Guiding Principles for Identifying and Promoting Best Practice in Virtual Campuses

This chapter will outline a set of guiding principles underpinning key issues in the promotion of best practice in virtual campuses. The work was conducted as part of the “Promoting Best Practice in Virtual Campuses” (PBP-VC) project that is aimed at identifying underlying issues and examples of best practice in providing a better understanding into virtual campus development and sustainability. The PBP-VC project was a two year European Commission Education Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) co-financed project running from March 2007 to February 2009. The PBP-VC project team have worked with key stakeholders from virtual campus projects across Europe and globally in identifying and exploring key issues relating to best practice. The importance of developing a practical set of guiding principles for identifying, evaluating and promoting best practice in virtual campuses and e-learning can be demonstrated by the significant number of high profile e-learning and virtual campus failures that have occurred over the last decade both within Europe and globally at great financial cost. This chapter will highlight key enablers and inhibitors to success, provide a description of the different elements comprising the guiding principles in the promotion of best practice, as well as describing a tentative four level model aimed at illustrating different levels of virtual campus maturity in the achievement of sustainability and organisational transformation.

An Analysis of European Megaproviders of E-Learning

This chapter presents an analysis of 26 European megaproviders of e-learning which had more than 100 courses or 5000 course enrolments in 2005. The focus is on distance education provision, not on e-learning for on-campus students. Among the megaproviders, which represent eleven countries, there are eight distance education institutions, 13 universities and university consortia, and five corporate training providers. Five institutions started e-learning in the eighties, ten in the nineties and eleven after the turn of the century. The largest provider, Learn Direct, claimed to have 400,000 course enrolments in 2005. However, only six of the 26 reported to have more than 20,000 course enrolments. Among these six top ranked institutions none are universities, only corporate training providers and distance education institutions. The chapter concludes with the 27 recommendations extracted from the analyses to help institutions obtain robustness and sustainability in online education.

E-Learning and Virtual Campus Development

The University of Pretoria (UP) implemented a virtual campus in 1999. The measure in which and rate at which the virtual campus environment was adopted in the institution, was substantial. To accommodate the expected growth the University decided in 2004 to upgrade the learning management system in order to provide more stability and better integration with the student information system. However, the more complex integrated environment resulted in more points of failure and a less stable environment. Higher user frustration levels led to a decline in the number of users. The chapter discusses four key variables that influence growth and sustainability in an e-learning environment: Management, Training and Support, Measurement, and Technology strategies. We argue that additional resources required in Information Technology Services (ITS) were not adequately provided for. We give suggestions for future directions.

Matching Technology, Organisation and Pedagogy in E-Learning

This chapter presents the findings of an in-depth analysis through several qualitative research studies, pointing out the key issues in relation to succeeding in developing effective and sustainable institutional virtual campuses and E-Learning provision initiatives. An appropriate balance between the issues concerning technology, organisation and pedagogy, the TOP triangle model, is needed, although every higher education institution is different and develops its activity in a particular context. In addition, the design and implementation of a strategic plan for such initiatives is highly recommended.

Is E-Learning Used for Enhancing Administration or Learning? On the Implications of Organisational Culture

The transition from learning on campus to e-learning presents many challenges. One of the key challenges is the organisational culture, which may enhance or hinder e-learning implementation. In this chapter, we describe how the organisational culture shapes e-learning use at universities. We compare a School of Business and a School of Health Sciences. It is argued that strategies for e-learning have played akey role in shaping the organisational culture, which in turn shapes how e-learning is being used. The School of Business regarded efficient administration as the key driver while the School of Health Sciences regarded collaborative learning as the key driver for e-learning. We introduce the concepts of administration-centered and learning-centered e-learning culture to pinpoint the difference identified. A challenge is to develop an e-learning culture that values both how e-learning can be used to enhance administration and learning.

