1. Kick-off
From dozens of e-learning consulting assignments of which about ten had to do with implementations of Virtual Learning Environments in educational institutes, the author derived two fundamentally different approaches for implementing e-learning systems: bottom-up initiatives by teachers and top-down initiatives by management, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.
Educational innovation with information technology often starts as a bottom-up process initiated by some teachers, ICT professionals or even students. At some moment, institutional management gets involved. Innovation converts from a bottom-up into a top-down process orchestrated by management. When observing the implementation of e-learning systems we see the same patterns.
As a consequence, how to implement an e-learning system heavily depends on the stage of educational innovation at an institute: bottom-up or top-down. Both situations require their own approach and both will be dealt with during our presentation. Although our experiences are based on Moodle implementations, our lessons learned may be relevant for other e-learning systems as well.
2. Bottom-up
Although educational institutes vary greatly, individual teachers always have certain degrees of freedom. Even when formal procedures have to be followed for implementing new systems, they can be neglected when the investment costs are (or at least seem to be) about zero. This is the case when implementing a free and open source Virtual Learning Environment like Moodle. But even in the case of commercial systems, suppliers may be so eager to penetrate an institute for business that they are inclined to offer their services for free (for a limited time) to whoever lets them in.
When I was lecturing at a university of professional education without Virtual Learning Environment, one of my students constructed a website to distribute my materials. As I found it a bit messy, I replaced it with my own site, one year later. The third year, I wanted more interaction on my site. That’s why I downloaded Moodle for free. I uploaded it to a website I hired personally from a cheap provider. Then, I could facilitate my part-time students not only by distributing handouts and other materials, but also by offering them a forum for regulated contact with me, and, as they discovered soon, with their fellow-students. To stimulate their continuous learning, I gave them weekly assignments to be submitted and graded through the system. This all worked great (initially).
My personal history is not different from the experiences of many colleagues at other institutes and even at Human Resource Departments of commercial firms. The fact that systems like Moodle are free, that a provider is cheap (eventually you pay it yourself) and that installation on a server is straightforward, has given us the opportunity to acquire and implement a Virtual Learning Environment within hours. As your own system administrator, you could realise great benefits at minimal costs and create a great learning opportunity (at least for yourself).
When my provider, without prior notice, decided to move my VLE to another server, performance went down with about 90%. When I went temporarily to a third world country where Internet bandwidth was less than 1% of what I used in The Netherlands, I could hardly access my own VLE at home any more. Grading my weekly assignments was no longer possible. Students started complaining to the management and it became clear I had bitten off more than I could chew.
My personal experiences show in a nutshell the strengths and weaknesses of the bottom-up approach. Realising quick and cheap solutions and being able to learn a lot from them are unmistakably strengths. Crossing the border of an experimental playground and offering professional services while not being able to run them adequately are evident weaknesses. In fact implementing a Virtual Learning Environment requires expertise in the fields of management, education/training and ICTs. A motivated teacher can show the way, but not complete the whole expedition alone.
The same is true for an ambitious ICT department, also often an initiator of bottom-up innovation. In one case they installed the software and created more-or-less empty courses for all their institute’s courses. The whole was standardised and good looking. They failed, however, to involve the teaching staff in this process. When some teachers got interested, they were not very welcome, as they had their own ideas on how to use the system. In another case, the ICT department installed the software on their own initiative and thought that was all they needed to do. After a year they complained that teaching staff was not interested in their new stuff.
In general we would recommend to the bottom-up initiators to be aware of their limitations, to learn from others and to communicate about their successes and failures. Their managers should welcome these innovative initiatives, stress their experimental character, support them where possible and organise the dissemination of positive and/or negative experiences throughout the organisation.
3. The matrix
In four different countries we could organise workshops for teachers, ICT professionals and management/staff from institutes that all were in their bottom-up stage of innovation. During these workshops our participants contributed a wide range of issues that had to be solved when implementing a Virtual Learning Environment. They classified these issues as educational, technical or content/data related. Some were operational in nature, others tactical or even strategical. This resulted in a 3×3 System Management Matrix (see Figure below).
At later occasions the matrix turned out to be a valuable frame of reference to discuss relevant issues from management, educational and technological perspective. It helped to give all upcoming issues a place in a greater context, to discuss the allocation of responsibilities, to evaluate them and to make improvement plans and define improvement projects for the coming years.
