Much of what follows is drawn from an EFFECTS seminar given by the section editor and a colleague. (See Workshop paper and Powerpoint presentation)

What approaches are usually employed for development?

The Lone Ranger/ Fred in Shed.

• Why? Funding models, academic freedom, tradition, enthusiasts
• Why not? Often fails to deliver anything, frequently delivers something different, "creep", false expectations, very late delivery, academic workloads, very difficult to monitor, no evaluation or evaluation has only local benefit.

Academic team + Support

• Why? Acceptable to academics. Retains academic freedom and control. Frees academics from some technological tasks. Facilitates development of expertise by support staff.
• Why not? Still sometimes fails to deliver anything, frequently delivers something different, "creep", false expectations, late delivery, academic workloads, very difficult to monitor, no evaluation or evaluation has only local benefit. Support staff not involved in the whole process, so development of expertise is constrained.

The "CAL" Approach

• Why? Identified "experts" with defined roles. Easier to manage - possibly.
• Why not? Isolated distinct roles. Lack of shared overview. Different cultures and languages. Lack of shared agenda. Development of expertise constrained to team. Often (wrongly) used as a substitute for a planned approach. Teamworking imposes new challenges.

All the above are commonly adopted by institutions during the introduction and adoption of the use of MLEs/VLEs. However they are fundamentally "project" in their focus, and do not indicate that development has become "embedded" - i.e. that it is a mainstream activity.

What follows is a series of questions designed to focus on a "planned approach" which will address the following questions:

• Why? What is the point of the course? How will it impact on the successful learner? But, also, "Why eLearning?" What advantages do you see for the learner, the tutor and the institution?
• Learners Requirements? The development process should have as its main drivers the needs of the learner and the overall learning experience. Too much eLearning development seems to have been developed with a prime focus on the needs of tutors and/or the institution. (These are important, but should not drive development).
• What? More time, more skills, more people, more communication and teamworking, more planning.
• Who? To get your development processes right in the first place will involve most parts of the institution. The development process, will need to involve teaching staff, learning development and support staff, staff with expertise in content and media creation, accessibility, IPR and copyright and others in more focussed capacities such as IT and Quality.
• Institutional context and processes? The development process needs to take into account staff development and the various forms of support for development and delivery, but also quality assurance, the validation and approval of new courses, academic monitoring, and the procedures associated with the recruitment, enrolment, charging, assessment and accreditation of students. And, vitally, processes to ensure that all lessons learned are fed back into the other processes.
• How? Do your development processes etc exist? Do you have a plan?
• When? The plan needs to account for such things as timetables for validation, marketing, recruitment and enrolment schedules in the development phase. Course design needs to account for scheduled events such as exam boards.
• Did it work? Most people don't know! Evaluation is generally either superficial or non-existent. You need to know from the outset what you are trying to achieve to both effectively evaluate and to gain benefit from the evaluation. Benefit from evaluation needs to accrue to all relevant parties (often evaluation as practiced only benefits individuals rather than the organisation). One of the biggest barriers to evaluation is resourcing it - a planned approach can help. Analysis and Planning

The first questions to ask are about Feasibility

• Is it needed? What is "needed" and what is "it"?
• Can it done? Skills? Time? Capacity? Commitment?
• Can you afford it? Cost of: Staffing (Delivery as well as development)? Resources? Income?

An important part of this is ensuring those involved in development have a clear understanding of a whole range of institutional procedures and processes and are about the need to have the use of your MLE embedded as discussed in the rest of this section of the MLE Development infoKit.

Who are your potential learners?

Two very important questions that you need to address are:

• How prepared are they?
• What are their needs and expectations?

Learning in Higher Education and much of Further Education, and even more so eLearning, requires learners to be able to manage their own learning to some extent. However, learner autonomy may vary in a number of ways and in degree. Characteristics and levels of learner autonomy that need to be addressed include:

• Degree of procedural independence: level of direction needed to carry out procedures, tasks and activities Degree of self knowledge and self management learners have in relation to organising their learning: ability to plan and schedule their study, seek support when appropriate, etc. "Critical" autonomy: degree to which learners can set their own learning objectives, use "learning to learn" skills of selecting and applying appropriate learning strategies and styles, monitor and make decisions regarding their progress.

