UCL's Extended Learning Landscape

UCL’s Extended Learning Landscape – APT Conference 2015 Summary In 2012 UCL began development of a public-facing online learning environment called UCLeXtend ( http://extend.ucl.ac.uk ). Our aim was to provide a new platform for CPD and short courses, but interest is much more diverse and spans across MOOCs, taster courses, public engagement, research dissemination and more. To explore potential boundaries; we mapped areas of interest, or activity, that UCLeXtend could support. We now call this our ‘extended learning landscape’. Alongside this we have identified five key challenges, which must be addressed in order to enhance the emerging diversity of blended and online learning. Creating a public-facing online learning environment MOOCs primarily fuelled the internal discussion around new educational opportunities and platforms. As UCL was not ‘MOOCing’ directly we conducted a meta-analysis and collated a broad selection of perceived benefits being discovered by other practitioners (Figure 1). Data was obtained from top-tier US and European HEIs (Jenner, 2014).  The institutional response was to observe others, while doing our own thing. Opening our existing VLE was problematic - it exposed potentially sensitive content and created a tense balance between the  walled garden  of the VLE and  open access. Circumventing these issues we built ‘UCLeXtend’ which combines self-registration with e-commence and e-learning. By December 2014 UCLeXtend had 21 live courses (Figure 2). Extended UCL To help understand the potential diversity of UCLeXtend courses the UCL E-Learning Environments team collated all ‘types of offering’ and created an ‘Extended Learning Landscape’ (Figure 3). This outlines the impact of the various offerings based on audience size; revenue; reputational impact and enrolment potential. Five significant challenges have emerged with e-learning/blended learning entering areas within the extended landscape: 1. Quality assurance and control to ensure the learning experience of participants reflects UCL’s aspirations, brand, culture and style. 2. Understanding new audience types and delivery modes; ensure we evaluate and disseminate these activities internally. 3. Managing the 'digital estate' to enable a seamless, coherent and platform-neutral experience for learners. 4. Maintaining our moral and legal obligations towards intellectual property.  5. Costing and resourcing course development and maintenance.  Since launching UCLeXtend we have seen a growth of interest from academics wanting ‘to MOOC’, develop courses and talk ‘instructional design’. We are prioritising our support and advice for colleagues to align towards these five challenges and ensure our approaches can scale in alignment with institutional, and local, priorities. Echoing back across the institution we see matriculated / credit bearing blended learning benefitting most abundantly from developments across this extended landscape. Moving forward Concurrently we are guided by UCL 2034 – our ambitious 20-year strategy, our Connected Curriculum initiative that rewires and entwines research and education and we are in the process of writing our new institutional Education Strategy. Our ambition is a research-based digital educational experience that puts learners, teachers and researchers at the centre of a connected, blended education. To achieve this we need to provide platforms that fulfil genuine needs, reduce barriers, disseminate good practice and provide pragmatic advice.