D2.3.2

=Teaching staff are provided with support resources (including training, guidelines and examples) for e-learning design and (re)development. =

Evidence
Bates (2007) explains that institutions must plan to allocate resources for e-learning. In his case study the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology it was decided that significant increases in numbers of instructional designers, multimedia developers, and faculty development facilitators was going to be required. Also, a matrix model to manage the resources of the Centre for Instructional Technology and Development was recommended. Each year a committee would determine how to allocate the CITD resources to departments according to service agreements.

A renaissance view of e-learning accompanies much of the literature that describes its potential. However, much less is written about its practice (Salmon, 2000). Unfamiliarity of teaching staff with e-learning processes and practices inhibits their preparedness to adopt and adapt to the new environment. While there is debate over the implications and impacts of organisational and pedagogic change that e-learning involves, there is resistance to it (de Freitas and Oliver, 2005, p. 93). Because technology environments can appear to provide user friendly interfaces for communication, interaction, and teaching-learning resource development, they can also inadvertently permit the transfer of poor practices. Staff must be not only trained and supported to develop strong computer, information literacy and management skills, but must also acquire relevant and appropriate pedagogical knowledge and skills, and, apply an informed critical perspective to using the knowledge and skills (Weaver, 2006).

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.

JISC has a set of effective practice case studies which can be accessed here: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearningpedagogy/casestudies.aspx

Bristol University makes good practice case studies available online: http://www.bris.ac.uk/esu/elearning/casestudies/

Botturi et al. (2007) explains the difficulties of working on a new project such as e-learning development with a necessarily large and diverse team. These authors argue for the benefits of fast-prototyping, where a rough idea for a product is actually produced so that all stakeholders can experience what might be on offer. This enables rapid understanding of potential problems and trialability. Fast prototyping works best when the project is quite big or ambitious, where team members are not accustomed to working together (such as academics and web designers or instructional designers), and many of the participants have little experience in e-learning course development.

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.