Flying under the Radar

This chapter argues that e-learning innovation is best done in an environment that allows for small scale experimentation and development and that this can be made more difficult in an environment that prioritises large scale e-learning systems (i.e., virtual learning environments and content management systems). These larger systems tend to function more as systems for the control and regulation of knowledge production and management, as well as being very resource hungry. The chapter discusses e-learning activities in the Open University (UK), in particular those of the MA in Online and Distance Education programme in the Institute of Educational Technology. This is a case study of e-learning innovation in what has been described as an industrial production model of university education.

From Virtual Mobility to Virtual Erasmus

In higher education, international student mobility has become increasingly important for learners as well as for institutions. But today’s mobility schemes are first and foremost aimed at physical mobility. This approach covers the majority of students, but does, however, not take into account the needs of the lifelong learners who are not mobile due to family or work commitments, or who are constrained by disability, or do not have the financial means for traveling abroad during their academic education. The need to offer all students in higher education the possibility of an international experience and the European strategy of boosting student mobility requires new and alternative mobility concepts in addition to physical mobility. The European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU) initiated an operational analysis of virtual mobility under the e-move project. Different models of virtual mobility have been developed, analysed and put into practice. This chapter will explore how a particular virtual mobility scheme can be put into practice and what is required from an organisation to implement this model and incorporate it into its own curriculum.

The E-Learning Phenomenon

This chapter contributes to the ongoing discussion on current best practice and trends in e-learning and virtual classes in higher education. With the increasing importance of knowledge as competitive advantage and engine of economic growth in an increasingly interconnected, multicultural and multilingual world, modern universities based on building and transport technologies are assuming virtual dimensions to address the pressures of rising enrolments, increasing fiscal constraints and rapid technological advancements. The Internet and globalisation are changing how we bank, shop, play, and learn. Can universities adapt, or is e-learning going to be an educational fad like educational television of the 1970s? Based on international research, this chapter examines some signposts using pilot projects as a key pedagogical method in the journey from idea to execution and the factors leading to success or failure of e-learning initiatives. Will the e-learning phenomenon represent a new and sustainable university paradigm for the emerging knowledge society?

The Online Seminar as Enacted Practice

The academic seminar can be seen as the core of university culture. In a seminar, claims to knowledge – presented in an essay and/or orally – are critically scrutinised and subjected to further articulation. The point of this chapter is to report on attempts to develop critical features of seminar culture in the online context. The basic premise is that participation in seminar activities has to be learned through experience. For the participant with little prior experience of online textual discussions, the online seminar introduces an unfamiliar learning situation in which organisational as well as cognitive and communicative issues must be attended to explicitly. In order to illustrate the attempts to socialise students into this kind of discourse communities, we use a Masters course for mature students as a case. It is pointed out that students must be involved in the activities of establishing a community with rapport between members and with an understanding of how to conduct the interaction. By giving the students responsibility for solving a range of practical problems and letting them help each other, we induce them into the status of legitimate online participants. Several issues are important to attend to in the building of such collaboration such as balancing increasing independence of students with a clear leadership and focus of the activities. It is argued that the face-to-face seminar and the online seminar may fulfil complementary roles, but in both cases learning how to contribute is essential.

Reviewing Traces of Virtual Campuses

The chapter first describes the concepts of virtual campus and virtual mobility and refers to several past and present projects and initiatives in the field. Through these previous experiences, a shift of concepts is noticed: from the fully online virtual campus to virtual mobility, whereby the more traditional universities open their borders and “blended models” gain more and more interest. Three cases demonstrate this evolution: the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) is progressively organising its educational support from a multicampus perspective; the Open University of The Netherlands is broadening its tasks towards lifelong learning; and in the GIS case, the virtual campus is used as a strategic means to ensure a valuable and transdisciplinary approach. To redefine the concept of virtual campus in order for it to be applicable to the changed educational needs of today, the Re.ViCa project has been set up. The project makes an inventory and systematically reviews cross-institutional virtual campuses from the past decade. Outputs will include a set of recommendations that can be applied to ensure the realisation of new successful virtual campus initiatives.