3.7 Evaluating impacts of VLE use
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Moving on From Minimum Standards discusses developing a strategy to enhance tutor contact details and availability beyond just providing basic information. It suggests using the Virtual Learning Environment to better communicate arrangements and manage equitable communication with students. A first step is identifying objectives like adopting a student-centered perspective to achieve enhancement and focusing efforts on tutors proactively sharing accurate contact information and availability.
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3.7 Evaluating impacts of VLE use
- 1. Moving on From Minimum Standards
- 2. Background: School of Media, arts and technology
- 3. Context evision and Sound ltural Production Tel Cu
- 4. Objectives
- 5. Outcomes:
- 6. The audit:
- 7. The audit:
- 9. Limitations
- 10. The reaction
- 11. Moving beyond an audit
- 12. An example Requirement: The problem: Focus on Nuts and Bolts: Tutor contact details and availability. Typically only very basic contact information, which is not always accurate. • What arrangements do you have? • How are these communicated? • Could the VLE be used to enhance or reinforce this communication? • Could the VLE play a role in managing equitable, efficient and effective communication with students?
- 14. What is the starting point?
- 15. Identifying objectives in the strategy
- 16. How should the issue be situated?
- 17. Adopting a student-centred perspective
Editor's Notes
- Hi, I am Dave Barber and welcome to the pecha kuccha on the MoMs or ‘Moving on from Minimum Standards’ project. When we started MoMs stood for Monitoring Online Minimum Standards, but, as we shall see this was never a very good fit. A collaboration between the Solent Learning and Teaching Institute and the school of media arts and technology…
- …this project responded to one of the key strategic principles in that school, specifically how the myCourse VLE could help promote the nuts and bolts of course delivery. We were not looking to improve use of MyCourse for its own sake therefore, but rather to evaluate how well it supported students and this is an important distinction that we will return to later.
- The project focussed on two programme groups: Television and Sound and Cultural Production. The project team consisted of myself and the programme leaders for these groups, Stuart Ray and Russell White, but we were supported by Rosie Cooper and Nicola Donnelly, who did all the heavy lifting in terms of the audit itself.
- In terms of objectives the project centred on an audit of courses against the University’s Minimum Content requirements, but there was a clear commitment, from the outset, to go beyond this in order to take a more qualitative position that recognised good practice rather than simply identifying problems and deficits.
- The desired outcomes were twofold therefore. On one hand there would be the information needed in order to identify and address areas of non conformance, but this ran alongside a desire to identify priorities and generate content for a training and development programme that aimed to address the issue in a more constructive way.
- So…starting with the audit, we set out to discover whether the university’s minimum content checklist was being observed. This is what the university sees as a basic student entitlement in terms of online content. It is not, for the most part, very demanding and anticipates the kinds of information that students are likely to need or want for reference purposes.
- Some of the documents are lodged automatically, requiring no input from lecturers and others are created by us in electronic format anyway: assessment briefs, for example and our assessment grids. The last three items cover areas of new content but these are loosely defined.
- An overview of the data suggests that a high proportion of courses either exceeded or only marginally failed to meet the minimum requirement and it should be said that many courses in the marginal category were well designed, student focussed and actually exceeded the expectations of the minimum requirements in number of ways. Even the clear shortfall category had problematic aspects.
- The auditors did not have time to go through courses with a fine tooth comb and the audit was only a snapshot, meaning that it did not account for content that may have been removed or was yet to come. In addition the auditors could not see the wider course context and it was agreed that the PGLs would have to assess the outcomes of the audit on an almost case by case basis.
- Overall, therefore, the audit highlighted how limiting a one size all approach to evaluating courses was. It is not that the idea of minimum content wrong and the audit did identify some genuine and serious issues. However, it was acknowledged that pushing people who were already working constructively by highlight deficits was unlikely to achieve anything.
- Rather than pointing the finger at individuals, therefore, we drew on recurring issues that suggested ways in which the VLE could be used to tighten up the nuts and bolts of course delivery. This could be used to engage all unit leaders in discussion about MyCourse, addressing areas of significant shortfall but also create wider benefits at a course and programme level.
- For example, MyCourse should contain tutor contact details and availability and the audit highlighted a number of cases of inaccurate information. However, very few courses contained more than the most basic details so the nuts and bolts approach would involve asking all unit leaders, what arrangements do you have, how are these communicated and how could the VLE could be used more effectively.
- We have segued into our second objective therefore and the principle of avoiding one size fits all approached continued to be influential as we started to build our development strategy. The rest of this presentation will concentrate on this and I will use one of the workshop resources that we have developed as a way of illustrating our point.
- Doing the audit taught us that MyCourse sites had to be seen as an element within a wider learning and teaching strategy. The auditors were hampered because they lacked this context, but we placed this principle at the heart of our development model. For example, this activity starts by asking teams to discuss their learning and teaching strategy.
- We’ve used Blooms taxonomy as a starting point and I am sure that most if not all courses aim to cover all these levels of learning, encompassing things like knowing, doing and creating. Teams are then asked to identify how the VLE contributes to this and only once the role of the myCourse is established so we ask whether it could perform this role more effectively.
- The audit also taught us that questions like “does a course contain this or do that” address only part of a bigger question about how useful a unit site would be. This depends on wider questions about organisation, presentation, richness of content and overall relevance. To do this, we learned, it was necessary to adopt a student, not an institutional perspective.
- The next stage in the activity is to explore what we want students to do, given the role of the MyCourse site within the unit delivery strategy. Here we have identified three levels of activity corresponding to levels of learning, but teams would combine and adapt these according to their needs and would, at the same time consider what this implies for them and their own role.
- Having arrived at a point where the focus has shifted to the tutor’s role it is relevant to turn to issues highlighted in the audit, which may point to problems in terms of training and tutor skills. How aware are people about the tools that available in myCourse? and how confident do they feel in using them? However, it also involves understanding the methods and practices that they support. (the what, the where and the when).
- Any development strategy, therefore needed to move from intention – in terms of what students should be able to do - to the nitty gritty of designing and implementing successful and engaging courses. In its third stage the roles that tutors have defined for themselves are profiled in terms of practices, which are in turn related to specific tools available on my course.
- This then is the overview of the activity, presented as a single resource, this has been a breakneck career through a complex field, but hopefully it has provided you with a flavour of the issues that we have encountered, the lessons we have learned and the outcomes that we have at least started to realise. The whole course team will be available at the end of this session in order to answer questions.