TEL014 Summary of professional staff feedback

TEL014 Summary of professional staff feedback

It was agreed that the supplier was supportive in guiding content creation and management and were very willing to adapt their plans to our needs.

Much of the content was new and the quality was perhaps higher that would have otherwise been the case and the pilot encouraged the use of interactive and multimedia content. The process also created a collaborative working environment where teaching colleagues and support staff consulted and peer tested the content.

Professional staff said that adaptive learning offered more structured self-paced learning and was a good self-managed revision tool and there was the ability to point students to specific content based on their interaction and performance. There was also more opportunity for tutor dialogue and student visibility of dialogue. All of these may be possible in other systems separately to differing degrees, but one tool that combines this set of benefits isn't currently possible in our other environments.

Content management however was inefficient as the actual content creation was a much bigger job than early expectations set by the supplier. The editing process initially required supplier intervention and manual processes. Some devolved access helped, but the publishing element was still unsatisfactory.

Professional staff were asked if they would recommend the adaptive tools to their colleagues and they answered yes based on the student response. They would also recommend CogBooks but there would need to be some urgent system improvements needed before we could scale up.

Pros and cons of the pilot from a professional staff perspective:

Pros

• The attentive support offered by the supplier and willingness to adapt their plans to our needs.
• Collaborative working processes
• Positive student response to the concept

Cons

• The content publishing process: the process of creation through to publishing and editing was manual and therefore not scalable, relying on supplier intervention.
•  
• The product is currently too costly to scale up to the whole institution, so a revised business model that recognises our input to the product is needed.

Recommendations from the professional staff

• General usability evaluation to improve student experience
• A simple process to empower content owners to publish themselves with import and export capability
• More option for assessment/tests/question banks - and ability to note context of exam relationship
• Question management workflow for categorisation of student questions to the tutor, publication and filter by module name.
• Author preview, so that the author can check content first prior to releasing.