Quality E-Learning Guidelines and their Implementation

Quality e-learning guidelines have the potential to support staff and help provide e-learning that is learner centred, follows good practice, and is innovative, collaborative and sustainable. This chapter will introduce the e-Learning Guidelines for New Zealand and show how organisations have used them. It will present some of the benefits of the guidelines as well as the limitations and discuss how these limitations may be managed. The guidelines have been used in various ways in different organisations. Teaching staff have used the guidelines to search for information and ideas or to help in course design or redevelopment. Managers have used the guidelines to develop procedures to help staff in their use of e-learning. Staff developers have used them as a tool to inform debate about the quality of e-learning. The guidelines allow organisations to share their e-learning knowledge and experiences. Direction from the literature and experience from this project show that guidelines can enable organisations to improve their e-learning but that guidelines need careful implementation and staff support.

Online Delivery of Deaf Studies Curricula in Ireland at Third Level

Irish Sign Language (ISL), an indigenous language of Ireland, is recognized by the European Union as a natural language. It is a language separate from the other languages used in Ireland, including English, Irish, and, in Northern Ireland, British Sign Language. Some 5,000 Deaf people use ISL. Given the history of suppression of signed languages across what is now the European Union, the average Deaf person leaves school with a reading age of 8.5 to 9 years. It is no surprise, therefore, that Deaf people are the most under-represented of all disadvantaged groups at third level. This poses two challenges: (1) getting Deaf people into third level and (2) presenting education in an accessible form. In the authors‘ work, they address directly these challenges in an Irish context, and this chapter reports on this work. In Ireland, two Dublin based institutions, Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and the Institute for Technology Blanchardstown, Dublin (ITB) have partnered to create a unique elearning environment based on MOODLE as the learning management system, in the delivery of Deaf Studies programmes at TCD. This partnership delivers third level programmes to students in a way that resolves problems of time, geography and access, maximizing multi-functional uses of digital assets across our programmes. Students can take courseware synchronously and asynchronously. The authors have built a considerable digital asset and have created a re-architected framework to avail of current best practice in rich digital media over Moodle with learning objects for ISL. Their digital assets include a corpus of ISL, the ‘Signs of Ireland Corpus’ which is one of the largest, most richly annotated in the world. They have operated online delivery since 2005, hosted by ITB. The hallmark of this project is the delivery of blended learning, maximizing ICT in the teaching and learning of ISL. It is important to note that there are currently no other universities delivering Deaf Studies programmes with this degree of online content internationally. Thus, this programme and its associated research is cutting edge innovation in its philosophy, its rich content and its utilization of rich media. Signed languages, by their nature, are visual-gestural languages, which (unlike spoken languages) do not have a written form. Given this, the online content is required to be multi-modal in nature and the authors utilize rich-media learning objects in their delivery. Within ITB and TCD, the authors have a number of doctoral level studies linked to this project. These focus, at one end of the continuum, on focusing on Deaf culture and is linked to the perspectives on Deaf Studies teaching modules, and at the opposite end of the continuum on describing, for ISL, the phonological-morphological interface in ISL ad which will enrich the digital corpus of ISL. These feed into the online programme.

Satisfaction Measurement in Education

The chapter presents the importance of providing high quality e-learning and the need to apply the requirements of the standards from ISO 9000 series for continual improvement of the quality management systems in education. The work applies the main principles for multiple criteria decision making. An approach for satisfaction measurement is developed. It uses weighting coefficients as qualitative valuation of the importance of the quality characteristics and numerical valuation for the level of satisfaction with the quality characteristics. The suggested approach is suitable to apply for different purposes in education in order to achieve high quality e-learning. It is also suitable to apply to different areas within quality management systems.

E-Learning

Since the democratization of personal computers and Internet access formal and informal learning opportunities have multiplied, increasing the technological-supported contexts and contents. Despite the increasing opportunities for education, not all teachers have developed a satisfactory level of eCompetence (Schneckenberg, 2006), not being able to choose and implement a technology-supported learning solution efficiently. On the one hand we need to consider the phenomenon of digital emigrant teachers, which is linked to the avoidance of technologies; but on the other, we have a large number of technological-enthusiastic teachers that try to introduce tools and functionalities without assessing first: the cognitive load, the cost, the utility, the usability, the accessibility and the psycho-pedagogical criteria that must be considered before innovate with technologies. This chapter aims at both groups of teachers or instructional developers, by offering a review of the e-learning possibilities and criteria, based on several analyses carried out by the authors on higher educational settings. Based on the learner cantered perspective, this chapter purposes some criteria for assuring the quality in higher education e-learning contexts, mainly based on three categories: psycho-pedagogical utility, usability and accessibility. One of the principal goals of the chapter is to support -by means of the criteria- the selection of technologies and functionalities (collaborative tools, e-learning 2.0 solutions...), considering, above all, the learning objectives and the specific learning contexts. The chapter will introduce also some of the main technology-supported learning solutions and will provide a decision-framework to choose, implement and evaluate the integration of educational technology for e-learning.

