The UCL Moodle Baseline that was approved by Academic Committee in June 2009, has now been updated after wide consultation on best current UCL practice.  The aim of the Baseline is to provide guidelines for staff to follow when developing Moodle courses in order for UCL students to have a consistently good e-learning experience. They are intended to be advisory rather than prescriptive or restrictive. These recommendations may be covered within a combination of module, programme and departmental courses.

Changes include the addition of a course usage statement explaining how students are expected to use their Moodle course. A communications statement is also now a requirement, in order to explain to students how they are expected to communicate with staff, and how often they can expect staff to respond. It is now a recommendation for staff to add (and encourage their students to add) a profile photograph or unique image, to make it easier to identify contributors in forums and other learning activities.

New guidelines for including assessment detail and Turnitin guidance have been added for those who use these technologies.

See the new UCL Moodle Baseline v2

Find out more about this and other e-learning news in the monthly UCL E-Learning Champions’ Newsletter.

One of the perennial problems for both academic colleagues and learning technologists is trying to judge the educational value of online courses. Especially in blended learning the online ‘course’ is often just a component of a broader learner experience, and its role really can only be understood in the context of how it supports or extends ‘live’ activities. Thus what looks to a learning technologist like an unsophisticated ‘list of links’ in Moodle may actually support a rich classroom-led enquiry-based learning activity. It is hard to tell without speaking to the lecturer (or students) involved.

Nevertheless for modules which are wholly online or have a high use of technology a consensus has emerged as to what components are necessary to enable a ‘good’ course. One very practical example of this is the Blackboard Exemplary Course Program Rubric, which has gradually developed as a kind of sector standard since it was established in 2000, back then under the WebCT flag. The eight page rubric actually supports Blackboard’s Catalyst course competition (only open to Blackboard users, of course!) but the document can also be read as a platform-neutral checklist of good design, as applicable to Moodle as it is to Blackboard. Using the rubric course designers can evaluate how well their own course conforms to ‘best practices’ in four areas; Course Design, Interaction and Collaboration, Assessment and Learner Support. Each area is broken down into separate areas, with a checklist of ‘incomplete’ to ‘exemplary’ examples.

• Course Design covers how clear the course goals and objectives are, the way the content is presented and any use of media, how learning design encourages students to be engaged in ‘higher order’ thinking and generally how the VLE is used to help student engagement.
• Interaction and Collaboration includes communication strategies (an aspect so important we are considering including in the UCL Moodle baseline), how a sense of learner community is developed and ‘logistics’ i.e. quality and expectations of interaction.
• Assessment is essentially about how assessment design aligns with the learning outcomes, the expectations on students and any opportunities for self assessment.
• Learner support highlights the importance of orientation to the course and the VLE, clarity around the instructor role, links to institutional policies, accessibility and the role of feedback.

In short this is really a very useful checklist for people already running or currently designing programmes with a high online component and well worth a look. Using a checklist does not guarantee an ‘exemplary’ student experience but is simply a way to ensure that what are nowadays commonly regarded as critical components of success are fully considered in the course design and planning. Some of the sections may need some ‘interpretation’ or localisation and that is hopefully where E-Learning Environments can help!

Attended the 2^nd Annual Quality Assurance and Quality Enhancement in e-Learning conference yesterday which had the intriguing and rather general-purpose title ‘Unsolved problems and unknown issues‘.  There were two presentations, one on the variety of e-learning quality initiatives across Europe (such as EFQUEL and SEVAQ+ ), and another on the development of an innovative distance learning graduate programme in law.  One of the main lessons was to develop a ‘quality culture‘ in course design and to ensure good communication and quality systems were in place.

The main focus though was a review of the snappily-named QAQE Toolkit for Harnessing Quality Assurance Processes for Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) which has been developed by a HEA special interest group. The toolkit is designed to work alongside existing QA mechanisms and encourage discussion around TEL-specific issues.

The toolkit has three sections Planning and design, Monitoring of implementation and Review and redesign. Each section contains a sensible set of TEL-related questions such as “What are the planned mechanisms for student engagement?” and “Do students possess the necessary digital skills?” together with some suggested actions. Attached to each question are links to good practice, case studies and so on deriving from recent JISC and HEA projects. This is particularly useful and represents a ‘crash course’ in e-learning design.

Several participants had tried out the toolkit and it seemed especially helpful in new-build courses, either for distance or campus-based delivery. One group had developed a so-called ‘Carpe diem’ brainstorming workshop around part of it. Less successful though seemed an attempt to align it to mainstream QA/E processes – the whole question set is quite long and so represents quite a lot of time investment to complete. The authors responded by saying the toolkit was just that, a set of pick-and-mix approaches rather than a wholesale approach.

I felt the toolkit certainly had potential and would be something we should look at in more detail, perhaps using it as part of the support process for developing distance learning courses.