4. Turning point
Only the complexity of our matrix illustrates that the bottom-up
approach has its shortcomings. It is simply too much for an individual
to cover this all. Sooner or later, a turning point is reached. For
positive or negative reasons management gets involved. A positive
reason might be that thanks to pilots and experiments and the
dissemination of their results, management starts to develop a vision
on educational innovation and more specifically a vision on the
potential of a certain e-learning system. A negative reason might be
that students start complaining about malfunctioning systems, loosing
assignments, grading failing to occur, teachers not responding anymore,
and in general being confused by the patchwork of online solutions
invented by different teachers. Time for management to take their
position, indicate the desired development trajectory, and align
procedures and allocate budgets to accomplish that.
5. Top-down
When implementing an e-learning system in a top-down way, the
critical success factors are the sustained commitment of management and
the involvement of stakeholders like teachers and students in the
process. Expertise in the fields of education, technology and
management is required. The average educational institute will not have
their rules, regulations, standards and procedures for this type of
operations. As far as methods and tools can be found in literature,
they are either too fragmented (e.g. only dealing with ICT) or too
abstract (e.g. introducing too many new concepts that have no meaning
for the stakeholders).
The implementation process cannot be handled as a regular management
task. It requires a project organisation with educational,
technological and organisational expertise and representatives of the
most relevant stakeholders. For this group we developed a dedicated
management game, Tactec.
6. Tactec
The management game Tactec initially was developed to explore the
complex process of implementing electronic commerce. In its essence,
however, it is a frame game that can be loaded with a different
content. We use it as an exercise by which groups can develop a global
implementation plan for an e-learning system, not a fictitious one, but
their own. The game or exercise takes half a day and consists of the
following steps:
- Stakeholder inventory
- During a Tactec session the participants first generate a long list
of stakeholders involved in the process. Once they come to about 25
stakeholders, they are asked to reduce this number to the seven most
significant ones. This usually results in a very interesting discussion
where a common base of concepts is created and people agree on what is
important or not. We focus further on the seven stakeholders. - Role allocation -
The participants will be allocated to seven different roles. Each role
takes care of one of the stakeholders. They have to guarantee that the
stakeholders’ perspective is recognised. Note that they are not
“playing” the stakeholder. - Current situation
- Each role summarises the current situation from its stakeholder’s
perspective. This results in seven short descriptions (a few keywords
is enough). The group will review them for completeness and
consistency. Results are written on coloured stickers and sticked to
the game board (a large poster). - Desired situation
- The previous step is repeated for the desired situation; i.e. the
desired outcome of the implementation process from the perspective of
the stakeholder. - Scenario - Next,
the roles will formulate a plausible way to go from the current
situation to the desired situation in a sequence of about four
activities. This will result in seven scenarios sticked to the game
board (see Figure 2). Again the group will review them for internal
horizontal consistency. - Cross-check -
Finally, the group will cross-check the whole for consistency and
completeness. Maybe activities on one line have to be postponed until
certain activities on another line have been completed, i.e. vertical
consistency.
Figure 2 - Impression of a TacTec game board
7. Conclusion
There is nothing wrong with the bottom-up approach. It is a fact of
life that in many organisations innovation starts this way. If it is
too early to move to a top-down approach management would be wise to
foster the bottom-up approach while trying to avoid its pitfalls:
tolerate and even stimulate experiments, encourage the exchange of
experiences throughout your organisation, offer support and knowledge
from an organisational, educational and technical point of view, but
let them not convert into business processes.
The main pitfall of the top-down approach is that vision and
commitment of management are limited to the first concrete steps. It
leaves the organisation confused about what is next. Once again it
turns out that participation of the stakeholders is a critical success
factor in an implementation process.
8. More information
- Moodle is a free and open source e-learning system that combines an
authoring environment with a Learning Management System and a Virtual
Learning Environment. For more information: - Moodle international community at http://moodle.org
- Using Moodle; teaching with the popular open source course
management system; 2nd edition; Jason Cole and Helen Foster; O’Reilly
Community Press, 2007 - Moodle Administration; an administrator’s guide to configuring,
securing, customizing, and extending Moodle; Alex Büchner; PACKT
Publishing, 2008. - The TacTec Game; The Tactics of Electronic Commerce; Pieter van der
Hijden; in: Proceedings of the ISAGA 2000 Conference; International
Simulation and Gaming Association, Tartu, Estonia, 2001; http://www.sofos.nl/LinkedDocuments/00pvdh_tactec.pdf. - Ned-Moove (www.ned-moove.nl)
stands for Nederlandstalige Moodle Vereniging, the Dutch Moodle
Association with members and activities in The Netherlands,
Belgium/Flandres and Suriname (South America).
9. Acknowledgements
The System Management Matrix is a “spin-off” of UNESCO’s Caribbean
Universities Project for Integrated Distance Education (CUPIDE), funded
through the Japanese Funds in Trust for Capacity Building (www.cupide.org).
Tags: e-learning, implementation, Moodle, oeb08, top-down, VLE