In all disciplines there is a specific "culture", the adoption of which defines the successful learner; for example, "historyness" in a Historian. It is the tutor (and to some extent the course designer) who normally "represents" the culture. At all levels of learning there is a tutor defined component of context which imparts elements of this culture. The culture should be inherent in information resources and methods, or, if not, in the choice of information or methodologies to be examined by learners in the context of learning activities.

Pedagogic options

These should be reviewed at regular intervals to take advantage of experience gained and new ideas. You need an "overview" of various options before you start to map these against the learners in question. (This emphasises the need for development of teaching staff to ensure their "tool-kits" are up-to-date and varied)

The next thing is to examine the pedagogic options alongside the target group. (Pick the right tools for this job)

You need to have a clear idea of the position of the learner and the desired outcomes of the course in terms of the current level of autonomy of the learner, the intended role of the tutor, and the "level" of the course and then select strategies for teaching, learning and assessment which will develop the learner as far as reasonably possible in terms of autonomy, skills and subject specific capabilities whilst meeting the course outcomes.

Some examples which you might want to consider in this light:

• Lectures - Homework - Exam
• Lectures - Assignments - Tutorials - Exam
• Problems - Groups - Mentoring - Assessed
• Question - Resource Guidance - Tutor Led Discussion - Assignment
• Question - Resource Guidance - Tutor Led Discussion - Peer Discussion - Reflection - Assignment
• Problems - Assessed

Delivery/Mode options

Review these at regular intervals (rather than every time) to ensure you are up to speed with developments. Ask yourself:

• Is the course best as blended or entirely "E"?
• In blended delivery, what activities will both tutor and learner do off/on line? E.g. "E" as "Lecture Support"
• What tools does the intended approach need for: Discussion, Communication, Annotation, Finding Resources, Group Work, Sharing, Feedback, Assignments and Testing?

Ensuring Integration

Ask yourself - how will we ensure that all those involved in a development "own" the development? This will involve you ensuring:

• The right People - at the right time - having all of the procedures and processes discussed in this section "embedded" will be needed for you to get the right people to contribute to a development at the appropriate point in time. E.g. during analysis and feasibility activities, it will be necessary to get those involved in marketing, costing/charging, and approval for new developments to contribute effectively.
• The right Roles - in a shared context - too often, individuals can become "closeted" in their particular role within the larger development. It is very dangerous to allow academic staff to abdicate technical decision-making entirely to "support staff" because unless they are involved in this process they cannot be sure that their pedagogic goals are being effectively addressed. The right "support staff" tend to be people with hybrid skills, for example educational as well as IT competencies.
• The right Communications - in the institutional context - as well as ensuring that the "team" are integrated and effective in communication between themselves, it is vital that the management of the development ensures that communication channels with all sections of the institution whose roles and responsibilities impact on the "project" are effective. This is a danger area because until processes are "embedded" people are often blissfully unaware of the channels they need to have open.
• The right Management - Whilst this is largely addressed by the previous points, you should remember developments are most successful when managed by people with a sound overview of the whole process who also have proven "project management" type skills. It is worth your remembering that, sadly, these people are not often teaching staff!
• The right level of Ownership - You should ensure core staff are involved in developments (rather than a "new" team for each one) because without this, ownership of the outcomes of the development will not extent beyond the team and lessons from experience and evaluation will not benefit your wider organisation.

Producing an Outline Plan

Most people have their preferred planning methodology and tools to actually describe and document their plans, but you should ensure that any initial outline plan includes:

• Purpose - the rationale of the development - including the wider, possibly institutional, aspects such as "more students", "enhanced learning experience" etc. as well as the rationale for the course itself.
• Scope - what is NOT included - you should "bound" any development - probably most easily done by considering what is NOT included - important because without this loss of control and endless "creep" is likely.
• Phases - split the plan into stages which each achieve one of the deliverables of the development? E.g. ensuring Semester 1 modules are ready for Semester 1.
• Timescales - concentrate mainly targets that can't easily be moved - especially those which imposed from outside!
• Responsibilities - overall responsibilities for "project" management and leadership of major stages in the development, and the nature and scale of contributions needed from others.
• "Soft" Deliverables - outputs of development in general terms. E.g. is the course blended or "e"? What are the overall intended pedagogic approaches?
• Assumptions & Risks - you need to be aware of things you are dependant on (e.g. key personnel) and of things that could go wrong. (You may not be able to plan how to deal with some of these!)

