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Case Study

United Kingdom

University of Lincolnshire and Humberside

Prepared by: David Lippiatt

Brief description of the programme

The University of Lincolnshire and Humberside has some 13,000 students attending full-time and part-time courses on-campus but, since 1993, the university has been franchising some courses off-campus. In order to promote assurance of quality in these courses, the university supplies comprehensive sets of materials to support lecturers in other institutions. Building on this experience in materials provision, in 1994 the university began to develop distance education materials for ‘top-up’ courses that would enable students with a diploma level qualification to study for an honours degree.

Following the well-researched identification of a potential market, academic design of the course was quickly followed by design of the form that such distance education provision would take. Now in 1997 the course is up and running with some 800 students using the materials through a network of approved centres both in the United Kingdom and overseas.

Problems encountered

Planning and managing distance education

Although there is now widespread experience of matters relating to the planning

and management of distance education, in fact, given the organisational structures

within which we originally undertook this development,

with advisors in one department and producers in another,

the early stages of the project were fraught with difficulties.

Part of the difficulty resided in the fact that directions;

were being given at an awkward distance;

serious progress only began when ‘management by leadership’ was introduced

and a managing editor was given direct responsibility for ‘producing the goods’.

Implementing quality assurance

In line with commonly understood standards and procedures,

a quality assurance system had been created;

but to some extent this was theoretical, and experience showed the

importance of drawing up such procedures in the light of local capabilities

and particular market requirements.

There is no point in designing idealised quality systems which in

practical fact do not fit with customer requirements nor institutional capabilities.

Using and integrating media in distance education

Given the academic design of the course in business and management, some

ready-made materials were available in a variety of media,

but their principal weakness was that they could only have been adapted to meet

the requirements of the course at uneconomical expense.

There was the requirement that ‘distant students’ should be receiving

university brand materials not substitute materials however good they might be.

Print-based technology was adopted because it was manageable by both;

the supplier and consumer with the expectation that use of further media would be

adopted at a later point

as the need arose and as economic returns justified its use.

Instructional design and production for distance education

Materials were developed for each unit of the course in the form of;

study guides centred on published core texts.

This model permitted lecturers to depend on the texts for conveying content

with motivating and explanatory text of their own in the study guides.

Local arrangements with a book retailer who in turn made arrangements

with publishers spread the cost of assuring access to large supplies of textbooks

and ensured sufficient ‘buffer’ to guarantee at least six months’ life ahead

for any one unit. The book retailer got

the business and the university had assurance of a safe life for its units.

Learner support systems

The best of materials do not support themselves so that local tutorial arrangements

with approved centres were, and are,

vital to the success of this distance education provision.

Following the development of staff in centres, the maintenance and cultivation by

the university of good relations with centre staff is as important

a part of the process as the direct relation they have with the student

The most important issue: Developing learning materials

The most important issue is difficult to isolate, but time and time again the difficulties encountered in the development of materials are purely the result of rushing things at the planning stages. It is not that the problems are overlooked or unforeseen at the outset but that pressures to start delivering the goods force the course developer to keep on using up safety spaces built into the project plan. This is not so much the result of not knowing how long it is likely to take to carry out a particular task nor of making a mistake in allowing for its duration. In fact, it is ironically the case that since the originally scheduled project is working, other commitments come to be made which, in effect, overlay the first plan. Success might breed success but it also breeds the pressure to succeed even more.

From one management point of view, this is understandable because few of us are working within fixed project time scales. We are frequently working within very fluid markets where flexible responses are required — reallocating resources on an almost daily basis so that project management is about redefining projects every day. The difficulty is to keep on managing things in such a way as to maintain confidence by fulfilling commitments made at one point while constantly readjusting dates to accommodate new projects.

But there are limits beyond which quality is in danger of being compromised and so, from another management point of view, one of the most important issues is to recognise those limits and refuse to cross them.