In the current economic climate, there is an increasing emphasis on efficiencies in all the core processes of the educational organisation, including curriculum processes. This focus has come to the fore during the lifetime of the JISC CDD projects, and makes those outcomes and approaches focused on business processes and efficiencies even more relevant to other institutions.
‘Following the Comprehensive Spending Review 2010, the focus of the Cascade project on how technology could help the Department respond to a reduction in funding has relevance to all UK HE institutions. By working on only those areas which offered clear benefits in terms of efficiencies, innovation or improved services, our activities targeted improvements in many of the areas that other institutions will be examining.’ (CASCADE)
- More efficient administrative systems
At the outset, projects in the Design programme undertook a process review, followed by extensive workflow modelling to discover where efficiencies could best be made. These outcomes can be browsed from the processes section of the design studio. There is increasing evidence that joined-up systems, including course information systems (see below) can produce significant efficiencies as well as being more useable by both staff and students.
Many of the projects in the Delivery programme also introduced changes to administrative processes that had a significant impact on efficiency. Even projects that did not explicitly identify this as a challenge used efficiencies as a way to persuade stakeholders of the value of some of their proposed activities. Savings have been made through rationalisation of timetabling (Making the New Diploma a Success, CourseTools) and course enrolment (CASCADE, Atelier-D).
‘For students the most popular and motivating tool has been the instantaneous access to their timetables, attendance and punctuality reports. As a result Registry no longer provides students printouts but instead points them to them on eME. This has also resulted in significant cost savings.’
'The integration of different open source systems (Moodle, Mahara and ePDP) facilitates effective teaching, that increases student success and progression, saves teacher and support staff time through more effective processes of monitoring and tracking progress (Making the New Diploma a Success)
'Costs need to be considered at both an institutional and a programme level. A high level of detail will take more staff time to map and maintain. The more that information can be fed into DLM on an automated or semi-automated basis from existing systems and data sources, the more economical it becomes.' (Dynamic Learning Maps)
'During the project, time savings through the use of online enrolment and payment have already offered tangible benefits to the Department. For example, the Weekly Classes programme took 850 additional enrolments in 2009-2010 compared to the previous year, and at the same time reduced their staffing by 0.5 FTE, allowing them to reallocate the staff effort towards marketing and development of further new courses.'
'For the four areas of course administration examined in detail by the project, we forecast savings equivalent to over 38 weeks of productive administration time a year' (CASCADE)
- More efficient processes of review and approval
At MMU the SRC project has been piloting a 'PARM standing panel' approach to course validation, supported by their new course information system .
Up to ten programmes have been considered in one day with up to 40 units considered by the small team. Quality has been maintained by providing much tighter guidance to programme teams on structure and documentation and by focusing the Panel process on academic issues.
We pay external advisors £150 for undertaking a review event. Therefore 1 standing panel = £150 and the external advisor considers 4 or more modifications / reviews. If undertaken using the traditional approach this would cost MMU £1200 or more. The student meeting takes place with one independent chair and a minute secretary instead of with 4 members of MMU staff and a minute secretary.
Instead of all Programme Team members attending the event and usually for most of the day (10.30 – 3.30), 1 or 2 members of the team meet the panel for 1 hour where necessary. There is a significant cost reduction in respect of logistics e.g. room space, papers and refreshments for 4 rather than 20.
- Course-related information
The baseline review process identified management of course related information as having great potential for efficiencies in the curriculum design and delivery process. Several of the Design projects are exploring the use of xcri as a standard for rationalising and supporting interoperable exchange of course information - again these outcomes can be explored from the processes section of the Design studio.
A few Delivery projects also addressed issues of improving access to, and links between, course-related information processes and systems. As well as saving time and simplifying systems for staff and students, this also enabled the production of evidence of cost savings for institutional managers.
The Curriculum Design projects are addressing reform of institutional business processes including assessment.
Whilst nearly all projects in the Curriculum Delivery programme addressed issues around assessment to enhance the learning experience, some also made changes to the systems which support these processes to deliver significant efficiencies at programme level. Assignment handling proved to offer significant time-saving benefits as well as reducing paper use and storage (CASCADE, ESCAPE, eBiolabs, Making the New Diploma a Success)
‘It is (now) possible to predict significant efficiencies in assignment handling time for the Registry staff who deal with student submissions for approximately 260 course assignments across 48 course cohorts a year: a saving of 30 minutes per assignment or more soon cumulates savings in the order of half a day per week. Other advantages of the new online system are the reduction in paper handling and photocopying, as well as better auditing and control. Reduction in paper storage is a further advantage both in terms of less physical space being required and also in terms of less staff time being required to retrieve data from the archive.’ (CASCADE Project)
'By automating coursework submission, marking and feedback processes we have significantly reduced staff workloads' (eBiolabs)
see also: efficient assessment processes
A few projects have considered challenges around the duplication of effort in producing learning materials, particularly generic content that had the potential to be used across an institution, or even outside the institution (CASCADE, Duckling, COWL, Making the New Diploma a Success Project ). See also open educational resources.
Projects in the delivery programme used a range of technologies and pedagogies to support more effective independent learning, for example through case-based and inquiry based approaches. In general, these approaches alllowed staff time to be focused on supporting individual learners more effectively.
'(Our approach) reduced the amount of face-to-face teaching (previously poorly attended) and replaced it with online content delivery in self-access units to which students were directed on an individual basis. Each unit culminated in a task which was discussed in an individual, face-to-face tutorial' (KUBE)
There is evidence from background studies into learners' experiences of e-learning and from many of the Delivery projects that integrating use of technology, especially personal technologies they own themselves, can help learners to integrate study tasks more efficiently into their lives.
'Students found it easy to take the ebook reader anywhere and read whenever an opportunity arose. They used gaps between other activities during the day for study purposes: "(Using the ebook reader) has increased the amount of course materials I have gotten through. I have finished reading through the Part A on sociolinguistics. Before this, I had been allocating weekends to spend on one or two units, and I would only study through the week if I had a few hours to spare" (Duckling)
Technology to prepare students for, and then support, high value activities such as lab and fieldwork can also ensure they get more from the time they have available to learn in these contexts. For example, MoRSE students used a GIS laboratory in the field that reduced the time they spent on basic data processing and preparation (down from 3-6 hours to 5-10 minutes), allowing more time to be spent on analysis and interpretation:
'The GIS students responded positively to... its ability to reduce the time between the collection of primary data and its analysis, and being able to complete projects while still in the field' (MoRSE)
Other resources
Case studies
The integration of different open source systems (Moodle, Mahara and ePDP) facilitates effective teaching that increases Student success and progression saving teacher and support staff time through more effective processes of monitoring and tracking progress.’
(Making the New Diploma a Success)
At the curriculum level we have been able to show:
- Much higher quality curriculum delivery at a marginal additional cost
- Low-cost, high-value, transferable and sustainable interventions embedded in the curricula
- Awareness of possibilities afforded by a range of learning technologies and how to capitalise on them (Duckling)
View all resources on the Design Studio tagged with 'efficiency' or 'effectiveness'
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