E-Learning Strategy Development for Fully Aligned College Curricula

The background of this study is a well-established 21 st century trend, leading education institutions towards diversifying their offer with e-learning. While top engineering institutions worldwide have developed e-learning, many others were still focusing on limited traditional offers until the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 which has brought unprecedented upheaval and drastic change even for small local colleges. The aim of this study is to analyse the dimensions of this change and evaluate the change management processes across engineering departments in local UK colleges that have had to shift their teaching, learning and assessment from face-to-face delivery to an e-environment in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, and are considering moving onto e-learning wherever possible. The initial research for this study has been collected across 77 further education colleges in the North West of the UK that also have a higher education offer and that teach engineering at various levels. Key aspects of the move to e-learning as well as the wider context will be presented, followed by a contextualised literature review where examples of challenges from analysed institutions will be presented in relation to key concepts of change management. Some critical aspects of higher education across colleges are considered along with their challenges in the present COVID-19 context. This will be followed by recommendations. The basis for the recommendations is an extended market and change management analysis available in the appendices to this work. SWOT, Porter’s Five Forces as well as stakeholder analyses are complemented by Culture Web and McKinsey’s 7S models which have been used to analyse the current state of operations and present strategic positioning of UK colleges with an engineering further and higher education provision in order to identify which of these may need reinforcement and propose recommendations. Keywords : e-learning, higher education, strategy, colleges, engineering education DOI: 10.7176/JEP/11-36-01 Publication date: December 31 st 2020