Learning Landscape

As I am sure you can all imagine, I did speak a little too soon when I suggested that we were well on schedule for the submission of the IRD.  However, with only a little rushing around as the 22nd loomed, we managed to get it in on time.  One of the last activities we undertook was a meeting of 14 or 15 members of staff involved with e-learning across the University to discuss the institutional drivers for e-learning.  One of the initial and most significant comments was that, really, we do not have institutional drivers, rather there are common reasons across the University for take up, the second comment was that the drivers provided were, on the whole, not relevant to the Cambridge context.  In the end we settled on the key drivers of improvements to quality of learning and teaching, greater efficiency, and student pressure as the most significant, with one or two other, less important factors.  It was a really interesting meeting for both the organisers and the attendees.

By the end of the autumn term we had contributions to all the items in Section C of the IRD from the different team members in the project wiki.  The Christmas period was then spent re-drafting this into Word format.  By the end of this week we plan to have a draft prepared to send to our e-benchmarking consultant and to key stakeholders in the University for comment. 

We need to set up a meeting to look at the key drivers within the Institution for e-learning now that everyone is returning from the Christmas break.  We will then just need to write the overview section in advance of the submission on the 22nd.  I am feeling confident that the timing is very achievable and that we should not have a mad rush at the end.  I hope I am not speaking too soon…

We are progressing well now with completing our IRD.  We have had four weekly meetings during the recent weeks.  For each meeting two sections of the IRD were added to the project wiki and all the team members were asked to input to the wiki in advance of the meeting.  At the meeting we then discussed the input so far and discussed what else should be added.  We have now completed all eight sections in this way and need to draft the information as prose – this will be done over the xmas period.  In the New Year we are planning on circulating the draft document much more widely across the institution for comment and eventually sign off.

We had our first meeting with our consultant (Allan Schofield) on the 14th November which was very useful.  We kicked off with a general meeting with some senior members of the University to get them on board with the aims and processes of the project.  This went very well.  We then had a more lengthy, and detailed, meeting with the consultant and the project team.  In this section of the meeting we went through the IRD in detail and started to consider the sources of information that we would use to complete each section.  It was a very reassuring process and we felt much more confident about completing the document on schedule after this input.  We have taken the decision to get the IRD written using the core team initially, and as quickly as possible, and then use the majority of the time to consult on our response and get much wider input and agreement across the University.  We aim to get final sign off from our General Board Education Committee in the middle of January.

In a word “cultural compatibility”. OK, that’s two words, but the idea was that we didn’t want any hint of tickboxes or checklists. Our ideas of what constitutes good practice in e-Learning for a residential university, or even what e-Learning means in our context, are emergent. We felt the OBHE methodology allowed us to explore our place in the e-Learning firmament rather more holistically than the other methodologies. It also helped that this seemed to involve the best ratio of work by us vs. work by the consultants

The project team at Cambridge has started to work through the IRD form and investigate what data is already available to answer the questions.  We will use the data that we collect over the next two weeks as the basis of discussion for the first meeting with the consultant assigned to us, Allan Schofield.

 We have arranged a first meeting with Allan for the 14th November, with all the members of the project team and also our Pro Vice Chancellor for Education.  We are anticipating that the discussion will help us to focus our data collection over the next few weeks to best meet the needs of the study.

This site will act as a project diary for the University of Cambridge participation in e-Learning Benchmarking, sponsored by the Higher Education Academy. We will follow the OBHE/ACU methodology.