A large part of my current role in Cardiff University is leading eLearning Team input into the CPEL (Continuous Professional Education and Learning) suite of programmes that have been designed to support career development for social workers in Wales. The programmes are postgraduate professional courses and are delivered using a mixture of face-to-face learning and online distance learning.
When the first two CPEL programmes were launched in September 2014, it was without any significant eLearning input, as I did not take up my role until the end of October of that year. This meant that delivery in the first year was based on the practical need to launch the programme rather than a considered design and development phase, and the 'online' elements of the programme were therefore relatively basic - the VLE largely used as a repository for information and the core module content delivered via uploaded word documents.
Therefore my role in the first academic year was largely to support the operational side of the VLE and improve the student experience where possible within the existing framework. I was aware though, through observation and student and staff feedback, that there was much room for improvement in terms of both online delivery and programme and module learning designs more generally. Therefore I was keen to take the CPEL programmes through a full learning design process in order to:
I started this redesign process formally in April 2015 when I hosted a Teaching and Learning day for the CPEL team, which as well as myself includes six academics from four different Universities and a programme administrator. This day covered a number of different aspects of the programme which i was keen to explore, and these can be seen in the Powerpoint presentation that I used to structure the day and updated and circulated afterwards to reflect and record some of the discussions and next steps. Some of the results of this day will be discussed in the following section 'An understanding of your target learners' but it is worth reflecting on the design process here.
I started the day with an exercise to develop seven underlying principles that should inform our delivery of the programmes. This was an attempt to get back to basics and agree on what we wanted to achieve and what a good online experience should look like - although I had a number of ideas that I had developed over my first six months in the role I was keen not to lead the discussion too much. However, rather than start from a completely blank slate I scaffolded the discussion by making some suggestions based on reading I had done around the subject, in particular:
I used these suggestions as part of an exercise that allowed us to reflect on what makes effective online learning, and then carried out another exercise where we refined these ideas into 7 Principles that would be most relevant to the CPEL Programmes; over the following months these principles were expanded on and generated a number of specific action points for the academic year 2015/16. The principles also informed the rest of the eLearning day, as we translated these principles into a number of learning design features.
As a starting point for this we looked at a learning design I had developed for two of the modules, 'Social Work with Children and Families' and 'Social Work with Adults'. These were very similar modules that were the first to run on the CPEL Programmes, with mixed results, and which I was already working with the two academic module convenors to redesign for 2015/16. We brought this learning design to the wider CPEL Team to obtain input and discuss which elements may be useful across all CPEL modules. We explored a number of key questions that I had developed around the headings of 'Students', 'Programmes', 'Modules' and 'Other Considerations' (see slides 16-19 of the Powerpoint presentation). I consequently summarised this discussion in a working document called CPEL Learning Design Guidelines and Structure that was shared with the team and would inform CPEL development throughout the summer of 2015. This included agreed principles on content, activities, and engagement and also an indicative structure for a typical one-semester module.
One of the central aspects to any learning design is content delivery, and I wanted to move from using the inbuilt VLE content editor to using engaging and accessible web templates hosted and delivered through the VLE. We had available to us a web template that was developed by a colleague for use on another programme, and included an attractive and engaging interface, accessibility features, full mobile compatibility. After a demonstration the CPEL team quickly agreed that this would be a positive move and we discussed how we would customise the template for CPEL, including new instructional design elements. Over the summer this was refined further and I worked with my eLearning Team colleagues to develop a CPEL version of the web template. This is demonstrated in the CPEL Demo Topic, which I created as an orientation tool for students, and which demonstrates not only the technical workings of the template but also the final details of our learning design, including the types of activities that students will be expected to complete. I was keen to give us a consistent terminology and toolkit for presenting learning content and I developed in consultation with the team a number of 'elements' and 'labels' that were relevant to our students; would scaffold the content authoring process and would make the content ultimately more structured and engaging.