Design

You need to ensure the right match of learners, learning outcomes, pedagogy, and technology to create a course design.

The Course Design Process

To help address the differing needs of learners at different levels and the various developments of general and specific skills and knowledge required for each development, you may find it useful to consider a basic Output-Driven overview with the view to achieving some consistency across developments:

• What's the Point? A course is a group of people who have clear learning outcomes as a focus for their learning activities. Here, a desirable start is a clear perception of what the point of the course is. That is: in what way is a learner changed by successful completion of the course?
• What will they Do? Learners are assigned learning activities to enable them to work towards the outcomes and demonstrate that they have achieved them. Course designers must decide which of these learning activities will be formal assessments. Activities must be designed in the context of the learners, the desired outcomes, the mode of delivery, pedagogic approach and the technological tools available.
• What Resources are needed? Now and only now, identify and develop the resources needed to help the learners in addressing the activities. An individual resource may, of course be relevant to several activities. Resources may be internal to the MLE or external, for example web sites, books, and of course, lectures and tutorials.

Course Structure

The output from the above process should be a design for the course structure, its activities, assessments and resources. You need this to be able to progress to actual development, and it should include choices of tools systems etc. An important component of the course design which is often overlooked or skimped is induction for learners - this is NOT just about how to use the technology but must induct students into what is expected of them and what they can expect in terms of the learning experience.

From this course structure and the outline development plan, a full development plan should now be produced with detailed "project" components and scheduling.

Development and Implementation of the "Product"

This stage is concerned with implementing the plan to develop the "product". The objective and plan are used to create the VLE and/or other content, including media and resources. The important things to focus on during this stage include:

• Monitoring progress - is it on schedule? Is it going in the planned direction? Is it meeting desired quality requirements?
• Reality checking - have you got it right? Formative evaluation of the product is important during this stage. Once things start to take form as the conceptual design becomes reality, you will have an opportunity to assess whether the "product" will actually serve the purpose intended.
• Recording effort - how much is it costing?
• Taking corrective actions and justifying them. Answers to the foregoing questions may prompt the need to change direction. Such a change may be to bring a development veering off track back to plan. It may be necessary to refine the objective, design or plan. The justification for the action needs to be recorded and communicated to all involved with the development.

Satisfying quality requirements

This is covered in sub-section 7b - Teaching and Learning Practice

Preparing for Delivery

In addition to the development of the "product", there are a number of important preparations that need to be made for delivery:

• Staff Development - See Section 7e - Staff Development
• Ensure support infrastructure and service levels are in place. This was touched on in Section 7b - Teaching and Learning Support and the need to ensure that "eLearners" are able find the support they need quickly and easily was also mentioned earlier.

It is also important that you ensure that problems learners may be having with one aspect of a course are communicated appropriately and do not lead to further problems. (E.g. "software problems" leading to an inability to complete an assignment). Thus, eLearning requires an integrated support infrastructure. This infrastructure needs to include the type of support traditionally offered by support services (e.g. IT or library) as well as academic support.

• Are your various support services "joined up"?
• Are your problem report mechanisms "joined up"?
• What links for resolving learner problems do you have between academic staff and services?
• Ensure organisation procedures such as enrolment are planned for. This is discussed further in Section 7g - General Questions. Enrolment is rarely straightforward even for traditional learning environments. But eLearning presents new problems and requires more efficient procedures if learners are not to become frustrated at a time when the need to create confidence is at its greatest. The extra demands eLearning presents include the need to ensure that enrolment information is "digitised" and recorded in order to generate computer and library accounts for example, without which access to "e" components of the course is impossible.
• Ensure assessment procedures are planned for. Some questions to consider are: How will learners submit assignments? Through the VLE or via email? What formats can you cope with? Are there special procedures to verify submission? How and where will grades be recorded and how do these tie in with institutional student recording systems?
• Design and implement marketing. This is the latest time to address this! HE has traditionally been poor at marketing its courses beyond the traditional recruitment areas. The WWW provides an obvious and cheap opportunity for extending marketing reach.

For a fuller discussion of the "Integrative Development" approach see: Stiles, M.J., and Yorke, J.M.E.Y, "Designing and Implementing Learning Technology Projects - A Planned Approach", Workshop paper and Powerpoint presentation for the "EFFECTS - Embedding Learning Technologies Seminar", 8th April 2003, University College London