O9.3.3

=Institutional strategic planning activities address e-learning.=

Evidence
Shackelford (2007) claims that the single most common cause of e-course projects is failure to treat them as proper projects. All the common project management principles must be employed. This includes defining the project scope, identifying project roles, keeping stakeholders informed, conducting risk assessments, gathering information on what is working and what is not, and applying that information in redevelopment. Shackelford lists eighteen pitfalls to avoid when project managing e-course development.

Resources
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.

Dondi et al (2006) explain how to create policy for e-learning and provide a six step guide. “For best effect quality needs to be inherent and designed into a process rather than applied after the process has been developed” (p. 32).