Critical Success Factor No.4 E-Learning Policy

In this post I would like to (1) explain in very simple terms the meaning of e-learning policy (2) describe contents of an  e-learning policy, and finally (3) provide a real-world exmple of an e-learning policy.

What is an e-learning Policy?

An e-learning policy is a set of guidelines and requirements which are formulated to achieve effective lesson delivery and learning experience through an online platform such as a  Learning Management System.

Without guidelines and requirements lecturers will have no standard procedures to follow when going about their work, and there will be no form of accountability or penalties to enforce. This ultimately affects the quality of the teaching-service delivery.

Contents of an E-Learning Policy

Different organisations may have different contents for their policies. Below I provide a template that I believe consists of essential elements for effective e-learning service delivery. You are free to adapt and use it for your organisation.

Purpose: Here state what the policy intends to achieve in your organisation. Inlude statements on any piece of legislation if any that the policy is designed to adhere to.

Scope: Here state what aspect of your information system the policy addresses (for example, a campus manangement system may have various components inclduing payroll, timetabling, and e-learning components but the policy may be referring to the e-learning component), and for which stakeholders the policy was developed (e.g lecturers).

Service Delivery: Here state what learning resources should be made available to students (for example lesson notes, videos (embbeded or via links), and book references.

Learner Support: Learner Support refers to what teachers or lecturers should do to help learners beyond the normal delivery of content (Bates, 2014). Under this heading the policy should state in what ways, and when, learner support is available. Schedules or timetables of videoconferences or webinars, during which students can ask questions on items of a topic they need clarifications on, should be made available.

Assessments: Here state what assessments students should be given, criteria of allocating marks, and when feedback (assessment results) will be made available to the learners. Students should have the confidence that for all assessments given they will have timely feedback. 

Behavioral Conduct: Here state the professional and ethical conduct that is expected of lecturers when engaging with students on a complaint, giving assessment feedback, or publishing a notice.

Revisions and Updating Schedule: State who is responsible for making revisions and the intervals or schedules for considering such revisions.

Sanctions for Violations: Note that a policy which doesn't stipulate sanctions to be imposed on its violaters is more likely to be a useless document. The 'Sanctions for Violations' section of  the e-learning policy is very crucial for a successfull implementation and management of e-learning. The section helps to ensure that everyone complies with the policy requirements. Under this section explain how violations should be handled, where they need to be reported to, and state what penalties or sanctions should be applied on a violator.

Contact Information: Details of who should be contacted about any matter regarding the policy. 

Glossary: Define any words that are likely to be unclear to the reader of the policy.

Acronyms: This section is more appropriate for longer and complex documents; it spells out acronyms used in the document. Where a policy document is small - as is expected for an e-learning policy - acronyms can be spelt out within the document.

May I state here that it is important to be realistic when formulating an e-learning policy. It will be quite futile to develop a policy that merely outlines the wishes of an instition but which are actually impractical. A policy should also be simple and easy to understand and something whose every stakeholder will be able to remember by heart. A simple way to find out if an institution has an e-learning policy is to ask any user of it if they can coherently state and explain one or two phrases of the policy. If a considerable number of users are unable to do that then the organisation has no policy in place! A policy should be a printed form of the spirit, guidelines and procedures that characterise an organisation's work environment.

Example of an E-learning Policy

You may find it helpful to take a look at the e-learning policy used by the University of Nottingham here. It does not contain all the details explained in the template above but should suffice to give you an idea of how an e-learning policy looks like.

References

Bates, T. (2014). Why learner support is an important component in the design of teaching and learning. Retrieved from https://www.tonybates.ca/2014/08/26/why-learner-support-is-an-important-component-in-the-design-of-teaching-and-learning/

Any idea when schools will re-open in Zambia? Time to act is Now!

When will schools re-open in Zambia - in a month's time? Two months? Three months? 

Yesterday I received a phone call from a Distance Learning student who desired to make a payment of tution fees and wanted to know "when  the college may re-open". The phone call confirmed my fear that the impact of COVID-19 on Zambia's education system is yet to dawn on many people's minds. If the trouble, which has led to the  closure of schools in our country, goes by the same spelling as the one which has crippled economies of the First World - with complete lockdowns and thousands of deaths - then what our learning institutions have done in preparation for the worst-case scenario is close to nothing, if actually not nothing! 

Today, I read this on Straightimes about Singapore, a first world nation with excellent educational infrastructure and systems:

SINGAPORE - Students in all schools and institutes of higher learning will shift to full home-based learning from next Wednesday (April 8), Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said on Friday. The Ministry of Education (MOE) will work with schools to implement this, Mr Lee said in a speech announcing new measures to curtail the spread of Covid-19. The measures will last at least until May 4.

