Learning Landscape

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