Start date: 1 March 2007
End date: 31 March 2009
Funding programme: e-Learning Pedagogy programme
Project website:
http://mw.brookes.ac.uk/display/JISCle2/Home
Committees: JISC Learning and Teaching committee
The project will run alongside the learner experience projects to ensure the maximum impact from these projects. The project will arrange and facilitate regular opportunities for the learner experience projects to meet and share their work, with expert input and guidance from members of the project team. The projects will be additionally supported by visits from the project team and an online wiki space to collate resources and allow for easy communication.
The project will also develop a series of workshops, with the HEA, sharing the findings in year 2 from the learner experience projects and the learning about approaches, methods, tools and data analysis in evaluative research. These will be supported by online resources. The workshops and the associated guidance materials will be aimed at practitioners wishing to undertake their own small scale evaluations.
Aims and objectives
The project aims to manage and support the seven funded learner experience projects for two years. It will offer support, advice and guidance to the other projects in the form of workshops, guidance materials and the experience gained from the Scoping study and Phase 1 Learner Experience projects. The synthesis of the projects’ findings will be ongoing and dissemination of findings will be presented in conjunction with the HEA and at relevant meetings and at least one conference.
The proposed project will:
- Arrange and facilitate regular and frequent opportunities for the funded projects to communicate with each other and with the support and synthesis team, as they are facing some of the issues we now know to be crucial to this type of research such as accessing learners, purposive sampling, tools to capture the reality of the learner experience, analysis of large qualitative data sets and ethical issues in learner centred research.
- Support the synthesis of the findings through collaborative working on dissemination outputs from the projects. Although all stages of the research are important, we anticipate that the analysis and synthesis stages will be complex and demanding for projects and we will ensure that projects are given adequate time and support to discuss their findings and draw out the implications so that these studies can lead to real changes in the development of the next generation of learning activities, tools and services.
- Support project teams and expert practitioners to conduct their own learner centred evaluations through workshops, materials and online collaborative workspaces.
- Harness project outcomes to the overall aims of improving learning design practices and systems, and of ensuring better support for learners in a technology rich learning environment.
- Provide the post-16 sector with a comprehensive and accessible synthesis of what has been learnt from the funded projects about learner experiences of e-learning. There will be opportunities to engage with the findings and discuss them with the project team at workshops, meetings and conferences.
- Contribute to the debate within the JISC concerning the impact of this work, and support embedding of the learner experience perspective across other JISC projects.
Project methodology
The work packages for the project are: project management, support and guidance, workshop and resources and synthesis of the previous and current learner experience of e-learning projects.
Anticipated impact
JISC has made a commitment to continuing the work on learner centred research and the development of innovative data collection techniques such as the interview plus method and audio logs. We have highlighted that the methodological implications of these data collection techniques are not fully understood so it is critical that these projects are well supported in order to gain the most from the investment already made in them.
Lead institution
- Oxford Brookes University
Project plan
Project plan (Word)