Following on from my first post on this topic here are a couple of additions to the knowledge base. I’m not saying they are necessarily relevant, just that here’s as good a place as any to deposit them. First up is the Sloan-C Effective Practices site. Of particular interest to me was the the Synthesis of Sloan-C Effective Practices (a 17 page PDF). For those not familiar with the organisation, The Sloan Consortium describes itself as “a consortium of institutions and organisations committed to quality online education”. The Sloan quality framework identifies 5 pillars of quality, i.e. learning effectiveness, cost effectiveness, access, faculty satisfaction, and student satisfaction. Practices categorized across the spectrum of: community; learning design; assessment, research and evaluation; information technology. The synthesis may be a high speed march across a lot of territory, but it provides some really good examples and lots of paths to follow.
Next up is the JISC funded Research Study on the effectiveness of resources, tools and support services used by practitioners in designing and delivering e-learning activities. I thought this might contain some ideas or information of relevance to benchmarking or would-be benchmarkers, but, although the study was completed in 2004, it proved a bit difficult to track down. I finally located it on the JISC E-Learning Focus site. It’s a relatively short but interesting piece of work authored by Alison Littlejohn et al which focuses on the success factors (must be benchmarking relevant therefore) in institution’s use of resources, tools and services.
Any views expressed in this Auricle posting are mine and should not be construed as necessarily representing the views of any other individual or organisation.
