SUOLL working group members
Last Thursday the Scaling up online learning working group got together to review and refine the ideas that were put forward by the community on the projects ideascale page.
By the day of the workshop 22 ideas had been posted, obtaining 185 votes and 46 comments from 66 users.
However, the amount of overlapping ideas that were generated on the ideascale meant that to avoid a lot of duplicated effort during the workshop a good proportion of the ideas had to be combined so the main focus of the working group members was to review and further develop the five leading main ideas that emerged which were:
• Scaling up online learning toolkit “Online interactive resource which recommends tools, techniques, strategies and activities at institutional, strategic, administrative and delivery levels to support the development and delivery of online/distance learning programmes.”
• Staff skills for online learning course “Online course to support lecturers and other key staff groups in developing the skills they need to plan, design, create, deliver and support online learning opportunities.”
• Partnership building service for international online learning “A service to help UK universities to identify the potential international market for their online courses, working collaboratively with universities overseas to reach their potential students.”
• Live directory of online courses “Tool which pulls together feeds of current online courses from UK HE and FE to help learners (often via third party sites) to find a course”
• Online/Distance Learning Resources Survey “Survey to capture benchmarking information across UK institutions that run online/distance courses.”
Representation of the Staff Skills solution
The working group considered the various users and the use case scenarios for each solution, along with what their key features should be and a development roadmap for each of them. Early on in the workshop the Online/Distance Learning Resources Survey solution was rejected by the working group so they focused their attention to the remaining four ideas (see the solution cards for fuller descriptions of each of these ideas). This included getting very creative and ‘building’ demonstrations of the solutions they were working on. As well as being lots of fun, these demonstrations proved to be excellent at explaining the users/scenarios and roadmaps that they had been developing to the wider working group.
The outputs of the meeting are currently being reviewed and updated by the working group, and following this a plan for taking the work of the project forward will be outlined and shared with the community, so watch this space!