BITE (Building from Installation to Engagement)

Information Services, Department for Enhanced Learning, Teaching, Achievement and Employability

Email: Rachel.Fitzgerald@northampton.ac.uk

As a result of a successful bid to the Higher Education Academy, the University of Northampton (UN) has been allocated funding to create BITE, a project that will focus on building on the existing installation of e-learning within the University to engagement with transformative processes and activities that will lead to greater involvement with e-learning for the whole institution. This will be done through the creation of an exemplar online course that consists of bite sized 'chunks' of learning, aimed at staff to enhance and develop their abilities to teach more effectively online.

University staff, as a rule, do not have the time to spend on lengthy courses although they are keen on continuing development in the area of e-learning. Previous experience in creating an online course had implied that time was an issue and the recent e-learning benchmarking exercise (ELBME) confirmed that this was indeed the main barrier to staff development. BITE aims to overcome this problem through the creation of a collection of bite size chunks of learning that staff can dip into whenever they have a need or an opportunity. The project will take core subject areas on e-learning (e.g. the use of blogs in assessment) and develop them into interactive small bites of learning material of approx 30 minutes. The bites will be developed by the core team assisted by academic librarians and will then be made subject specific through use of dedicated academic staff, before being piloted.

It is hoped that the deliverables from the BITE project will be integrated into current staff development infrastructure, possibly providing a pathway into the PGCTHE and complementing other provisions and affording a flexible mode of learning. In parallel to the development of BITE, there will be careful monitoring and reporting of the time and resources needed to develop material. This will lead to a clearer understanding of the costs of undertaking e-learning which, as already noted, was identified as an issue during ELBME.

BITE aims to create a series of bite sized 'chunks' of learning, ranging from instructional to a higher level of skills development. The 'chunks' will be relevant to e-learning and will be personalised to the school or department of the learner.

The project aims to:

• Impact on staff working practices
• Impact on the student learning experience
• Have greater understanding of the costs of e-learning development for UN and the sector
• Develop a methodology to measure the cost of developing e-learning materials
• Increase the quality and proportion of blended learning which will support the aims of the University of Northampton's e-strategy
• Create a model of delivery that will be transferable between institutions

At the conclusion of this project it is hoped to see a shift in the way that staff embed e-learning within their modules. With more quality e-learning provision, there may also be an impact on student motivation. The learning materials could form the structure of a future accredited course and could also be used as part of existing PGCTHE.

We expect to monitor and reflect on the changes to the staff and student experiences as a result of BITE and disseminate our findings to a wide audience across the HE sector. Examples of materials will be deposited onto JORUM and made reusable for others.

It is expected that the project will develop a staff social network within an online environment, to encourage staff to engage with technology that would also work for their students and thus improve confidence in staff ability to engage with the pedagogy of online learning.

It is also hoped to create a methodology for identifying the true costs of e-learning and a report on the effectiveness of BITE in institutional change.

At all times there will be an ongoing BITE blog indicating the successes (and problems) of the project and a BITE website containing latest project information.