E-Learning Advocacy: Exploring Departmental Approaches to the Embedding of E-Learning

E-learning Advocacy: Exploring departmental approaches to the embedding of e-learning

Mr Brett Lucas

Higher Education Academy English Subject Centre

Royal Holloway, University of London

Support for the development and embedding of e-learning at a departmental level can often be a challenge. Institutional resources can be inadequate, too generic or simply overstretched. This paper describes a project which is exploring ways in which e-learning might be supported more effectively at subject level through an ‘e-learning advocate', an academic, working with his/her colleagues for one day a week. Their role is to act as both a catalyst for change within a department and a source of practical help and advice for those wishing to make greater use of e-learning. The project, now in its second year, is delivering tangible results and may provide a useful model for levering pedagogical change at a departmental level.

Keywords: E-learning support, English Studies, Embedding, Cultural change, Staff development

Introduction

“Not everyone needs to be an e-advocate but perhaps every department needs to have one”

(Robertson, 2007)

VLE’s, MLE’s[1] and other e-learning tools have become ubiquitous throughout Higher Education in the last few years, however, research[2] carried out by the English Subject Centre[3] has shown that their actual use in delivering enhanced pedagogy in blended learning environments is patchy to say the least. Many staff are too busy with the day-to-day demands of ‘being an academic’ to either familiarise themselves with the potential for new technologies to transform their teaching practice or gain the necessary skills to achieve this. In a national survey of English departments, carried out in 2005 by the English Subject Centre, two of the principal barriers to the development of effective e-learning practice amongst English academics were lack of time and insufficient or inappropriate support. (Figure 1)

In 2005 the UK Government published an ambitious 5 year e-learning strategy[4] which stressed the need for a more strategic approach to the future development of ICT[5] in education. This approach identified six key priorities for reform, one of which was ‘good quality ICT training and support’:

“… those wishing to upgrade their skills should have access to flexible courses, with advanced support for those seeking to specialise further.”(DFES, 2005)

Whilst we therefore now have e-learning strategies at institutional, faculty, school and in some cases departmental level all of which instantiate the government’s priority by detailing local support structures, something still seems to be going wrong. There is a mismatch between the rhetoric one hears about e-learning on an institutional and national level and the reality that one finds in a typical university English department. On the one hand we hear that new technologies are radically changing what and how we teach, whilst simultaneously enhancing the way our students learn, on the other hand we find in many English departments archaic PC’s, patchy and uncoordinated rollout of blended teaching, ignorance of possibilities and potential - all rounded off by a general lack of ‘time’ to do anything about it. Not surprisingly, the persistence of strong cultural resistance to anything ‘digital’ is exacerbating these support issues. Ironically many of the messages that the e-learning community and the national support agencies may have hoped were getting through to individual academics, are not.

Figure 1: Comments from an E-learning Scoping study of English across 53 institutions carried out in 2005 (n=172)

Support for the development of technology-based teaching by individual practitioners in the humanities within institutions mirrors that of other subjects in the academy i.e. it usually consists of some combination of the following:

·  Meetings with a departmental, school or faculty e-learning rep /learning technologist.

·  Generic training workshops / induction programmes (e.g. ‘How to use WebCT’) which may or may not be divided into levels.

·  Co-ordinated professional development programmes.

·  Centralised e-learning or teaching & learning support units for assistance.

·  Institutional e-learning seminars (which may or may not be subject specific).

·  Applying for internal e-learning or teaching funds for e-learning projects.

·  Staff rewards for e-learning work (e.g. e-learning champions).

·  Attending e-learning conferences etc.

·  Browsing online help and advice either on the intra or internet.

·  Reading help manuals or e-learning publications

·  Attending external (e.g. Higher Education Academy Subject Centre) events.

E-learning will be considered fully embedded in an institution when all policies, procedures, roles and responsibilities pertaining to the use of it are fully integrated (Stiles, 2003) (Phillips, 2004). All of the support mechanisms detailed above aim to embed e-learning in practice but the challenge of embedding e-learning practice at departmental level still faces significant hurdles.

In my opinion, this model of support and information dissemination is not proving effective enough. Quinsee & Simpson (2005) mention how staff at their institutions were often unclear as to the relevance of e-learning courses to their practice or even that the courses were available and had struggled to develop courses on their own. Horsley (2007) mentions the lack of funding behind the ‘funding promises’.

The English Subject Centre too plays an external support role by sponsoring small-scale departmental e-learning projects. Over the last eight years more than twenty-five have taken place with the view that outputs would be cascaded to colleagues both locally and nationally. Unfortunately this bottom-up approach involving organic change from early adopters and innovators has not been as transformative as we might have hoped. it is often hard to change practice through small individualised locally applicable projects and in a subject where the notion of the ‘lone scholar’ still has currency we often find that academics in the office next door may have been unaware of the project in question. So what is going wrong? Did we create expectations of support that just cannot be met?

Is there another way? Do academics feel more comfortable hearing about new teaching ideas using technology from their peers rather than outsiders? Are their implications here for change in general in related to teaching practice? Would it be more effective to embed the support within the department rather than rely on external drivers to draw academics in?

In an effort to explore answers to these questions a two-year project, funded by the JISC Distributed e-learning (DEL) programme[6], was initiated which aimed to explore a different support model. The project, still a work-in-progress involves the appointment of a self-selected ‘e-learning advocate’ who gets a day a week buyout for an academic year to work with their colleagues on e-learning related initiatives.

