Eamonn Murphy
University of Limerick

Deployed in pdf format for student download, chat forums and feedback, percentage of marks allocated for chartroom participation.

Platform (lms)

Moodle + Sakai .

Why are you using e-learning in your organization at present?

Industry based students are very constrained on time and availability at specific times and venues.

Do you consider e-learning positively as a system for teaching?

Invaluable.

Strong points of the e-learning project of your organization

Students learn at a time and place most suited to their needs.

Type of software

The University made the decision to deploy the Sakai Framework in 2006 and this has been running for approximately one year. The intention is that Sakai will form the basis for our eLearning support structure into the future. It is proposed to use Sakai , not just for undergraduate support but also to provide a virtual environment for supporting research students across multiple institutions and physical campuses. The environment will provide a comprehensive range of tools to support research project management, collaboration and dissemination and will utilise open-standards to interface with existing systems.

Type of technology

Moodle & Sakai Flash + html content.

Do the students or professors need to use a specific software?

No all interaction is done through the LMS.

Is production following any kind of standard?

Scorm, AICC.

Have your e-learning practices been evaluated? have you used specific tools for evaluation or quality control?

Yes, We have advertised within the EU for a reviewer for the MSE in Technology Management and the contractor has been appointed and they will conduct 20 days with student's faculty and members of the public Report is due in June.

Describe evaluation results

Not yet available due 1 st June 2007.

Impact in the organization

We found that industry based students were relined to commit to 2 year post grad study using conventional study because these students had no idea where they would be in 2 years time. However the introducti0n of ELearning programmes has resulted in us enrolling students from small companies and small areas.

Obstacles or barriers

A major obstacle was the length of time to get materials from SME to ID to the technical writers and back to SME. Difficult to get students to participate in chartrooms until we made participation mandatory. Another barrier was a student who submitted work did not like their work been submitted to other students.

Necessities

Planning Stage.

Definition

Identify authors.

Design

Instructional Designers.

Production

Technical Writing.

Implementation

Uniformity of end product across modules.

Evaluation

Marketing.

Its very costly to develop a full programme of ELearning, its restrictive as having invested you don't want to have to rewrite modules and you need a large market to be profitable.