Two things caught my attention in the above news report: the swiftness to  act before a problem attacks and the availability of senior leaders to quickly provide policy to guide the implementation of the solution. It is important to be aware that a solution that is made to operate in a policy  vacuum will soon become a problem itself. 

Some three decades ago Professor James Moor, a pioneer of Computer Ethics, had noted that a typical problem in Computer Ethics involves a policy vacuum of how computer technology should be used and remarked that often either no policies  for conduct exist or existing policies seem inadequate (Moor, 1985). Although many developed countries have made strides towards implementing comprehensive policies to guide e-learning, institutions in Third World countries, where e-learning is still a relatively new phenomenon, are yet to catch up on this.

It's high time senior managers of colleges and universities in Zambia wake up and begin to quickly draw up plans on how they can implement e-learning systems, and more importantly, establish e-learning policies to guide the paradigm shift.

I should emphasise here that whilst some colleges (especially private ones) have quickly acted to implement learning management systems, there is still a high-risk of implementing e-learning systems which operate in a policy-vacuum. It is important to note that an e-learning system can only be as effective as its policy. By "policy" I don't mean an archaic document that has to go through the red-tape of approvals which may take a year or two before implementation but yet will remain unkown by stakeholders after implementation. An e-learning policy should be simple, and easy to understand and remember. As a matter of fact, one way to know if a college has a policy or not is to randomly ask any lecturer at the institution about any line in the policy they remember. If on average lecturers or teachers can hardly recall a single line from the document then that college actually has no e-learning policy! 

A policy should be the heart or spirit that guides all online training activies. In my next blog-post I will discuss 'e-learning policy' and provide examples. I will also provide a simple template which you can use for your college if you dont yet have one!

In concluding may I remind you that these are desperate times requiring urgent action. The biggest blessing in all this is that e-learning systems have now become so easy to set-up and different free options now exist - you can use Moodle, Google Classroom, etc. If you dont yet have a Learning Management System kindly go through my workshop series on how to set up your LMS in eight-simple steps here.

References

Moor, J.H. (1985). What is Computer Ethics?  Metaphilosophy. 16/4: 266-75

Implementing Moodle LMS

Introduction

Step 1(a): Setting up the Moodle Cloud LMS

Step 1(b): Customising your Moodle Cloud site's interface details

How to Implement an LMS in 8 Simple Steps!

Before we begin our lessons let me make three things clear: 

First, you don't need sophisticated ICT skills to implement an LMS solution; if you are able to hold a mouse and can type on the keyboard, and have time to concentrate on what I am about to show you, then you are the right person to learn this.

Second, most of the people reading this could be doing it out of desperation of the pandemic which has befallen the world and so the solutions I propose will be simple and easy-to-follow instructions. The proposed solutions will only respond to the basic needs of providing electronic lessons, tests and assignments to students. This is something that will at least keep learning going on as our men and women in white coats battle out to find the COVID-19 vaccine.

Third, be warned that there are many entrepreneurs who see COVID-19 as an opportunity to turn the panic of colleges and universities into a business opportunity. They will take free open source software like Moodle, give it a little tweak and then sell it at an exorbitant price to you! However, there are other well known commercial LMS solutions such as Blackboard and Astria on the market. Even so, the solution I suggest to you on this blog is the most used around the world by leading universities and  a good number of renowned global brands. The system has extensive capabilities to help you manage various training and assessment needs. It is used by over 60% of higher learning institutions around the world!

Yesterday I was invited at the Ministry of Higher Education to present my ideas on how learning management systems can help colleges switch to e-campus in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The meeting was triggered by the last blog-post on the e-learning vaccine. I am thankful to a senior officer at the Ministry who called on heads of distance learning departments in the various colleges in Lusaka for a meeting. I was also thankful for the opportunity to share ideas with the Permanent Secretary. It was a fruitful  discourse and I can only hope that out of this crisis, Zambia's higher-learning institutions can act on the need to utilise e-learning systems. Like someone said, COVID-19 is leap-frogging us into the future of how work ought to be done! 

Now, during the meeting at the Ministry three important questions were asked 1) How can a college implement an LMS? 2) What tools will students use to access learning materials, and 3) How will students who lack computing skills be able to use the system. This series of blog posts endeavour to answer these questions.

What I am about to present in the next series of blog posts  require you to have two resources: a computer (laptop or desktop computer) and an Internet connection. Here is an outline of what you will do in this series of learning how to implement a Learning Management System in less than 15 minutes: 

Step 1

Set up your Moodle LMS in less than 15 Minutes.

