Most institutions have some form of mechanism for dealing with "I've got an idea for a new course". Questions you might want to consider in the context of MLEs/eLearning include:

• "How do you know there is a demand for the course?"

Whilst true for all course proposals, this question is particularly thorny when considering a true "virtual" course. Educational organisations are not particularly good at market research (teaching staff even less so) and the cost of developing this type of course is not inconsiderable.

Validation (or its equivalent) of an "e" courses throws up many additional questions relating to assessing that a course development has been thoroughly thought through and planned:

• What additional documentation is needed for the validation?
• How should this be presented?
• How can it be most efficiently targeted?"
• Most validations consume reams of paper, could the documentation be made available electronically? (This a particularly true of "course handbook" type documents which surely must be ultimately made available electronically to the learner anyway)
• What service levels should apply?
• Do you need to have statements covering issues such as response times and support levels from IT, Library etc services?

A more difficult but important question, given national analysis of student satisfaction, is

• Do you need service statements covering response times and feedback quality from teaching staff, including return of submitted work, email communications etc?

For fully "virtual" courses these issues are critical, and, additionally, need to cover all the services a student might expect as an on-campus student. This often throws up problems about rights of access to resources and software licenses, and also problems about provision of welfare services, careers services. The crunch question is

• How can you treat the virtual learner in an equitable way compared to an on-campus learner?
• How can you assess intended learning strategies?

Without some real indicative content this is very difficult, also external panel members need time to examine this.