By

Tony McConnell and Kerry-Jo Chesters- South West College Noel McDaid- JISC

South West College is a multi campus college in Northern Ireland with 14,000 students and 500+ staff

The senior management of the college felt it was important that awareness of the dangers of the use of electronic communications be heightened among staff and students.

Kerry-Jo and myself, as members of the Virtual Services Team, were given the task of researching the topic and coming up with a method of assessing that staff and students had an acceptable level of awareness.

Our first approach to the task was to research: The extent of the dangers involved

Any solutions that were already available

We soon discovered that there are a vast array of areas to look at(This was going to become our biggest problem)

No suitable solution to approaching the topic was available

In February we were directed to Noel McDaid from RSCni

Noel had a long term goal to create a similar object for the national RSC body

We met with Noel and discussed what we wanted to achieve and mulled over some ideas as to how we might approach the topic

Shortly after our initial meeting we agreed a range of topics that we would each research

The research proved to be a laborious process. There is so much material available from a range of sources. Some good…..some not so good!

We had to be ruthless on what we decided to keep and on what to reject

We all had one clear objective- the object could not be overlong. In order for it to be effective it had to get its message across and assess the users as economically as possible

The object would be a Web based resource. Good accessibility

It provides Self contained learning

Loading it onto a VLE made it trackable and SCORM compliant

We were able to build in multimedia learning

It provides a stable platform for assessment and instant feedback

The temptation to launch straight into content was a mistake. We got bogged down by the sheer weight of the available material

Much of the content overlapped between topics.

An initial plan and storyboard would have allowed us to be more specific

It was very difficult to know where to end each topic as there was so much material

A well constructed storyboard would also have improved the flow of the object. Initial versions lacked a proper narrative

We brought in a fresh pair of eyes. Bernard Aghedo, RSC London. He agreed to review our progress so far.

On the basis of Bernard's review we went back to the drawing board. After many revisions and lots of content we completely restructured the object to make it flow better

The following is our finished learning object

Signposting

We ran a pilot programme over late September to mid October

A few technical issues emerged that were solved

Participants were surveyed after completion of the object.

We had an overwhelmingly positive response

Version 1 of the object is now complete

The students will complete it during tutorial classes

It is hoped that we will have time to refine and update in 2014