Much of what follows is drawn from an Effects seminar given by the section editor and a colleague. (See the previous link in this sub-section's resources)

A final reality check

Before starting any eLearning course a final check is a good idea:

Final Quality Assurance

is the given course ready and fit for learners to start?

What checks do you have in place to ensure quality at the time of delivery?

As covered in Section 7b - Teaching and Learning Practice, you need to check courses for completeness, functioning links, usability and accessibility, educational structure etc. It is important that the course developers do not carry out this activity themselves - even if no formal QA process is employed to "sign off" the course - peer review is a good method. Remember that this process needs to be carried out when a course is repeated as well - check links, up-to-dateness etc.

• Are you Ready to Enrol for this course? -- Enrolment of learners is an area where things often go pear-shaped. Students who cannot connect to the course at the outset, or find they having to use temporary accounts, are often confused and have trouble forming an initial engagement with the course and their peers. Don't assume that because your MLE has automatic links between the VLE and the student system(s) that in will be straightforward - there will always be errors, late starters and early dropouts. "Non-standard" courses, which start and finish outside the norm, roll-on-roll-off courses and course of short duration often cause unexpected problems, as do "combination courses".
• Support - is it all in place? -- IT problems at the start of the course can be totally demoralising to learners - you need to ensure they will know where to get help, that the support is available when you say it will be, and that it will respond quickly.
• Deliverers - are they in place? -- The same applies to academic support - plus, if you have a "team" delivering the course, being sure everyone is clear about who is supporting what aspects and activities.

Delivering a Course

Enrol students

what do you do about the student who still can't log-in or isn't included in the course membership?

Induct students

If staff are doing face-to-face induction (can be an asset to aid "community building") make sure that they check the technology is working! (This is particularly important where induction is happening outside of the "host" institution)

Ensure access

again there will be students, particularly those accessing from work or other institutions, who will experience problems caused by firewalls, local IT regulations etc. that have not been foreseen. Also need to be ready for students with disabilities.

Latecomers and drop-outs

dealing with these can be more problematic than you think. How will you enrol/remove them, bring latecomers up to speed, handle disruption of groups etc.? For roll-on-roll-off courses this should of course be planned into the course design, administration, and management.

Collaborative and Group Working

When setting up sub-groups for collaborative and group activities, a number of issues need to be borne in mind.

Collaborative

where learners work together, often carrying out different roles, and consciously assist each other - for example where a team of student works on a project

• Group - where learners carry out the same task and interact with each other as the work progresses - for example a group discussion using e-mail or conferencing.
• Fairness - learners need to be confident that their own contributions will be properly recognised both in quality and scale. This is easier to achieve where there are individual outputs.
• Passengers - learners can object violently to any assessment which can result in a "passenger" (a learner who contributes little) either reaping undue reward or "pulling down" the grades of the other members of a team or group.
• Group Failure - the situation where a group fails to produce outputs of the required standard because either there were "group" failures (possibly because of personality difficulties) or because one or two individuals failed to deliver their required contribution, is always one which concerns learners greatly and therefore one which tutors must have a credible strategy for dealing with before the start of learner activity.
• Appropriateness - is the activity appropriate for collaborative or group working? This should have been dealt with at the design stage.
• Learner Skills - do the learners have the required collaborative, etc. skills? - If the course has been properly designed, then this should be a non sequitur, because the acquisition of such skills should be inherent in the course design.
• Group Size - this can be crucial. There is a wealth of publication on this, but generally where an activity has a team output the number should be very small, three to seven learners at most. For discussion type work, the larger the group, the less focused the discussion will be, and the greater the need for tutor moderation and monitoring. Groups above ten to fifteen tend to become unfocussed.
• Set up and initiate activities - how will you make expectations clear and ensure all aspects, including timescales, if the activity is assessed formatively or summatively, the mode of submission and how feedback will given are clear?
• Feedback - it is important to conform to the standards of feedback you have promised to give.

Assessment

The issues here were introduced in sub-section 7.2 and solutions should have been designed in (see comments above) but additional some points are worth considering, particularly in the context of group and collaborative work:

• Peer Assessment - a minefield! A good general guide is that peer assessment will meet greater learner acceptance where it is used to mitigate tutor grades, rather than to establish grades in their entirety.
• Monitoring - if learners are confident that tutors are monitoring their activities as part of the assessment exercise, (for example by following electronic discussions closely, of by having regular "briefings and reviews" during a project) then many concerns will be greatly reduced.
• Formative Assessment - if learners are requested to produce evidence for assessment at stages during the activity (this could be for, example, individual reports on team progress and individual work done for a Learning Opportunity requiring a major team output) this will also boost confidence.
• Authorship/Plagiarism - How will you guarantee the authorship of electronically submitted work? How will you integrate checking for plagiarism? (For example using the JISC plagiarism service)
• Proof of Submission - how can the learner be sure work has actually been submitted? For example, is some acknowledgement or certificate issued?

Overall, it is important to ask the question "Does our assessment practice within our MLE conform to institutional policy as laid down?"

Supporting Delivery

Many of the issues of support have already been addressed. One of the most fundamental questions here is" "Is everyone one involved in support clear about who supports what, and do they really own those aspects of support?" Whilst this may seem trite, it's sadly true that even in the best operations, those needing support often find themselves passed around between different services. Learners are often quite unsure if their problem is academic, administrative or technical. A test, consider the following problem as presented by a distance learner and consider how it would handled at your institution: "BlackCT doesn't work"

This could be an IT problem at client or server end, an administrative problem (account not set up for example), a network or firewall problem, a human problem (connecting to the wrong URL), a failure in induction and so on... Who would the learner contact, how would the problem be handled and escalated?

Access beyond Delivery

Access to learner activities and outputs beyond delivery is needed for quality, monitoring, resit, revision, and "taking your learning away" (lifelong learning).

The "institutional" issues were mentioned earlier, but the learner-centred ones are just as important. Some of the questions here are:

• If a learner is resitting an end-of-course assessment, does your MLE provide them access to all aspects of their learning experience from the course component in question, even though it has finished?
• Can a third-year student access all the courses, including work submitted, discussions taken part in, feedback given etc they took in years one and two?
• How can a student take away all these same aspects of their learning experience when they leave the institution?