UWIDEC APC P. 3

2004/2005

THE UNIVERSITY OF THE WEST INDIES

ACADEMIC PROGRAMME COMMITTEE OF THE UWIDEC

OCTBER 27, 2004

 

UWIDEC STRATEGIES FOR 2004/5

(click here for a PDF version)

By Professor Stewart Marshall
Director, UWIDEC
20 October 2004

This document provides the philosophical underpinning for several projects to be undertaken by UWIDEC in 2004/5. Each project will be outlined in separate documents to be presented to APC and BNCCDE, but each will refer to the current document. Several of the projects are mentioned in this document.

Mission, Vision and Objectives

The current UWIDEC Mission Statement, as developed in 1996, is as follows:

"The overarching aim of the UWIDEC is to provide world class distance education for the Caribbean people, and in so doing help UWI achieve its mandate of widening access to territory level education and training, thereby unlocking the potential of the region for growth and development.

The Distance Education Centre of the University of the West Indies is dedicated to becoming a centre of excellence in distance education throughout The University of the West Indies; to developing and delivering quality programmes by distance and, in so doing meeting the higher education learning needs of an ever widening population of students, in order to contribute to UWI's mission of unlocking the potential of the people of the region. Driven by the commitment to promote increased access to university education, and recognizing the particular and special needs of the distance education student, the UWIDEC assumes the lead role in ensuring UWI's distance programmes are responsive, learner centred and cost effective.”


At the UWIDEC Staff Retreat held July 20-21, work was commenced on creating a shared vision, modifying the Mission Statement if required, and formulating the aims and strategic objectives for UWIDEC. As a vision, it was felt that in the next five years:

UWIDEC will be n ationally, regionally and internationally renowned for the quality, access and appropriateness of its distance education and research for individual, national and regional capacity building for the information society.

To achieve this, UWIDEC will need to provide education that is:

•  Relevant to the needs of students, employers and society;

•  Flexible in:

  • Time – students can enrol and study at anytime;
  • Place - students can enrol and study anywhere (and in this way, equalize higher education opportunities, e.g., for those who are unable to leave the home base for a variety of reasons, and between the campus countries and the non-campus countries);
  • Mode – study can be anywhere on the continuum from face-to-face to totally online;
  • Product – access to a database or matrix of courses, modules and learning objects in order to rapidly construct programmes in response to the changing HE environment (e.g., as a result of the Caribbean Single Market and Economy);

•  Scaleable, i.e., able to move from offering a course to 30 people to offering it to 3000 people;

•  Quality assured, i.e., products and processes are based on best practice and research.

Also, UWIDEC will need to conduct research that is relevant and strategic in relation to the needs of UWIDEC and its stakeholders, and use strategic and systematic communication of the results to raise UWIDEC's international research profile. Each of the projects undertaken in 2004/5 will have a research component associated with them – to provide the knowledge for the project; to capture the knowledge arising from the project; and, to disseminate the results.

 

Utilising information and communication technologies

Central to UWIDEC achieving the objectives listed above, is greater and more efficient use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in order to create new learning and working environments. For example, by using the Internet, a course coordinator can facilitate synchronous and asynchronous interactions between learners, stream videos of lectures, provide access to digital libraries, and many other possibilities. Thus, ICT can create a learning environment in which learners, tutors and learning resources can all be networked. UWIDEC will create such an environment in a Blended Learning/Asynchronous Delivery Project to be undertaken during 2004/5.

But these same ICT possibilities also permit new working environments for those responsible for the facilitation of learning. For example, lecturers can use the Internet for synchronous and asynchronous communication with colleagues, video-conferencing for meetings, digital libraries for research, etc. Thus, ICT makes possible a teaching environment in which lecturers, tutors and other facilitators can all be networked. All this means that the facilitation of teaching and research can be done in excitingly different, collaborative and more efficient and effective ways. For example, a t UWIDEC we are currently experimenting with the use of ACollab (open source software) to create a shared, virtual workspace in which members of a particular community of practice can share ideas and work collaboratively. This ACollab Virtual Workspace Project (and others relating to ICT-enabled working environments) will be undertaken during 2004/5.

