Decision-making - Taking the Lead: Strategic Management for e-Learning

A Theme from Strategic Management for e-Learning

The key question to ask here is:

• Who makes the decisions about which courses and programmes will use e-learning and how they will do so?

The locus of decision-making within institutions about the use of e-learning is a matter of strategic importance. It is also an issue that is closely related to the previous discussions on leadership, organisational structure and resourcing.

As with these previous issues, the options can be viewed in terms of a continuum. At one end, decisions are made primarily by the individual teachers on behalf of each of their courses and according to their own preferred teaching mode. In most divisions of most New Zealand universities, e-learning is viewed as an option which teachers can elect to adopt, or not. There are support services available to assist teachers in using the institutional learning management system and there will generally be opportunities for teachers to undergo targeted training in this mode of delivery. However, only rarely are teachers instructed to deploy a given mix of e-learning tools to support the delivery of their courses. In these institutions, academic developers tend to see their role as supporting and encouraging teachers to develop and teach in the ways that best suit them. It is not their role to enforce an institutional standard or to prevail on the unwilling to adopt a new mode of teaching.

To a greater or lesser degree, all the universities represented among the case studies tend to leave the decisions about the use of e-learning to individual teachers.

Some institutions are recognising that decisions about mode of delivery should sensibly be made on a whole-of-programme basis rather than a course-by-course basis. Students commencing a programme should reasonably expect some continuity in their mode of study rather than being subject to the vagaries of choice from a sequence of teachers. A programme that has been developed for a particular student demographic may be seriously compromised if some teachers opt not to employ the delivery mode suited to that target market. In such institutions, these decisions are made increasingly at a divisional or, more commonly, a programme basis.

A decision might be made, for instance, that a programme will target the parttime student market in a particular region. In order to meet the needs of that market, the programme might offer a blend of face-to-face block courses, supported by a suite of online learning resources and communications services. A minimum level of online service is specified for the programme and all teachers contributing to the programme are actively assisted to prepare their courses to meet these requirements. These standards might conform to a wider, divisional or institutional standard, or they might be specific to the programme in question.

Arguably, every institution should strive to achieve a functional level of programme-wide service. It will certainly require the active intervention of programme leaders and, ideally, of divisional leaders, but it should not be seen as a threat to academic freedom. Teaching with e-learning methods is no more an attack on academic freedom than the implicit expectation that conventional courses will be delivered in lecture and seminar rooms, that teachers will be available to tutor and advise students and that the course will normally last for the duration of a semester.

In the Whitireia Community Polytechnic case study, we present an example of an institution deciding as a matter of policy that decisions about e-learning will be made on a programme basis and that support services will be targeted at the programmes and programme teams rather than individual courses and teachers.

Further along this continuum are those institutions where the decisions about what is taught and how it is taught are made at a corporate level and for strategic ends. This model is normally accompanied by a strong injection of central resourcing and central support. This approach is favoured by much of the early literature on e-learning. Potentially, it allows a concentration of development resource and effort on those programmes that are likely to yield the greatest educational and financial return for the institution. It allows a relatively rapid development and roll-out of a high quality product. This approach requires hard choices to be made between competing options for scarce resources. It will therefore work much better in an institution with a relatively corporate culture. It will also require a high level of commitment among the leadership team to a shared vision and a steady uptake of this vision by the staff at large.

A highly-centralised corporate approach to managing e-learning is evident in the Open Polytechnic case study. All decisions about e-learning are made by the senior executive team on the basis of thorough business plans prepared on a programme-by-programme basis. It is the senior executive team that is driving the uptake of e-learning at Open Polytechnic as well and there is targeted central funding available to assist programme teams in making the change.