The E-Learning Roadmap: Making Strategic Decisions in a complex environment – Amy Campbell, Samantha Earp & Edward D Gomes

Reason for presenting this paper is that they have just finished 15 months of exploring what to do next now their blackboard license comes to an end. They chose to undertake a full review across the campus to see what is needed. They are moving to Sakai now.  They wanted to share their experiences including how they identified and assessed factors that informed their decision to change and strategies for engaging stakeholders.

Assumptions they started with were broad and looked at all available tools. Starting point was that they had guiding principles and overall they had to meet all course needs.

The team was not faculty led because they wanted faculty to provide information about pedagogy not spend time organising meetings etc. There was a core group of three and then others were co-opted as needed. Sub groups were also set up.

Teaching and learning scenarios were developed for the project to ensure needs were being met. They drew on their existing environment and what it was being used for and interviewed a range of staff to ask about what they would like to use across their teaching. These reports are on the website and can be accessed at http://elearning.duke.edu/reports/ . These reports were then used as background documents for the future needs.  This was important because it meant there was some exploration of tools being used already and not just relying on what people said they needed.

Engaging stakeholders used a range of approaches and these included meetings, focus groups and demos from Moodle, blackboard and Sakai to name a few.  Senior leaders also took an active part in identifying what was needed and provided information about what the strategic view was for the next five years and asked leaders from the areas about their vision.  Factors that were found at this point included interdisciplinary education, global presence, engaging a community of scholars and effective use of materials.

For functional factors they used the teaching and learning scenarios and the information already collected about tools used across campus. They collected through a survey all tools that anyone used including those where individual licenses were held.  Much of this information they kept in google docs so all could see. Eventually they produced a report on the tools needed.  Technical issues were also explored in a subgroup. Costs were also important but this was not a cost saving analysis. They did however want a system that meant those who had their own system might use the central one.  

The global expansion of Duke was very important as was the engaging a scholarly community.

Questions

What would you do differently?

Difficult to achieve outreach with all so may be get more senior staff to keep sending messages to staff.

What is the plan for making sure faculty needs are still met as the roll out occurs?

This is an iterative process and many faculty are involved in this roll out.

Issue how do you cost open source?

Part of the analysis was to get feedback from others using Sakai and what staff they had to support this roll out. The license cost was zero but staffing costs varied across others from one to ten staff. “Free is not free”.

Was there a strategic goal to reduce variety?

Not really but would be nicer if the environment made using range of tools easier.  Might be better to use less tools to reduce burden on support staff but not an objective.