LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITY

Minutes of the meeting of the E-learning Advisory Group held on Thursday 30 April 2009 at 9.30am in Library Group Study Room 3B

Present: Morag Bell (Chair), Paul Byrne, Adam Crawford, Tony Croft, John Dickens, Martin Harrison, Mary Morley, Phil Richards, Charles Shields, Jan Tennant.

1. Apologies

None.

2. Minutes

The minutes of the meeting of 20 January 2009 were approved.

3. Matters arising

Min. 3 (ii) A revised version of the Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) had been drafted.

ACTION: Charles to circulate the draft

Min. 6 The E-learning Operations Group had met twice and was working very well.

4. JISC

Recent success in securing JISC funding was noted as follows, with all concerned warmly congratulated.

4.1 £250k for an open educational resources proposal led by EngCETL in partnership with five other universities. Intellectual property rights was likely to be a major issue, and thus the project included time from the University’s Copyright Officer and Head of E-learning.

4.2 £80k to the Mathematics Education Centre to upgrade resources provided freely to the community. Copyright issues were proving difficult to resolve.

4.3 £70k for a proposal developed by Charles Shields and Lara Alcock of the Mathematics Education Centre (Project ExPOUND). The project would build on work for which Dr Alcock had received an Academic Practice Award, and was one of very few proposals funded in a highly competitive bidding process.

ACTION: Charles to ensure that all the above were publicised through News @ Lboro.

5. Copyright materials and the use of Learn

Charles Oppenheim joined the meeting for this item. Random checks on Learn revealed a significant proportion of copyright-infringing material (e.g. images, copies of journal articles, etc). It may be that academic staff believe that adding such material to the virtual learning environment (VLE) does not require copyright clearance as it is for educational purposes. However, although the University has licences for photocopying and scanning, their coverage is limited. If the law is broken, individual staff and students may be sued, and also the University. There is a clear reputational risk, as an aggrieved copyright owner would be quite likely to take action against the University.

The revised AUP was more explicit about this. The only realistic course was to try to educate staff and students about copyright compliance: policing the VLE on a daily basis would be impossible.

In discussion the following points were made:

penalties would be limited, as access to the VLE is limited
it was not acceptable just to acknowledge the source of material – the copyright owner must be asked for permission to use it
copyright affects staff and student web pages as well as Learn
the Director of Finance wished the risk to be explicit in the University’s risk register, with mitigating actions outlined
an immediate mitigating action would be a notice and take-down procedure
a communication strategy and series of awareness-raising activities were required, including presentations to new lecturers and departmental staff meetings, and to a HoDs\HoSS meeting; Learn refresher sessions; examples and key messages
key messages were that copyright is important, and if in doubt please ask
University resource in this area is very limited – the Copyright Officer post is one day per week.

ACTION: Morag to give Caroline Walker a note of the above discussion.

6. E-learning support for research postgraduates

John Harper attended for this item. He was concerned that the research postgraduate community – of 1300 students - may be somewhat overlooked in terms of support for e-learning, and wished to ensure that ELAG was aware of the scale and nature of PGR demand. The Graduate School was responsible for PGR training, and was working with the Teaching Centre, the E-learning Team and the Enterprise Office: the School was grateful for all their contributions. In future the School would make greater use of online training; copyright training would be more important because theses were submitted electronically; and PGR training would be better monitored. The national move to doctoral training centres, involving a number of universities in collaboration, was also likely significantly to increase demand for online delivery of research training.

The Group understood the Graduate School’s concerns, and endorsed the importance of e-learning in research training.

ACTION: Mary to include PGR demand in business case for moving the Faculty

E-learning Officer posts to open contracts.

7. Learn Stage 2 – from minimum presence to effective practice

The Programme Quality Team (PQT) had discussed the next stage of Learn development, recognising the concern felt by some that providing too much via Learn would encourage students not to engage with face-to-face learning. It was clear that technologies such as podcasting and videostreaming were being used and\or demanded, but the scale was not known to PQT.

ELAG agreed that the need was to capture and disseminate effective practice, rather than to know about all instances of the use of e-learning applications. It was suggested that publicising examples of effective and innovative practice would be a useful way of encouraging competitiveness among academic staff, and thus the uptake of e-learning technologies. The E-learning Team and Teaching Centre were working on case studies to be used in forthcoming ‘doing more with Learn’ training sessions. These were being offered alongside the regular Learn refresher sessions: both were required.

Online help in Learn was available only via the staff room facility, and few people used it: context-sensitive help would be much more effective.

Faculty-specific methods should be used to secure engagement with Learn by colleagues not currently so engaged.

ACTION: Charles and Phil to seek implementation of context-sensitive online help in Learn.

ACTION: Charles to produce an outline of the next phase of Learn training for PQT.

8. Responsibilities in relation to Learn

8.1 While ELAG reported to Learning & Teaching Committee, plans for the further development of the VLE should also be routinely reported to the LUSI Steering Group. In addition, the Student Experience Committee (SEC) had an obvious interest in the VLE. As the student portal developed, further questions of oversight would arise – there would be a clearer idea of the way forward, and of the relationship between the portal and the VLE, by the summer. A further issue was responsibility for achieving a new ‘look and feel’ for Learn (which need not be delayed until Moodle version 2.00 was launched in January 2010).

ACTION: Charles to convene a working group to design the look and feel, with members to include Jon Walters and Steve Ashurst of Marketing & Communications. Charles would keep ELAG, the LUSI Steering Group and the SEC informed.

8.2 Phil introduced a proposal to create an E-learning Systems Team in IT Services and invited ELAG to comment on three staffing options. The Group endorsed the proposal and approved option 2, subject to a review after one year.

9. Technical support of RAPID and other programs developed on campus to support learning and teaching

Now that external funding for RAPID had ceased, PQT had asked ELAG to consider how it would be supported (noting that RAPID was used across the University). Response was that IT Services would provide technical support for RAPID and other current applications, and the E-learning Team would deliver training to users. In future, there will be a clear exit strategy for externally-funded projects.

ACTION: Mary to notify PQT via Robert Bowyer.

10. E-learning Operations Group

The minutes of the first two meetings of ELOG were received, and Charles was congratulated on the very good progress being made by the Group.

11. Any other business

11.1 It was noted that while acknowledging the competition for funding to replace TQEF, the Library budget submission would include a request that the four FELO posts be converted to open contracts. ELAG supported this.

11.2 It was noted that EngCETL and Engineering departments were funding student projects relevant to e-learning. Adam would report on progress in six months time.

11.3 A decision was needed on when\whether quizzes were an acceptable method of summative assessment. This would be discussed at the next ELAG meeting.

ACTION: Kelly to include this in the agenda.

11.4 As this was Mary’s last meeting, she was thanked for her and the Library’s contribution to e-learning and ELAG.

12. Date of next meeting

To be arranged.

May 2009