2.5. What are the Key Questions?
Scenario: Your institution's MLE Working Group is about to meet and you have been asked to put together an agenda and a discussion document to focus debate.
In this section we address some of the key concepts that will allow your stakeholders (and thus your institution) to get to a shared understanding of what an MLE is/can do, and start to indicate how you can make this happen. The general discussions in sections 'Understanding your organisation', 'Gathering Requirements', and 'Implementation' may also be of interest in guiding your thoughts.
In order to answer the question 'Do we need an MLE?' there are some basic issues that should be discussed. First and foremost there is the question 'What is an MLE?' or 'What would an MLE mean for us?' Answering these questions should enable the institution to come to an overall 'vision' and a shared understanding.
The next task might be to consider what each of the stakeholders will want out of the MLE, in both the long and short term. This does not necessarily mean a formal process of gathering requirements more a general discussion by the stakeholders of how the MLE might change their work. Some preliminary questions you might wish to discuss are:
What do we hope to gain from an MLE?
What might we have to change to make it happen?
What could we lose?
Each of the stakeholders should initially focus on these from their own perspective. They should then attempt to draw these together to form a consensus and understanding of the possible impact of an MLE across the institution.
This will lead naturally onto discussions of how big the project might become. For example, are you looking for a far-reaching holistic solution or is this unrealistic? Boys (March 2002) identified four possibilities re MLE deployment which could be considered at this initial stage breaking them down into comprehensive, additive, parallel, and autonomous (in decreasing order of cross-institutional remit). Boys, however, noted that many people start by attempting the approach of implementing a portal but this is merely targeting the access point not the interoperability of the underlying systems. Ravensbourne College began with a modular design in mind (i.e. not a single monolithic system) that 'could easily inform the different levels of interoperability through progressive stages of integration and development; [and] one that allowed flexibility reordering priorities without loosing [sic.] control of the rest of the components.'
The background to this is the systems that are already in place. Technical, political and social systems can determine failure or success. Boys (August, 2002) noted that one of the key findings from the JISC projects was exactly 'how little institutions know about what already happens in terms of either data flows or organisational relationships' ... 'the enormity of these tasks alone should not be under-estimated.' One tip might be to take the student-centred approach and to consider all of the processes that he/she might go through from enrolment to graduation. For detail on Process Review, visit the JISC infoNet Process Review infoKit.
Then there are the issues of the surrounding infrastructures and support services. The overall complexity of the environment you operate in will be a key determining factor in the ultimate success of the MLE (Jefferies and Waterhouse (2002)). Moreover existing technical systems which might be in place already are notoriously lacking in interoperability and integration features and this severe limitation should be recognised from the start.
Once the background has been established there are some specific issues you will need to raise. Collated from the case studies reviewed these boil down to:
Local support issues (e.g. do you have sufficient network capabilities to host an MLE, or a support infrastructure to cover maintenance, and training?)
Management issues (e.g. are the managerial structures in place to make an MLE realistic, are there any dysfunctions in the current system that might need to be tackled, and what will be the costs for all of this versus the benefits?)
Political issues (e.g. does this tie in with your institution's mission and strategies, is there sufficient support at a high level, are all stakeholders on board, what are the current attitudes to e-learning in your institution, and what are your competitors doing?)
Depending upon the remit of your group and the expertise of the stakeholders you may allocate each of these areas to specific people to tackle. It is common to use various approaches to gather information about requirements (e.g. the CoManTLE and the SMILE projects both used interviews and surveys). You can, of course, draw on previous experience. It may be the case that you have already implemented a VLE and if so this may provide useful information and answers to the above. Similarly there may already have been reviews of business processes which could provide very useful information. However, in all of this it must be noted that you are moving on from answering the question 'Do we need an MLE?' to the next stage of 'Could we actually implement one?'
The CoManTLE project chose an interesting approach to this by looking at the possibility of adopting a systems analysis stance, employing such approaches as the Soft Systems Methodology (SSM), and Beer's Viable Systems Model (VSM). Although this may seem heavy-handed to those who may wish to adopt the more informal approach of simply getting together and thrashing out the issues, the project concluded that 'we see SSM as providing a methodology for collecting the raw data needed for constructing a useful VSM of the University in the context of MLE development.' (Britain, 2001)
There are formal and informal approaches which could be adopted in guiding the group with its preliminary questions and activities, and underlying these are some fundamental questions and issues that will need to be raised early on. Whichever approach is selected the group should set itself up with the knowledge that they will be involved in 'a lengthy iterative process' (MARTINI Project Plan 1.5, 2002, p. 9)
Summary
We have begun to look at the issues and methods your group could adopt when beginning the process of analysing the potential of an MLE. At the root of this is the need for all stakeholders to agree on the following:
What an MLE will mean for the institution
What it will mean to all the stakeholders (it is essential that everyone understands the impact it might have on themselves and others)
What does everyone want to get from the MLE
Whether the institution is ready for an MLE (discussed in the next section)
If you feel that you have achieved this level of understanding then you are ready to proceed to the next stage.
Follow this link for key resources for this section (these open in a new window)