Step 2

Configure your LMS for lecturers to start using it.

Step 3

Prepare your LMS for students to start using it.

Step 4

Prepare a simple policy to guide the usage of the Learning Management System.

Step 5

Upload notes onto the LMS.

Step 6

Create and schedule a test. Note that the test will be embbeded with a marking key so that immediately a student finishes attempting the test his or her score results will display on the screen.

Step 7

Create an assignment on the LMS.

Step 8

Create a forum where students can engage in discussion assignments.

You must follow the lessons in the provided sequence of steps. All these lessons are made available to you free of charge. In times of calamity we can all help each other in our own humble little ways . See you in my next series of video posts!

Audio file of blog post

e-Learning 'Vaccine' for Institutions of Learning

The Novel Corona Virus is slowing wheels of the economy everywhere around the world. The educational sector will be among the worst affected as schools are getting ordered to close. Private learning institutions are likely to be the most affected: just how will they financially sustain themselves if this pandemic prolongs? But should a college, university or school sit idle and hope for the soon arrival of the vaccine from the medical fraternity? No, I have news for you: there is an e-learning 'vaccine' that can immunise your organisation from halting operations!

There are now a number of colleges and universities in Zambia which are making good use of Learning Management Systems. A number of them are using the free (open source) Moodle platform. Moodle is widely used around the world by many organisations and universities to provide e-learning. It is a robust and extensive system that enables lecturers to effectively and remotely engage with their learners. Apart from uploading notes and assignments, a teacher or lecturer can design online tests which students can attempt from anywhere they are as long as they have an Internet enabled device such as a phone, laptop or tablet. What is interesting is that although the Moodle platform is being used by about 60% of higher learning institutions around the world, it still remains unknown by many colleges in Zambia. What is more, the platform is open source and can be downloaded for free!

It is important to be aware that ICTs are no longer luxury tools; they are business survival tools! But more importantly, they promote a greener and healthier Earth. When doing my work as a lecturer  I don't print notes for students. I use a Learning Management System to manage all my training activities. By doing that I am using less paper. Paper comes from trees and so, by using e-learning facilities, you and I would save trees from getting cut down for paper extraction. The more trees remain standing, the healthier our environments will be.The Ministry of Higher Education in Zambia should  work together with the Zambia Information and Communications Technology Authority (ZICTA)  to work on policies to compel all training institutions to implement e-learning facilities. 

If you are a college or university in Zambia, I am available to help you  - FOR FREE - to quickly set up an e-learning facility. All you will need is Internet access! To fail to prepare is to prepare to fail. An ancient Hebrew writing put it this way - "The prudent see danger and take refuge, but the simple keep going and pay the penalty" (Proverbs 22:3, NIV ).We can all help fight COVID-19 in our simple humble ways.

Critical Success Factor No.3 Effectively Communicate your Value Offering

No matter how great a product or service is if people do not know about it they will not buy it. Therefore, having defined the value of distance learning services you wish to sell, and also having carefully designed the apparatus for delivering it to prospective clients, the next critical thing to strategise on should be choosing the most effective way to communicate your offer. 

To effectively communicate you need to understand your audience well. For example, an advert your college may make is much likely to reach a person who was in his or her young adulthood in the early 21st century. Such were born in the period between 1980s and mid 1990s. They are called Millennials.  To effectively engage with them you must be aware that their generation is fundamentally different from that of 'BBCs' - Born Before Computers - and so, if you want to effectively reach them, be sure to choose the right medium! 

Millennials are not into walking around with a Times of Zambia newspaper or tuning to 19:00 hrs news on ZNBC (I have heard a number of them calling it Dead NBC!). Theirs is not a vocabulary of checking out what's the 'headline', what's in the 'editorial section', or who can be my 'Pen Pal'. Millennials talk 'tagging', 'likes', 'followers', 'sharing', 'podcast' and  look out for what's on the 'wall'. If you have a marketing manager who can't relate with these words then  be informed that he should be nowhere close to a leading role in your marketing department. A modern marketing manager should be savvy with changes that have occurred to the media landscape. Two things are critical for success in wooing distance learners to your college: first, understanding the power of Internet advertising, and second, utilising different components of the Promotion Mix.

Many colleges and universities are increasingly becoming aware that advertising on social media is far more beneficial and cost-effective than using traditional platforms offered by TV, Radio, or newspapers. Many companies now spend more money on Internet advertising than on other media types.  In 2018 worldwide spending on Internet advertising was $255.8 billion, TV advertising was US$181.6 billion , radio was $31.8 billion, newspaper advertising was $44.4 billion, and in 2019 worldwide spending on Internet advertising was $293.7 billion, TV advertising was 171.7 billion, radio was $31.5 billion, and newspaper was $39.5 billion (GroupM, 2019). Notice the huge increase in spending on Internet advertising and the decrease in the use of traditional media!