Approach

The project has taken place in two stages both of which invited English departments (including literature, language and creative writing) across the UK to submit proposals indicating how they would embed e-learning in their departments over the academic year (2006-7 and 2007/8) given the support of a nominated e-learning advocate for one day a week. Their role would be to act as both a catalyst for change within a department and a source of practical help and advice for those wishing to make greater use of e-learning. Interested departments were encouraged to submit innovative ideas which reached across the department and might involve design, development, refiguring or creation of e-learning materials, one-to-one consultancy, training, workshops etc. Applicants would also have to demonstrate how the support model proposed would integrate with existing institution based strategies, initiatives or support structures. The proposal would also have to show that there was a serious commitment to the project at a senior level.

In the first year we received thirteen proposals of which six were chosen by Subject Centre staff and an independent external e-learning support professional who was also appointed as an evaluator for the project. The selection criteria included; strategy, experience, impact, sustainability, need and spread of contexts. In the second year we had a reduced overall budget and were able to offer three advocate roles out of six applications, one of which was shared between two academics. We also created a new role of ‘E-learning consultant’ whose function was to act as a roving ambassador of e-learning and assist the project manager in an evaluative role.(see table 1)

Table 1: E-learning advocates and their institutions over the 2 year project period(*= HOD)

The academics chosen comprise a mix of both senior and junior academics from a range of HE institutional contexts. The network is being managed by the learning technology officer at the English Subject Centre who is responsible for the professional development of the advocates, monitoring of individual projects in relation to submitted schedules/plans and overall management and critical evaluation of the support models studied in the project as a whole. A web-based project management tool (Basecamp[7]) is being used to help facilitate project discussion, deliver announcements, monitor progress against individual milestones and allow advocates to reflect on their experiences throughout the project in a blog-like format. In addition a baseline survey, focusing on unique contexts, was carried out. All six advocates from stage 1 have written full reports on their work.[8]

Results to date

“The e-Advocacy award … not only freed a little time for additional work on these projects, but (more importantly, I think) gave a demonstration of external support that was enormously useful in negotiating both at Department and Faculty level. In an atmosphere in which it’s very hard (still) to secure time for pursuing eLearning developments..” (Horsley, 2007)

The project is now reaching the end of its second and final year. To date it has been extremely successful. In this section the main achievements of the project are summarised below:

I Pedagogical development

All nine advocates have developed, extended and improved both their own as well as many of their colleagues courses. The appointment of an e-learning advocate in the small English department at Bishop Grosseteste University College in Lincoln for example has had a huge impact on the breadth and depth of e-learning use in the department. The freeing up of time allowed the department to incorporate aspects of e-learning into all the courses offered through the VLE for the first time. Wolverhampton and Lancaster assessed discussion forum activities, Northampton developed an exemplar course for all staff and Plymouth introduced a Wiki-based activity where students created annotated texts collaboratively.

II Shaping policy

At BCU e-learning has been put at the forefront of school and faculty plans, through the influence of the e-learning advocate who has been influential in determining priorities. In several other departments there has been more effective representation of English departmental e-learning requirements on institutional committees, and the advocate has been able to shape school, faculty and university learning and teaching strategies with a humanities perspective in mind. At MMU the advocate has mediated in infrastructural issues that were threatening to undermine the distance teaching programme within the department.

III Sharing of best practice
Every advocate had a different way of doing this but all agreed that it was of primary importance. Many designed a series of staff development workshops encouraging staff to share what they were doing, bring in outside guest speakers or encourage other institutional support staff to give a talk. As the ‘community’ of advocates developed they started arranging visits to each other’s departments to share their expertise in areas like podcasting, use of online discussion for role-play, interactive whiteboards etc. At Lancaster instruction sessions were provided to postgraduate and inexperienced lecturers first, as these groups proved more receptive to new ideas. At Northampton, working with individuals, or groups of two or three on specific issues and tools, with a particular end in view (such as how to set the ‘tone’ of academic discourse in a blog, or how it might differ in a formal essay) proved more practical and productive than formal staff development sessions. Whereas at BCU an exemplar module within the VLE, a core second year course, proved most effective.

IV Personal development & recognition

One of the most fascinating results of the project has been the way in which winning external project money has ‘shone a light’ on the advocate and this has often resulted in both a an increased recognition of English needs and requirements as mentioned previously, and more funding becoming available. For example at Hull £7,500 was made available for a mini-lab, at BCU resources were made available to refurbish derelict teaching space, and several advocates had their antique computer hardware upgraded. How can we hope that lecturers will develop cutting edge e-learning solutions if they don’t even have sound or graphics cards?

V Building the departmental skills base

All advocates were involved in developing the expertise of their teams, at BCU the advocate realised that what staff wanted was not examples of what they might do, but in fact help in developing what they were already doing. At Hull personalised training courses were developed for staff in the use of the interactive whiteboard. At Plymouth a learning technologist was employed to work alongside the advocate in building resources for colleagues.

VI Updating spaces

Refurbishment work in the arts building at Northampton resulted in significant equipment upgrade in all the teaching rooms partly encouraged by the project. BCU was also able to refurbish a teaching space and ensure it was outside central booking systems. Similarly, an interactive whiteboard lab was built at Hull.

“…the project has begun a movement, at first small- then large-scale, towards improving facilities and inspiring staff and students to add variety to their learning and teaching experiences - not least by also inspiring people at the head of the faculty’s teaching and administration. The university has just demanded JISC-style flexible learning spaces, and we already have one! The project has resulted in ‘kudos gain’ for the faculty within the university.” (Coote, 2007)