This was of course going to be challenging to put into practice, and to help the academics (who had very limited experience of online learning) to redesign their modules and to rewrite their content I created the CPEL Production Toolkit. This included a Word template to be used for writing the content, in-depth guidance on everything we had agreed with regard the learning design, and best practice guidance and standards on writing online content, using images, and Copyright. I also established a content production process that included
Given the amount of modules and the complexity of the process this was all very challenging. However, on reflection we achieved a great deal in a short space of time, and the programmes are now much more structured, consistent, accessible and engaging in terms of the online environment and the student experience generally. Students can expect a familiar experience between different modules and have a clear idea of expectations and requirements.
Overall, the process of overhauling the CPEL learning design was more difficult than it could have been because of the dispersed nature of the CPEL team, and in retrospect I would have liked more time for discussion and analysis earlier in the process, and at more regular intervals, to review and amend the learning design and clear up ambiguities in what was agreed. Indeed, we did amend the learning design as the process unfolded; this caused some problems with changes late on, in particular to terminology and instructions.
The main theme of the changes was to reign in some of our (originally my own) more ambitious ideas such as enquiry based learning group tasks and video case studies. This was partly due to the short timescales but also, as we thought through the implications further, the unique features of the programme and the student needs. These needs will be discussed further in the following section.
An understanding of students and their needs is essential in terms of delivering an engaging student experience. My years at University of Birmingham gave me a solid understanding of the needs of distance learners, and was good preparation for my role in Cardiff. All programmes are different however and it was quickly apparent that learners on the CPEL Programmes had particular characteristics and requirements that I would need to address to ensure our learning design was effective.
I discovered this partly from formal channels such as exploring project documentation and reviewing student module evaluations. I also received some crucial informal feedback while supporting students via e-mail, telephone and face-to-face at Module Orientation Days. As important as this was talking to CPEL colleagues and others about the social work landscape and the challenges that social workers face, as well as the general background to the programmes.
This all fed into the 'Principle of Effective Online Learning' document mentioned previously which effectively constituted a series of pledges as to how we would meet student needs within the framework of effective online learning, To encourage an ongoing dialogue this document was published widely to all stakeholders and also formed the basis of my presentation at the CPEL Annual Conference in June 2015; this was well received and increased confidence among students, employer representatives and our funding body in the future delivery of the programmes.
The main actions taken based on identified learner needs are summarised below.
As described in the previous section these actions have been taken as part of a redesign of programme delivery based upon seven principles of effective online learning.
Going forward I will build an ongoing review cycle that records student experiences and captures student needs. As well as monitoring the core module evaluations for anything of relevance, I will design a large part of the end of programme evaluation, which will be aligned with the seven principles to enable us to measure our progress against these aims; for example the question 'How much did the tasks help you to engage with and understand the content' will help us judge how well we are doing against the 'Learning is Active' principle.
It is also important to gather qualitative and informal feedback and with this in mind I attended a module orientation day (face-to-face learning at the start of the module) for some of our modules and conducted informal focus groups with the students there. Some of the questions I asked included:
The feedback from this was very instructive, in particular helping me realise that many students were still not engaging effectively with the learning environment and many were unaware of much of the information available to them - they did not use the full range of resources available on Learning Central and did not regularly check their University e-mail accounts. My immediate response was writing a bulletin to be sent to students personal e-mail addresses that reminded them of several pieces of key information and pointed them to further resources online. A longer term response will be the development of a student communications strategy (talked about further in Core Area 4) which will ensure that we are, amongst other things, meeting the needs of students to have information in a number of different formats and at various points throughout the academic year - it seems that we can't rely on students proactively investigating the resources available.
It is clear to me that a greater understanding of target learners at the start of the design process would have been helpful but also. from this and other experiences, that learning design is an iterative process, and that a continual cycle of review is required to best meet students needs. I have also learned that is not normally possible to meet all student needs all of the time, and this is because individual students will have different requirements which are often incompatible; it is a regular feature of evaluations for example that while some students will request more face-to-face learning, webinars, or activities others will request less of the same things. The important thing is to try and meet the majority of student needs while not sacrificing the integrity of the learning experience, and also communicating clearly to students why things are done the way they are.