8.5. Staff Development

Embedding cannot be achieved by decree - policy and procedure alone will not suffice, people need embedding as well and this can involve considerable and uncomfortable cultural change...

This section looks at the area of staff development for all staff, and addresses such questions as:

How is staff development implemented in terms of addressing:

• Pedagogy and use of resources

• Use of technology

• Management and administrative philosophy

• How is staff development integrated into other practice, policy and procedure?

The most important part of the relationship between staff development and embedding is that working practice and culture can only be changed if the policies, procedures, roles and responsibilities that are in place will reinforce the impact of development on staff, in that they will practice what they have learned.

Some questions to consider:

8.5.1. Pedagogy and the Use of Resources

Education Development

Many institutions have programmes in place for the educational development of teaching staff. Does your programme have the use of eLearning integrated into it? If so, does it address issues around pedagogy and the use of technology? Too much teaching staff development focuses on the technology rather than the issues of course design and facilitation of learning in the context of using technology.

Secondly, much of such staff development is aimed at new staff, how are the 'old lags' encouraged to be involved?

MLE/e-learning Development

Again the question here is: Are you addressing the educational issues or merely focusing on using the technology? Whilst many institutions would argue that getting people started justifies a technology led approach, when one looks at this from an embedding point of view one should perhaps ask: 'Is there a danger of embedding weak educational practice by not including pedagogic issues in MLE focused staff development?'

Resources and eResources

This is a major cultural challenge, particularly in HE where teaching staff often have strong views about the IPR of content and resources they have created. Asking the question 'How do you promote effective use of and management of resources?' raises additional questions:

• Does your institutional policy on Copyright and IPR address the needs of e-learning AND is it effectively disseminated to, and understood by staff?
• What staff development do you have in place for teaching on the use, reuse and repurposing of local, regional and national eResources?
• What development do you have it place to encourage staff to share, reuse and repurpose each other's materials?

Other Staff and Pedagogy

A number of reports have indicated problems with joining up staff development of support staff with that of teaching staff, and problems with support staff having sufficient pedagogic understanding to effectively support eLearning and the use of MLEs. For example:

• How are information specialist' such as librarians, integrated into staff e-learning development?

• How are both information and IT support staff given an understanding of how the MLE is used by staff and students, both educationally and administratively?

8.5.2. Use of technology

The issue of training teaching staff on technology has been discussed above, but the issue of which technologies to train them on (or not) and the level to which to train them remains. In addition, the training of support and administrative staff also remains.

Teaching staff

The depth to which to train teaching staff must be a function of the policies and procedures governing the use of your MLE. Most training will focus on the use of the VLE and Assessment components, but will also involve training in PDP systems and administrative systems as appropriate. There is a danger in both under and over training teaching staff in terms of the range of systems and functionality covered. You may well find that whilst it was expedient to train staff in quite few management and higher level course creation procedures during the implementation and rollout phase of your MLE, as you come to embed the MLE you wish to centralise certain responsibilities and controls. However, this can then lead to friction with teaching staff who feel that control and flexibility is being taken away from them.

(A parallel to the above is being experienced by institutions that are introducing Content Management Systems to manage their web servers, where staff resent not being able to do just what they like any more)

Nevertheless staff development of all staff should probably contain a fairly full overview of the MLE and its parts, with an emphasis on who does what and why.

Support staff

The main failing in the training of support staff tends to be that of concentrating on training them how to carry out the technical tasks they are required to do in support of the MLE, without giving them an understanding of how the MLE is intended to be used by others. This need is particularly true of helpdesk staff, where training often focusses on the tasks required to fix things (e.g. change account details), but lacks giving the staff the understanding of how, for example, learners use the system educationally which makes effective problem solving and communication with the client more difficult than necessary.

There is relevant discussion of staff development in the context of 'Understanding Your Organisation' in the section 'Planning, dissemination and evaluation'.

8.5.3. Management and administrative philosophy

Most of the issues above, like understanding how the MLE forms part of the learning and teaching experiences, still apply here. However the issue of understanding how the MLE fits into organisational strategy and how to build this into on-going departmental and other local operating plans is a particularly difficult area.

This is because of the circular nature of the problem - such staff have a tendency to ignore MLE issues unless they are part of their normal practice, but unless something is seen as part of normal practice, staff development in it is seen as irrelevant.

The solution is to introduce staff development alongside relevant changes in policy etc. This is where embedding MUST imply senior management commitment to real change.

Evidence and examples of how Senior Managers have been engaged in staff development for MLEs and e-learning are almost non-existent, or at best anecdotal. Given that a review of the 'DTI Microcomputers in Schools Initiative' in the Nineteen-Eighties commented that a major bar to success was the failure to address the development of School Heads, this is an area where action is needed urgently.

Follow this link for key resources for this section (these open in a new window)