O5.3.4

=E-learning initiative plans are coordinated throughout the institution. =

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.

Inglis (2007) has further found that there are 2 broad types of ways in which institutions are communicating e-learning strategy. The first is through discrete e-learning strategy documents and the second is embedding e-learning strategy in more general documents. Comparison of the documents at many universities showed that when e-learning strategies are embedded in general documents that the range of aspects of e-learning covered tends to be less. Inglis concludes that there is currently no consensus on what information these documents should contain or how they ought to be structured. However, he speculates that employing a standard approach will bring benefits to universities and groups of universities.