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Focus Areas

The project  focussing on the following five areas:

  • Online assignment handling
  • VLE support for courses
  • Generic content
  • Course design
  • Online enrolment and payment.

The rationale behind the choice for each is given below; further details are given in the relevant page for each area.

Online assignment handling

What?

  • Develop and implement an updated online assignment handling system and make it available for all the Department's courses

Why?

  • Current online system is out of date and hard to use
  • Paper-based assignment handling is extremely inefficient
  • Savings can be made in administrative time, postal costs, archive space
  • Improved turnaround time for students
  • Provision of an equal service to students, regardless of geographical location

Issues

  • Identifying complex technical requirements
  • Tutors not differentiating between online submission and on-screen marking
  • catering for the wide variety of courses within the Department

More details

VLE support for courses

What?

  • Make it easy to set up an online course presence and set passwords for students and other users
  • Develop templates to support core course formats and subject areas

Why?

  • Current online support for face-to-face courses either non-existent or reinvents the wheel
  • No central location for all course information, making it difficult to locate the latest version
  • Provide means for peer-to-peer communication for geographically-dispersed students (and/or tutors) between teaching sessions

Issues

  • Need to cater for the wide range of courses offered across the Department
  • Need to design solutions that tutors and administrators have time to implement and maintain

More details

Generic content

What?

  • Identify areas of generic content and develop reusable, customisable versions which can easily be used online

Why?

  • Same content often developed from scratch by multiple teams
  • Content not delivered when most needed by students
  • Administrative information held in several places
  • Free up academics' time which can be better used for subject-based teaching

Issues

  • Version control
  • How to make customisation easy, e.g. citation and referencing, several different systems

More details 

Course design

What?

  • Support course design process to incorporate technology effectively from start

Why?

  • Staff don't have the information they need to make choices about using technology (especially budget and resource implications)
  • Better address audience requirements e.g. online surveying
  • Staff are often unaware of our existing models, content and tools (e.g. Phoebe)

Issues

  • Engaging staff at the right stage of the process

More details

Online enrolment and payment

What?

  • Allow students to book and pay for more courses via the web

Why?

  • Currently, many courses can only be booked in person, by post or by fax
  • Manual processing of bookings is time consuming and labour intensive

Issues

  • Different course types have varied registration and payment requirements
  • Need to interacting with other University systems
  • Ensuring correct workflow for enrolment and approval

More details