Who manages e-learning now? (637) Home : Annual Conference 2014

Who manages e-learning now? (637)

Public Group Active 8 years, 1 month ago

Wed, Sep 3 2014, 10:30am – 11:30am

Description

As e-learning has moved to the mainstream in universities and colleges the online environment has become central to the student experience but the systems to support and sustain this are underdeveloped.

Although the academic remains central to the design of the learning experience it now requires diverse teams to deliver and maintain it. Who ‘owns’, develops and monitors the assessment and feedback process, maintains and develops online resources, manages online communications, processes data analytics, engagement monitoring and so on? These roles are ill-defined and emergent, sometimes uncoordinated, and spread across academic and admin staff who vary in their skills. UCL’s Digital Department project (JISC/UCL) to explored real workflows, practices and procedures at the departmental level and identified the need to develop digital literacies and e-learning skills across a wide range of staff groups.

Reviewing the major JISC change project Brown (2013) concluded “universities are particularly difficult environments in which to achieve large scale, lasting change”. We believe in the complex environment that is emerging it is necessary to develop a far more participatory and nuanced approach to transformation. This is in contrast to and may impact on the traditional fixed-term project-derived e-learning change cycle which we claim can suffer from underestimating the complex issues of ownership, workflows and responsibilities.

The aim of this session is to explore and map out the fuzzy and ‘unowned’ area between academic, administrative and learning technology practice in order to better describe the needs and emerging roles of the ‘digital department’ .

This is a challenging new area and the extended presentation plan is

Welcome, UCL and Imperial examples of change initiatives – 10 mins

Examples from your context? Group discussion and feedback – 5 mins

New models of change – 5 mins

Could these models work in your context? Group discussion and feedback – 5 mins