3.3. Identifying issues
This section will help you identify key issues of relevance for your MLE development including:
What mechanisms can be used to find out about the current culture of your organisation?
Identification of which organisational and cultural aspects to include
What tools and resources can be used?
How can stakeholders be involved?
How will this information be used?
Also see the section 'Who should be involved?' in 'Why might you want an MLE?'
What information should you be gathering?
This section offers a range of approaches. The approach you take will depend on the resources available to you.
Firstly you need to brainstorm about some of the things you might want to consider finding out about in relation to your MLE development. Secondly you will need to consider which are of particular importance and why. This will enable you to decide the degree of detail you go in to and hence the resource requirements. You should refer back to the information you have gathered on your organisational context and what has been identified as important contextual issues as part of the mapping exercise outlined in the previous sections. Thirdly you need to consider carefully the resource implications, in terms of how much time you have available to gather information, where you are going to get it from and who is going to be involved. If you are one individual tasked with gathering information then you will need to take a very different approach to an organisation which can invest more time and resources. You will however need to balance carefully the time and resources against the potential value of the information.
Give some consideration to where you might obtain information and how easy it will be to get. For example, will a general sketch of the institutional profile and a quick brainstorm of key priorities as they relate to your MLE development be enough information or do you actually need to do a detailed audit and mapping exercise? In addition you will need to be mindful of political sensitivities in obtaining information. What level of authority do you have? What are the agendas of information gatekeepers and how willing are they likely to be to share information with you?
Finally, give some consideration to how you intend to use the information and make a note of where you might want to follow up with a more detailed information gathering exercise at a later stage in the development plan. For example you might mentally list key stakeholders, then later expand this list in discussion with colleagues and later still formalise and ratify a definitive list through an appropriate steering group or committee.
Stakeholder analysis
This section will address stakeholders and how they can be identified and involved. An introduction to stakeholder management can be found in the Project Management infoKit. This topic is also discussed in the next section of this infoKit which focuses on requirements specification. It will also provide suggestions for the different activities which are needed to effectively identify and take account of organisational issues and suggestions for how these might translate into particular roles and responsibilities in terms of your MLE development activities.
A strong emergent theme across the JISC MLEs in HE projects was the importance of both stakeholder identification and engagement for the success of the project. It is worth spending some time at the beginning of the project to map out stakeholders, their relevance to, and interest in, the project and potential agendas and conflicts between different stakeholders. Typical stakeholders might include the following:
Senior managers
Heads of department
Functional coordinators - such as learning and teaching coordinators, quality assurance representatives, research coordinators, IT liaison staff, etc
Academics
Support staff
Technical staff
Students
It is likely that the initial mapping of your institutional context will have given you a pretty good idea of who the key stakeholders are and their different perspectives. The fact finding section will give you ideas on ways of refining this and involving stakeholders in different parts of the programme.
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