June 5, 2008, by Teaching at Nottingham

Forming an e-learning strategy group

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Do Coyle: “The E-Learning Strategy Group in the School of Education was really formed as part of the Learning and Teaching Committee, and its brief was really to look at how e-learning, and learning and teaching in general, ‘What was the relationship between them?’

“Because there was a concern from some of us that it seemed that, as long as you had the two separated out, and it seemed that a lot of the strategies and policies always seemed to be badging e-learning as being something completely different from the learning and teaching agenda, then it seemed to us that there was a gap there that didn’t quite feel right.”

Matthew Nilan: “The thinking behind it was that there was an awareness that there was a lot of e-learning going on in the school, but not in any co-ordinated way, and the people involved in it weren’t necessarily talking to each other, might not even have been aware that there are other people doing similar things, or very different things, which might have interested them.

“So the idea was that we would try and bring together some of those people. Inclusivity has always been part of what we talk about a lot, and we’ve always found that student experience is often – well, there’s often an emphasis when we talk to students, that they often point out that a lot of the support they get is from administrative and support staff,and so we definitely don’t undervalue the contribution that the support staff make in this school.”

Do:“It tried to capture the different roles of people within the school, and it was a voluntary group, and it consisted of people from both the academic staff and the administrative staff, and the technologists as well, so really, it was bringing together three elements of work within the school.”

Mike Sharples: “There was certainly people with expertise in teaching and learning and pedagogy, understanding both the theory of learning, and what are effective and valuable theories of learning, and also practices, so a wide range of different practices across different subject areas and knowledge of technology.

“Both very practical knowledge of technology, so how technologies are working in a University context to support teaching and learning. So it was a nice mixture of theory, practice and technology.”

Tony Fisher: “We represented different perspectives, and different levels of responsibility, and different areas of responsibility within the school, and yet we were able to pool those in a way where nobody was in charge.

“It was a democratic group, equal voice and all of that, again like the IQEA Cadre Groups, and well placed because of being based in several different areas and several different levels of responsibility, well placed to, sort of, touch the structure and processes of the school at a number of levels.

In conversation with: Do Coyle, Tony Fisher, Matthew Nilan, Mike Sharples (School of Education).

Extracts from interviews with staff who are starting to use technology in their teaching, and those who are mentoring them. This video was originally published as part of PESL’s ePioneers collection. Produced June 2008

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