Learner Management Systems and Environments, Implications for Pedagogy and Applications to Resource Poor Environments

Knowledge management is essential for realizing that knowledge is power, and power is explored by the learner for meeting existing demands and challenges. Advances in technology, education and learning are therefore linked to using technology. Education is the pathway to productivity, thus the learner is the agent and technology the medium. Among others, e-Learning will play a dominant role in shaping learner management systems and associated learning environments. This chapter addresses the learner and learning management describing some of its implications for pedagogy. It then describes and proposes some implications of the application of these systems for development in resource poor environments. It is divided into three main sections. The first section describes contemporary definitions of LMS and its concepts. It proposes a comprehensive definition of LMS and describes possible future directions of these definitions as a concept in change. The second section describes various tools and classifies them according to current applications in the industry. It describes in principle, the current cutting edge technologies that are being used in the area and how these were developed. It then proposes a Model Structure for Learner Management Systems. It describes and compares classical, e-based and blended learning pedagogy, A third section discusses some current concepts and methodologies in research, pedagogy and LMS, proposing some defining questions for the three areas as a group. The third section first defines and describes resource poor environments. It then highlights and discusses some need areas in resource poor settings. Further, it describes and discusses some of the implications of LMS technology and applications to resource poor settings, with a focus on it’s relevance and validity for specific resource poor environments. Following this discussion, the section describes some applications and limitations of LMS approaches and blended learning in resource poor environments. Finally, it describes some applications and limitations of LMS and blended learning technology in resource poor environments.

Semantic Mapping between LOM – SCORM Content Package and MPEG-7 Concepts

This chapter presents the current status of the efforts to harmonize MPEG-7 and SCORM Content Package (including the LOM description metadata, part of SCORM). In particular a model for the interoperability between these standards is developed. The MPEG-7 provides a standardized set of technologies for describing multimedia content, while SCORM is a collection of specifications for developing, organizing and delivering instructional content.The proposed model concerns the semantic mapping between the different elements of these standards, which are created to satisfy the specific needs of different communities. The followed approach is based on the main principles and procedures for metadata interoperability, such as on the crosswalking and mapping techniques. Moreover some empirical remarks conclude the mapping process.

Interoperability of Web-Based Education Systems

The global society is becoming a reality. Inevitably this leads onto questions around the generation and exploitation of knowledge. Education systems grow to be more complex and interdependent. The Web makes a large number of learning resources within reach of anyone with Internet access. However, many valuable resources are difficult to use due to the lack of interoperability among various education systems. In this chapter, the fundamental principles of interoperability of complex and dynamic global education system are presented. The contemporary approaches to systems theory, entropy and autopoietic theory, social system theory, sociocybernetics, the strengths and limitations of these approaches, and their potential applications in education are examined. The nature of educational systems can be linked to biological concepts. When education principles and cybernetics are combined, the resulting theory turns on scientific principles instead of philosophical speculations. Proper utilization of such principles provides methodology that increases the effectiveness of web-based education systems.

Open Educational Resources in E-Learning

According to Dr. B.R. Ambedkar‘s definition (Deshpande & Mugridge, 1994), Open Educational Resources (OER) are based on the philosophical view of knowledge as a collective, social product. In the last years the relevance of OER has been widely acknowledged and a high magnitude impact is to be expected for OER in the near future (Atkins et al, 2007), (Wiley & Gurrell, 2009), especially as a masterpiece in e-learning development. The aim of this chapter is to present an overview of OER in e-learning, focused on two fundamental aspects: (i) technical issues, mainly standards, and (ii) socio-economic and legal questions. This way the chapter deals with the most relevant issues in this matter: Which is the OER´s role in education, especially for e-learning performance? Which are the technical resources and current standards needed for them? Which socio-economics and legal aspects influence the diffusion and use of OER?

Diagnostic and Formative E-Assessment in Engineering on a Moodle-Based VLE

Electronic learning is nowadays a reality that has been possible due to the recent advances in technology. Different new Web tools have been developed to be directly applied to the teaching/learning process at all levels, especially in higher education. In fact, e-learning tools are the key elements for carrying out educational innovation when dealing with overcrowded groups of students. This e-tools applied to assessment are analyzed in this chapter. In particular, diagnostic and formative e-assessment implemented on a Moodle-based VLE environment has been introduced in different basic Mechanics subjects, with similar contents but taught in different engineering degrees, in diverse years or with various group sizes. The benefits and underlying problems of this introduction are described here. This has been made in order to compare results of different subjects and to extract general conclusions, which could be extrapolated to any other engineering disciplines.

Interoperability Approach in E-Learning Standardization Processes

Providing interoperability by using standards and specifications for E-learning resources is an important element of the virtual learning environments (VLEs). In this context, a large number of international organizations develop specifications that provide principles for reaching a common “language” to be used in exchanging resources among the virtual university. In this paper we turn your attention to an approach and reference for providing interoperability in different standards. The establishment of E-learning standards has promised to improve interoperability between E-learning systems, but can only be done through enforcement of these standards. Many existing E-learning systems are built on top of relational databases, and it is possible a framework which matches XML Schemas (from learning standards) and relational schemas semi-automatically. This type of framework can provide translation between learning objects and relational databases as well as an interface to manually refine existing schema mappings. The focus is E-learning standardization and synchronization in the international and national levels. The work presents a brief updated review and it presents some new challenges, concerning the E-learning standardization processes. This research is in the area of E-learning standardization and issue is one aspect of great interest for all organizations, authorities and experts working in the field of education. Moreover, the most recognized approaches are introduced in order to improve and optimize the management of the E-learning processes. While the establishment of E-learning standards has promised to improve interoperability between E-learning systems, and obviously, this can only be done through enforcement of E-learning standards and E-learning standardization processes. The aim of this work is to discover the useful E-learning technologies as technological tools for teaching. Therefore, teachers must keep in mind clearly that they must optimize teaching by means of them, such as an improvement of quality education for current society in terms of competences, as connections with the current reality that students spent long hours using them. It starts with a brief background to worldwide standardization activities in the field of educational technologies as means of enhancing the accessibility, interoperability, durability, reusability and efficiency of E-learning resources, but more important new demands and problems to be tackled are reviewed. Finally, experimental dates from studies have shown that it is useful a framework that also provides translation between learning objects and relational databases, as well as an interface to manually refine existing schema mappings.