Five minute interview
- Article 2 of 3
- JISC Inform, July 2011
Marion Manton, e-learning research project manager talks about leading the Cascade project, which gives education organisations the opportunity to increase the effectiveness of their course administration.
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What institution do you work for?
The Technology-Assisted Lifelong Learning (TALL) unit, which is part of the Department for Continuing Education at the University of Oxford.
What is your job title?
Elearning research project manager.
What does your job involve?
Doing research projects into e-learning but also supporting our development of online courses here in the department, the wider university and for other institutions as well. My responsibility is to make sure all the courses we produce work well as good examples of learning online.
What's the name of your project?
Cascade
How would you describe your project to friends outside of education?
Everyone across HE is now facing cuts in funding, but we were facing them three to four years ago due to the implementation of the government's Equivalent or Lower Qualifications policy. We wanted to address this challenge by using the knowledge of our department in developing online learning. To do this, we looked at how to use technology to help us do more things more efficiently and save money, but we also wanted to investigate how we could improve what we offered more generally, in the face of increasing fees. We also wanted to see if there were new things that we could be doing that might give us new lines of work or improve what we're doing.
Is it achieving its objectives at the moment?
We certainly met our objectives in terms of the projects. We've established several new services, and changed our practice in some key areas. But we're always seeing ways of improving things and making them better.
What would you say are the lessons for the wider sector?
The big areas for us where savings could be made were around course administration, in particular online enrolment and payment, which gave us huge efficiencies, and online assignment handling. But another key theme that came out was examining the processes themselves - often some of the greater gains were as much about streamlining processes generally as about using technology to do this. The other three areas we looked at were VLE support courses; developing generic content that could be used in lots of different ways; and we did quite a lot of work looking at improving course design processes related to people using technology.
We produced a course design site with lots of examples of good practice and guidance that we originally made for the Department, but we are just about to release a publicly available version.
Who do you think will benefit most from your work?
I think the stuff that we do is becoming more and more normal - the non-traditional students are almost becoming the bulk of students - so all of our output and our inventions are very much focused on those kinds of learners. In particular, though, our outputs would be of use to senior managers and learning technologists, as well as other academics since we developed case studies targeted at these groups. Obviously, in the end, the ultimate beneficiaries should be students.
What has surprised you the most during the project?
Oxford is not an institution that people immediately associate with using openness to technology in teaching and learning, and some of our cohorts of students have an average age of 50-60. So what's really surprised me during this project is how open people have been to technology. People who I would have talked to five or six years ago and would have been totally uninterested in engaging are much more interested and open and engaged in this whole area than they ever were before.
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