Staffordshire University Regional Federation (a directly-funded HEFCE HE/FE consortium) is just coming to the end of its second year of running Foundation Degrees accredited by the University across its 11 partner FEIs.

The first of these degrees, Project Management, started in 2001, and makes heavy use of one of the University's VLEs, COSE. COSE already had links to the University's student information system, TheSIS, for enrolment of students (links to others systems and eResources have been, and are being, developed since as part of the ongoing development of the MLE) The COSE VLE had been used since 1998 for a significant number of the University's own internal and distance courses. Not unsurprisingly, the University thought it could anticipate most of the likely problems, and had put in place a programme of staff development for teaching and support staff from the partner FEIs.

However, as might be expected given the inexperience of the FE partners (and the particular group of University teaching staff) in eLearning, coupled with everyone's inexperience with Foundation Degrees, things did not go entirely smoothly...

[In defence, it must be stressed that the Foundation Degree in question has continued to recruit well and is "successful", but the lessons learned will hopefully prove useful.]

The problems were both MLE and VLE focussed, but largely centred on the VLE or the link between the MIS and VLE components of the MLE.

• Enrolment - this was carried out at each partners college using the University's own (paper) forms. The delay in getting these from the colleges to the University and then processed and the registrations entered into the student information system meant that learners were not in place within the VLE by the time of the first face-to-face sessions. This led to the use of temporary usernames and passwords. In turn, this, coupled with the need for "local" usernames and passwords to access the individual colleges networks and computers, meant that once the "proper" usernames and passwords for the VLE were available, many students had become very confused about which account to use for what.
• Staff Induction for Delivery - although a programme of staff development was put into place, this proved to less successful than hoped for a number of reasons. Firstly, it was difficult for the partner FEIs to identify those staff who would be involved in delivery some four or five months ahead of the start of the course. Secondly, staff involved in delivery needed course content for the course in question available to allow best use to be made of the training, and this was still largely undeveloped at the time of training. Thirdly, those staff who had been identified did not engage enough with the technology following training for a variety of reasons (including that they did not know they would need to! - This is an example of a cultural difference between HE an FE in that course staffing decisions in FE often are made "at a late stage" and also that a higher proportion of part-time staff are employed)
• Technical issues - this was the first time that most of the partner colleges hade been involved with the use of a VLE with "off-campus" students. This was further compounded by the fact that the VLE server was also "off-campus", being based at the University. There was an assumption that "it's basically just accessing the internet" and number of issues were overlooked and "came back to bite" the teams when delivery started. Firstly there were problems with firewalls, with some colleges finding that various components of the VLE were blocked - for example because of the use of Java Applets by the VLE or because Chat was blocked. Secondly, colleges were not advise strongly enough about the need to check access from the actual computers that student would use whilst at the college. Revealed problems where the software installation on students PCs varied across the college (for example, browser versions and plug-ins installed). Overall college staff did not receive enough advice on "what might go wrong".
• Student induction - whilst the University understood the need for student induction, and a session with college staff to reinforce this, induction was very uneven - partly caused by staff not having been identified in time, or being unavailable for the session. Materials to support induction were also inadequate, being based to much on those used by the University which assumed significant support would be on-hand.
• Support - this was another area where "who does what" was not made sufficiently clear and resulted in problems taking too long to resolve or being inappropriately escalated. This was a particular problem where the student had technical problems at the start of the course at home or at work.
• MIS issues - whilst the MLE link between the MIS system and the VLE allowed automated enrolment of learners into both course and modules, students needed to be grouped into sub-group for each college delivering each module. The University's MIS system could supply the VLE with groupings at this level of granularity and therefore this required manual intervention to achieve.

Solutions

• Enrolment - this is still to some extent "work in progress". For the second delivery of the degree in September 2002 a "comfort zone" was built into the start of the award to allow learners to have their "proper" usernames and passwords before use of the VLE started. In addition, the bulk of all semester modules was put onto a CD (COSE allows course content to be published onto a CD containing a COSE "player" which allows the VLE to be used in an "offline" mode). This helped those with problems and late enrollers to have access whilst account issues were resolved. Longer term, the University is looking at electronic enrolment.
• Staff Induction - support staff from he University now will go to colleges to carry out induction immediately prior to delivery. (This also helps to identify local technical issues). Perhaps more importantly, a "getting started checklist" has been produced - drawing on both good practice and experience - which is aimed at those delivering VLE-based modules within the partner colleges. A member of staff delivering a modules should go through the list, which covers a range of issues from making sure the staff member has checked that they can access the VLE content and understand its intent, that they have all support materials, learners have accounts and are in the group within the VLE, that facilities for induction are in place and working, to ensuring that the staff member understands all of various support mechanisms and procedures.
• Technical Issues - the solution of these has been "by experience" and is backed up by the provisions of the COSE CD versions of the courses. And the staff "induction checklist".
• Student induction - the staff "induction checklist" aids the provision of a consistent approach by making it clear what induction should include. To help this a comprehensive set of materials for learner induction has been produced including sets of PowerPoint slides for use in induction sessions, and student handouts on the use on the VLE in the context of the Foundation Degrees.
• Support - this required further discussion and agreement with partner colleges (and within the University) on the "ownership" of the various types of problems. Once this had been done, a "script" was produced for use by college teaching and technical support staff that addresses the basic problem (as normally expressed by students) of "I can't access the course" or "COSE doesn't work". This was produced by examining the historical support records both for consortium and University students, and would have been difficult to produce without an "experience base" to work from. The scripts takes the person using it through a carefully worked out series of questions and lists solutions and escalation paths. A similar scripts are now being produced for use within the University which cover the MLE in its wider context (including BOTH the VLEs used in the University itself).
• MIS issues - the "group granularity" issue is a fundamental MLE problem which has impact on the flexibility of courses. This is being addressed as part of a redesign of the University student information system