3.5. The MLE in your institution: linking the project into other institutional activities
What other important institutional activities are happening?
How do these align with the MLE development?
In what ways can other relevant institutional initaitives, projects and activities be connected?
In addition to mapping organisational issues to your MLE development plan, it is useful to think about how it relates or might be of use to other institutional activities.
Building an MLE involves change in both the service, administrative and academic functions of the institution. Therefore an MLE development, by nature, cuts across existing organisational structures and boundaries. This needs to be accounted for in how the project is managed and aligned with existing institutional structures and activities. Your MLE project therefore needs to be linked to broader institutional issues, activities, timescales and priorities. Careful alignment of the MLE project alongside other institutional activities will help maximise benefit and is another way of demonstrating the importance and value of this work.
Be aware that the timing of your project activities may well have to be adapted quite significantly in the light of other institutional priorities. In particular the JISC Building MLEs in HE projects identified that project activities most sensitive to change in this respect were the softer organisational and human issues, such as stakeholder perspectives, and associated training and staff development needs, as well as the difficulty of mapping tacit processes. However, conflicts can also arise with technical implementation, particularly around issues of local ownership and control and with different stakeholders wanting to continue with existing practices and processes.
It is also useful to identify and link the project to relevant current institutional directives, such as e-learning, learning and teaching or estate strategies and to find out the status of each of these, the mechanisms by which they are being progressed and how they are inter-related. Interlinking of the project with other strategic activities serves a dual purpose of stakeholder engagement and commitment as well as functioning as a dissemination activity. See the dissemination sub-section for more on developing your dissemination plan. Align the lifecycle of the project as much as possible with the lifecycle for other relevant strategies and initiatives. For example who in the institution is responsible for taking the e-learning strategy forward? What stage is it at? What is its status? How does it relate to other strategies? What impact does the MLE project have on it and vice versa? Clear articulation of the benefits of the project within the context of the different strategies is a good way of evidencing the value of the project and gaining stakeholder engagement.
3.5.1. Linking into institutional lifecycles
What are the key institutional lifecycles and how does the MLE development map to them? Is there information from the MLE development lifecycle which could usefully be fed into the other lifecycles or vice versa? Are there some activities across the lifecycles which could be combined?
It is worth carrying out an audit of other key institutional activities and lifecycles and considering in which ways the project can be aligned to these. An obvious one is sensitivity to the academic calendar and alignment of the project to not clash for example with busy pressure points in the year or, alternatively, times when it may be difficult to get users together for other reasons. Lifecycles to consider include:
The academic year
Strategic and operational planning
Local faculty or departmental meetings and committee schedules
Institution-level meetings and committee schedules
External events and cycles - such as quality audit or the research assessment exercise for HE institutions
Funding cycles
Any other cycles (for example recruitment, summer schools, etc)
Another tactic that you might consider is alignment of the project with related cross-institutional activities. One mentioned already is the development of institutional and local e-learning strategies. Others to consider are staff development and training activities, or specific agendas such as widening participation or accessibility.
