Supervising online learning

When a college switches to e-learning, and when this was never part of its strategic plan but an abrupt reaction to the COVID disruption, one big problem  may hinder the successful roll-out of e-learning: the failure by supervsiors to monitor online training. 

The failure to monitor online training can happen when supervisors (heads of departments or heads of sections) are caught up in the confusion of not having the knowledge or requisite skills to monitor online training activities. This gets excerbated when the supervisors lack basic skills for using learning management systems. This problem is often characterised or caused by the follwoing factors:

1. Mistaking the management of e-learning to be a work of IT specialists. This can cause serious harm to the training process. IT specialists should provide technical support (e.g. ensuring that the system is accessible by users, tweaking the system to make it more user friendly, performing system updates, etc),  but managing online training (e.g. ensuring that online content meets e-learning quality standards) should be the work of heads of training. They need to be as conversant with usability issues of the system as lecturers and students. Simply put, you can't manage what you don't understand! 
2. The absense of a checklist and schedule which stipulates tasks to be completed by each lecturer on the e-learning platform will leave each lecturer to do their work in their own style, at their own pace, and many will end up posting scans of bookish notes which have little or no interactive content. As an example, a simple checklist may list notes, forum disccussions, a YouTube video on a given topic, and five multiple choice questions for each topic covered in the week.
3. The lack of knowledge by supervisors concerning what constitutes e-learning pedagogies. It is important to note that effective e-learning uses tools that (a) encourage interactivity between a lecturer and a learner, and  between a learner and another learner, (b) give visual appeal to learners (e.g. videos, games, or simulations). The Internet is replete with free videos and apps one  can use to achieve this. As part of a Quality Assurance checklist, supervisors should check that learning materials satisfy these e-learning requirements.
4. Absense of an information help desk. When students are in college, they read what is on the notice board to check for announcements. And incase they have a challenge of not knowing what to do or where to go, or where to find a certain resource, there is an information desk or reception at a physcial campus to provide such assistance. Likewise, a virtual campus should have a platform which should work as a central point for students to access announcments or to post inquiries. This is not complicated, a simple Whatsapp group can be created and professionally managed to achieve this.

What all this means is that managers of training institutions need to aquiant with e-learning systems, e-learning pedagogies, and e-learning quality assurance. A good starting point would be to have strategic meetings and workshops where this has to be discussed and planned.