Some three years ago I helped a training institution to re-strategise on platforms it was using for advertising. This was my simple advice to the college : When you publish an advert in a newspaper or if you broadcast it through TV, have you any idea how many people access it? Well, the entire traffic to your advert is completely invisible to you because you dont know how many people bought that newspaper and out of that how many noticed your advert! You can only guess about the performance of the advert when your phone rings or when someone  visits your college to make an inquiry. Serious marketers would record every phone number of each caller to make follow-ups. But writing the name and phone number of each inquirer after each and every call is a labor-intensive task! Thankfully, social media campaign tools have changed the game altogether! A marketer is now able to automatically capture campaign traffic and contact details of inquirers. A self-generated database of potential clients is what any marketer desires. I guided the organisation on how to implement the idea and within a short period of time the marketing team was enthused at the transformation of their business.

Now, your organisation must never get more obsessed with receiving money than giving out the value for which the money is being paid! Negate this principle and your college will never experience growth. Be more concerned with offering value and there will always be a hand willing to pay for it. However, to convert a 'willing' hand into a 'paying' one requires more work than placing advertisements. In the modern competitve environment it is important to be always aware that there are many other organisations offering a similar product or service and so the buyer has an array of choices to make. To win the choice of the buyer you must explain the uniquness of the value you are offering. A text, sound or video advert alone may not accomplish that! How about doing interactive conferences or presentations where you directly engage with people to explain the uniqueness of your products? That is called professional selling. Some colleges have regular programmes on radio where  they talk about real-world business happenings in Zambia. They stage their show as though they were invited to be asked questions on various concerns stakeholders have. Before you realise it, your mind is led to believe that the answer to a problem being discussed lies in enrolling at their college for good quality training. That method of advertising is called Public Relations and also includes other tactics like press releases and news conferences. It is usually perceived to be more objective and is a very effective marketing tool. The lesson here is for you to never rely on one method of advertising. Utilise different components of the Promotion Mix.

That's all I will say about communicating to attract a customer. However, be warned that once you manage to convert an inquirer into a student your next and more important work is retaining that student. It is cheaper to keep an exisiting client than aquiring a new one. More on that in the next blog post!

References

GroupM(2019).Worldwide Media Spending Forecast. Retrieved from www.groupm.com

Critical Success Factor No.2: Align your LMS strategy with your Business Strategy

It is important to know that Information Technology is not a charm that automatically turns misfortunes of an organisation to better business results. Information Technolgy has no inherent value (Peppard and Ward, 2004).  Information Technology is only a component of a wider conglomeration of entities called Information System. A good start point for understaning the second csf being discussed in this article should be knowing the difference between IT and IS. I should emphasize here that knowing this difference should not be for mere academic recall; appreciating the difference is crucial for managers to begin seeing results out of an LMS investment!

Understanding the difference between IT and IS

Information Technology refers to "all the hardware and software that a firm needs to use in order to achieve its business objectives" (Laudon and Laudon, 2014). Thus Moodle, Blackboard or Astria, together with the keyboard, monitor and mouse used to interact with them belong to the category of Information Technology. They are simply equipment or tools for processing and managing information. The information could be lecture notes, student details, courses, etcetera.

Information Systems, notes Laudon and Laudon (2014), are more complex. Here is a good description of what an Information System is: "An information system consists of people (actors), information (contents), and technology (means), linked together by a process directed towards a purpose" (Luukkonen et al., 2013). An information system consists of components - people, procedures, equipment and business processes - that are carefully planned to work together inorder to achieve a purpose. "Purpose", therefore, comes first before a need for Information Technology or an Information System. Purpose is what should create the need for components of an IS. The desire to achieve "purpose" in an efficient way is what should inspire a carefully planned set of relatonships or interconnections between various components that make up an Information System. This was not the case in the early 2000s when there was a 'dot com' explosion - every company wanted to have a website because every other company was going online! The result - many companies invested in owning websites but most of which were inactive! That is still the case in Zambia. Many companies have inactive websites displaying oudated information and listing email addresses or phone numbers which will never respond to a query of a visitor. Often website visitors have to end up visiting the physical premise of a company to get feedback to a query that should have been  attended to online  via email or a phone conversation. Such a situation is a  symptom of an IS (a website in this case) having been implemented without being inspired by, or being aligned to, the purpose or business goals of a firm. How about a Learning Management System of a college, what would be the sympotms of non-alignment with training objectives of a college?

