Abstract
Students taking part-time, distance or blended learning units who are also in employment face high commitment demands of work, life and family in addition to their study. They do not have time to face the additional challenge of making sense of difficult to access learning materials. These students are also often highly discerning, and will talk with their feet ââ¬â failing to complete units that donââ¬â¢t engage. At Southampton Solent University, we recognise the need to make online or blended units accessible and supportive. In order to engage students on these, we have developed a set of institutional standards for online course development that aim to make materials intuitive, easy access, clearly introduced and well signposted. The standards also identify levels of support and collaboration in order for students to feel both engaged in and to gain maximum benefit from the learning processes. At the same time we have established a Flexible Delivery Development and Support Team which collaborates with academic staff in course planning, writing and delivery. This team works with tutors to achieve the standards while aligning learning outcomes and assessment with online and blended learning activity. This workshop explores the stages that led to establishing our institutional standards for online course development and the scope of activities for the FDDST. We shall explore ways in which the activities of the team have been responsive and adaptive to student experiences, and illustrate some of the impact of these developments on both actual an anticipated student engagement, achievement and retention.
Highlights
Students taking part-time, distance or blended learning units who are in employment face high commitment demands of work, life and family in addition to their study
Southampton Solent University (SSU), like many other providers in the sector, is increasing provision of courses aimed at part-time, mature, often professional learners delivered through distance and blended learning
In regard to blended learning, according to MacDonald (2008, p.2), ‘the term is commonly associated with the introduction of online media into a course or programme, while at the same time recognising that there is merit in retaining face-to-face contact and other traditional approaches to supporting students
Summary
Southampton Solent University (SSU), like many other providers in the sector, is increasing provision of courses aimed at part-time, mature, often professional learners delivered through distance and blended learning. Most providers used a consistent presentation of content within the courses or units that they deliver; various features such as learning or communication tools as well as navigation features are presented consistently within the same frames of the web page This style of consistent content presentation has been experimented with and improved based on user feedback in the SSU project, succeed@solent – an academic skills resource available to students from http://mycourse.solent.ac.uk/succeed. This term has been applied usefully at an institutional level to suggest a set of standards or principles that all course developers and facilitators can aim to achieve These standards are currently in the hands of SSU’s Academic Services Department with the intention of establishing them as SSU Policy as regards to provision of online distance and blended learning resources via the University’s new, professional learner-orientated VLE, Solent Online Learning (SOL). As is common with support of technology enhanced learning within a large institution, the learning technologist works in a capacity of enabling academic staff members to deliver their VLE content independent of continuous support
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