3. Understanding your organisation
A version of the core material comprising this section is available for download as a printable version in pdf format. (The Adobe Acrobat Reader to allow viewing of pdf files is available for download here).
This section will help you work through the organisational context within which your MLE developments will occur and to identify potential barriers and enablers. This also links to the section 'What are the key questions' in 'Why might you want an MLE?' and the section 'Implementing change' in 'Embedding'. Many of the key resources in this Section provide useful exercises and checklists and we would urge you to take the time to look through these.
Who should read this:
staff engaged in developing and implementing an MLE, in particular members of the steering group for the project and the project manager.
Outcomes:
At the end of this section you should have a clearer idea of what constitutes organisational issues and why it is important to take them into account when developing an MLE.
Approach:
The section provides you with appropriate guidelines and resources and guides you through the process with a series of questions to consider.
Overview
This section highlights why it is important to understand and take into account your organisational context when embarking on an MLE development and implementation. It considers:
what is meant by organisational context
what are the key issues
what are the different kinds of organisational issues and what is their impact
why organisational issues are important in the context of MLE development
what strategies you need to have to understand and deal with organisational issues.
It outlines the stages and processes which need to be considered and the kinds of questions you need to address. It is based on a distillation of the lessons learned from a variety of MLE development projects across FE and HE over the past three years. The information draws on the experiences of the projects involved in MLE developments under the JISC Building MLEs in HE and related programmes, but also includes pointers to other JISC projects and studies and other sites and programmes (such as the TLTP (Teaching and Learning Technology Programme), the LTSN web sites), professional bodies (such as Becta, SEDA and ALT) and relevant theory and research literature.
The sub-sections will help you to consider how to articulate what your organisational context is and how to identify specific organisational issues of relevance to your MLE development. Having identified and prioritised these we then go on to consider how to take them into account in the most effective way and offer means of evaluating how effective this has been.
An aspiration behind the JISC MLEs in HE programme was to critically reflect on the process and difficulties associated with MLE implementations in different institutions and to distil out the key lessons learned and mechanisms for supporting implementation which can then be used by others across the sector. The key lessons learned are included in this infoKit.
Building up a picture of your organisational context will be an iterative process which you can develop and expand upon throughout your MLE development work. This iteration is reflected in the design of this section which guides you through the sequence of issues and questions you might want to consider along with mechanisms for achieving these. Having worked through the section 'Why might you want an MLE?' you should now have a clear idea of why you want an MLE. In this section we begin to build on this and to consider the organisational context within which your MLE development is occurring. It will help to write a brief description of the nature of your proposed MLE development. You should aim to provide a brief summary of the scale, scope and intended outcomes. You may find it helpul to use the Project Initiation Document template from the Project Management infoKit. For example are you intending to totally integrate all your systems (finance, student records, VLE, timetabling, web sites, etc) or are you focusing in on specific aspects (linking your VLE with your student record system or integrating systems concerned with teaching and assessment)? Consider the following:
What is the scope of the work and what will it broadly involve?
How did the idea come about?
What are the main reasons for doing it?
Who is going to lead it?
Who else will be involved?
Who are the stakeholders?
What are the potential organisational benefits?
Are there any barriers which might affect your MLE development?
What are the timescales for developing and implementing your MLE?
What are the intended outcomes of the project?
Where can you get additional advice, support or guidelines?
