Group Admins
Description
What Lies Beneath!
It is now commonplace for the majority of HE coursework to be delivered via a VLE either through desktop or mobile versions. Despite the relative maturity of VLE systems, staff users in particular, face the problem of being able to easily view and access older courses via their VLE interface. There is also the issue of frustration caused by from users not being able to quickly and easily enter their most recent modules from a computer or mobile device owing to the clutter of courses facing them.
At the institutional level, many universities do not actively manage both staff and student access to older modules in the live VLE. If using a managed hosted system or a server farm, additional costs associated with archiving old courses content, can impact on the operation and perceived efficiency of the system. The lack of a properly managed VLE archive can undermine the effectiveness of blended learning delivery ie failure to access current courses owing to datbase issues (recently experienced in Blackboard by our institituion)
Breaking The Waves.
As part of an iterative blended learning roadmap, our institution is committed to developing an accessible archive policy and implementation guidelines for our VLE. These will enable all users of our VLE to be clear about where and how they can access current and past modules. They will ensure that relevant course content is either “rolled over” to the next academic session or archived, to provide efficiencies in not only overall content management but also in terms of the numbers of active modules available to users of our VLE
This presentation will outline how we approached the creation of an institutional archive policy by getting wet and will highlight key considerations including:
- Consultation with staff and students
- Operational procedure
- Liaising with IS Department
- Working with our VLE provider
- Impact on other key systems integrated with the VLE.
By attempting to make our ‘old courses’ available but separate from current content, we can have the additional confidence in developing our future approaches to blended learning provision through demonstrating better VLE management.
Authors
| Name | Jim Emery |
| URL | http://www.gcu.ac.uk |
| Affiliation | Glasgow Caledonian University |
| Country | United Kingdom |