 

Aggregation of expertise, resources and infrastructure

Using ICT in the global learning environment requires both staff and students to cross new socio-cultural borders (Jegede, 2000) and acquire new literacies and learning skills (Wallace and Yell, 1997). But to achieve maximum advantage from the use of ICT, it is necessary to re-engineer work practices (Coaldrake and Stedman, 1999). The ‘mega-universities', i.e., those with enrolments in excess of 100,000 students, use division of labour (some people developing learning materials, others supporting students, others providing logistic support, etc.) and the specialization that this permits, to develop a model of supported open learning which can operate flexibly at large scale, with low costs and high quality (Daniel, 1996; 1999). UWIDEC can adopt these same principles. In the online world, many of the functions traditionally carried out by a university can more readily be disaggregated and the university can specialize in those functions that it regards as its ‘core business', forming alliances for other functions or outsourcing to new intermediaries in the value chain. Although they may not achieve the economies of scale of the ‘mega-universities', the advantage of these alliances is the opportunity to improve the reach and the quality of the educational experience through the aggregation of expertise, resources and infrastructure from different sources. Thus, UWIDEC could form alliances with other educational providers to provide tutorial support for UWIDEC students or to offer UWIDEC courses (utilising the UWIDEC “resource package”) on a franchise basis; or, form alliances with Community Access Centres (or similar) to provide access to computers and the Internet; or, obtain content (learning objects or whole courses) from other providers (e.g., Commonwealth of Open Learning Virtual University for Small States). Proposals for these (and similar) ‘Aggregation' Projects and initiatives will be developed over the next academic year for commencement in the academic year 2005/6.

 

A management information system for UWIDEC

UWIDEC can also use ICT to provide more effective ways for staff members to share ideas/information/content/material, and to create, edit and publish these to the outside world (whether students, academia or general public). Various UWIDEC staff members are working on, or have created, ICT solutions to local communication problems – but such solutions need to be shared and adapted to fit into a UWIDEC-wide system, and most importantly be capable of interfacing with the UWI systems (e.g., BANNER). In short, we need to tackle the management of the whole of our information system.

In order to create a management information system (MIS) for UWIDEC, a Management Information System Steering Group and a Management Information System Development Team will be created, and extra technical staff appointed as needed (short-term/part-time) to develop modules for the system so that the project can proceed without impacting on normal operations.

The most urgent outputs will be:

•  Course Database – that provides information for the creation of the handbook, course websites, etc;

•  Learning Management System - that interfaces with BANNER for student validation and enrolment details, and includes a system for creating default websites for courses by utilizing information from the course database;

•  UWIDEC Website Management System - that automatically populates web pages with information extracted from databases of staff and course information, and includes a simple system for staff (without knowledge of html) to add their own content.

In time, we would need to add other outputs, e.g., automated staff and student contact system (click on course+site/course code to send email and/or sms text message to students and or tutors at one or all sites); student specific page, i.e., containing information (e.g., course and assessment) specific to the student logged-in.

 

References

Coaldrake, P. and Stedman, L. (1999). Academic Work in the Twenty-first Century: Changing roles and policies . Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs (DETYA), Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra. Published at: www.detya.gov.au/archive/highered/occpaper/99H/academic.pdf .

Daniel, J. (1996). Mega-Universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education, Kogan Page, London.

Daniel, J. (1999). Distance learning in the era of networks: What are the key technologies? (and reflections on ten years of The Commonwealth of Learning), Pan Commonwealth forum on open learning: Empowerment through knowledge and technology - a celebration of ten years of The Commonwealth of Learning , Universiti Brunei Darussalam, March. Published at: www.col.org/forum/daniel.htm.

Wallace, A. and Yell, S. (1997). “New literacies in the virtual classroom”. Southern Review , 30 :3. Published at: www.infocom.cqu.edu.au/Staff/Susan_Yell/Teaching/fmctl/liter.htm .