Symptoms of non-alignment

Are you at a college or university which has a Learning Management System (such as Moodle, Blackboard, or Astria) but yet are experiencing a lot of challenges in using the Learning Management System? Are these some of the challenges being experienced:

• The e-learning system rarely has up-to-date learning materials.

• The system is rarely used to send announcements to students or members of satff.

• You are not aware of any user-policy which you were supposed to sign-up before being given access to the system.

• There is rarely a person available to assist you with technical challenges you may face whilst using the system.

• There is no policy that compels all lectures and students to always use the system: some lecturers prefer to use it and others do not use it at all (those who do not use the LMS  distribute printed notes.

All the above are indications that an LMS was implemented without understanding the business need it was supposed to respond to. That amounts to a huge loss for the organisation that implemented the system.

What follows is a simple guide for ensuring that your LMS is aligned to the training objectives of your college.

Aligning a Learning Management System with Business Objectives

If you are a college offering Distance Learning and would like to implement an e-learning (Learning Management) system, the following list should help you ensure that your LMS will be aligned to your objectives and hence enjoy the benefits of having an LMS:

1. Understand that your core business objective as a Distance Learning provider should be to offer value for money that a student pays. Your purpose should never end with receiving the hard-eaned cash of a student. The student pays that money not because they love your college or want to assist you; that money is being exchanged for the value you promise them.

2. Clearly state the value that you wish to promise your prospective student. Here is an example:

At ABC college our distance learner should be able to:

a) Access learning materials from whereever they may be.

b) Attempt tests, assignments, and other forms of assessments from wherever they may be.

c) Ask and receive prompt reply to any question on notes they are reading.

d) Enjoy their distance learning through visual illustrations of topics covered in notes.

e) Submit an academic or administrative querry and be promptly responded to.

f) Believe in a system that ensures or gurantees that lecturers will perform their duties of attending to them.

3. Clealry state how the above value can be delivered to a student, in exchange for his money. Here is an example of how ABC College can accomplish this:

a) Install a Moodle Learning Management System. Moodle is free. A college can engage an IT expert to perform the installation.

b) Ensure that before a residential school starts, a deliberate plan, with enforcable penalties, is in place to ensure lecturers carefully prepare and upload quality-assured:

• Notes (uniform format and structure)

• Assignments

• Online tests

c) Lecturers have two timetables - one to be used during residential school, and another one for online engagements with students during the post-residential periods. There should be scheduled times for online discussions, and day and time for students to consult with their lecturer. All these activities should be monitored by an administrator to ensure that all lecturers are available to students.

d) Within a DL department there should be a role of  a person checking to ensure all lecture notes posted onto the LMS:

• Contain Visual aids (video links, gaming tools, etc).

• Are not merely copied and pasted from other sources on the Internet. A distance learner needs quality-assured notes which have been sufficiently edited to ensure that they are easy to read and understand and meet TEVETA stands of a Distance Learning Module. 

e) Ensure that there is a person assigned the role of responding to all academic queries. Queries may range from asking about exam requirements to when results will be published. A Distance Learner should never be left to search out this information on their own. They should trust that your system is a great repository of information.

f) Develope a policy and operating procedures that will guide every facilitator (lecturers, Moodle administrator, DL Head of Department) in their duties. The policy should stipulate penalties for any abrogations.

Are you able to see how items listed in (3) above align with objectives in (2)? What is important to know in all this is that colleges often decide to invest in implementing an LMS inorder to be able to manage Distance Learning. However, it is important to be aware of the fact that technology can only support business objectives; it can never guarantee success on its own. So, never implement an LMS when you are not exactly sure of what the system will be used for. Without a clear understanding of how a technological solution will support your business processes, loss and failure becomes inevitable. In the words of Peppard and Ward (2004), "The inability of organisations to realise value from IS/IT investments is, in part, due to lack of alignment between business and IS/IT strategies" (p.44). 

References

Laudon, C.K. and Laudon, J.P. (2014). Management Information Systems. Boston: Pearson

Luukkonen, I., Toivanen, M., Mursu, A., Suranto, K., & Korpela, M.(2013). 

Researching an Activity-Driven Approach to Information Systems Development. Handbook of Research on ICTS  and Management Systems for improving Efficiency in Healthcare and Social Care. Retrieved from https://www.igi-global.com/book/handbook-research-icts-management-systems/72374

Ward, J. and Peppard (2002). Strategic Planning for Information Systems. 3rd Ed. USA: Wiley

Ward, J. and Peppard (2004). 'Beyond strategic information systems: Towards an IS capability'. The Journal of Strategic Information Systems. 13, pp.167-194