D7.3.7

=Institutional policies require that e-learning resources be created in a manner that supports reuse. =

Evidence
Littlejohn (2003) draws on work carried out in a national forum for support staff and recommends that major challenges to a unified e-learning strategy need to be dealt with in the following way: Institutions must take responsibility for e-learning planning and provision, there must be cooperation between technology support staff and academic staff, good practice research currently being ignored by institutions must be incorporated into practice, e-learning must be seen as mainstream practice. Overall, ‘the development of a unified strategy to promote sustainable approaches to e-learning requires major shifts in support and leadership’ (p. 99). Institutional standards, templates and policies are needed to support this shift.

E-learning results in digital content that can be re-used, or can be designed to be re-used (Bates 2007). This digital content has value and therefore needs to be managed. It is this value that compensates institutions for the investment in e-learning. Institutions should be considering how best to create digital content so it can be re-used. Also, who owns the copyright for the content once it has been created? There are a range of possibilities from making content freely available to charging for everything. Bates (2007) recommends that an explicit plan be developed for how the institution proposes content management.