D3.3.7

=Teaching staff are provided with support resources (including training, guidelines and examples) for creating design rationales that are aligned with institutional e-learning strategies.=

Evidence
Suzuki & Tada (2009) draw upon relevant instructional design literature and propose a five tiered hierarchical model for ensuring quality in e-learning course design. Their model places easy to use, friendly information design at the heart of the model (tier 3), with exactness of content and a ‘painless’ well functioning technological infrastructure below that. At the higher tiers they advocate ensuring learning effectiveness with learner support and appropriate structure and sequence of the course, and finally at tier 5, ensuring that students are engaged, motivated and willing to learn. These authors explain the major instructional design techniques necessary for achieving these goals of instructional design. They include: Learning environment analysis; Needs, task and content analysis; Rapid prototyping and formative evaluation; Structuring and sequencing; Aesthetic design, androgogy, and serious games among others. The model is then applied to an existing course to see how it measures up, and how it might be improved. They emphasize high performance technology, sharing a set of course design policies among professors, relationships among courses to be kept in mind, alignment of the course with professional requirements. They also note the need for a series of studies [or information collected by an institution], aiming at determining learning outcomes and satisfaction measures for students taking courses designed using this model.

Resources
Milne & White (2005) collect together twenty-three sets of e-learning quality guidelines from an array of geographical regions. Such guidelines, or something like them, should be part of the support offered to staff by their organizations. Staff need guidelines, and examples of good practice.