, implementation, evaluation. Horus services will be developed to support reflective learning, teacher development, and learning management in workplaces. A link between Horus and UKCDR will be prototyped. A design specification for the transfer of Horus services will be developed.
Anticipated impact
The project is important because placement learning is a common feature of further and higher education courses and the potential of IT to support it has yet to be fully exploited. The expertise of the Horus team will not only helps stakeholders locally, but will be available to the wider JISC community.
Lead institution
Project partners
Project Staff
Project Manager
- Dr Iain Campbell (Head of Information Systems) School of Medicine, University of Manchester
Project team