This is the description of the case 10 for activity 2 in course H807
Background and context
Managed by School of Business and Economics at University of Exeter, the project has as principal goal to reduce the increasing costs due to a change in the module structure of economics programmes. This School is facing up to an increase of international students together with the introduction of a business module for students outside the School of Business and Economics. The class sizes increased from 12 to around 25 students and number of lectures range from 40-200.
The author also complains that the students do not prepare themselves for the class; do not read the material nor do the exercises
The College has already switched 25% of its lessons on WebCT, but he is looking for an other more time saver solution to face economics and financial problems due to the rapid changing of the module structure.
Project description
Each lecture has been linked with an associated exercise available on-line. The student are forced to access the lecture twice: before and after they have completed the exercise.
The students have been explained the new approach at the start of their module and a help desk is here at a weekly basis to answer questions. The staff have also been trained with the new material before the module started.
The project consists on an access to documentation (case studies, videos, texts, exercises,…) offered by chosen publishers including Wiley and Pearsons.
The College can follow the progression of each student by the logs provided by the publishers.
Tools in use
Nothing has been produced by the College itself. The College has made the choice to adapt his syllabus to the publishers’ (Pearsons, Wiley). Those publishers are offering on the web a collection of e-learning facilities the College just bought the right to use.
Because of copyrights the students have to pay to access the text and the on-line activities.
Tangible benefits
For the students
It seems that the retention rates on the modules are very high. The author stands that “the pass rates/average marks on economics modules are equivalent to the module that were previously in place. The business module was new, however the marks demonstrated a good spread an high average level of achievement”.
If the module is new, with what could we compare ?
It is also said that “[in the future] we will also show [the students] the anonymised data from the previous cohort that relates the proportion of e-assessments completed to the final exam mark, although we will also make it clear the the conclusions are not robust”. In fact the College is far from serious to try, in a way, to persuade the students of the legitimacy of the action and telling them the conclusions are not solid, in the other way.
One of the real benefit is the access to documentation even if the students have work commitments or have to spend time away from the university.
In fact the benefits are definitely tangible…
…For the staff and the College
The investment is small and the ROI is important in term of gain of space (saving on the number of classes), and gain of time. Real savings in staff have been identified with eight tutorials/week replaced by two help classes.
Disadvantages and drawbacks
- The costs of the texts to the students
- The interactive discussion that could take place in the class is lost (it was already with the increased number of students per class)
- Dependancy to commercial publishers
- There is still a huge amount of students that don’t access the material
Conditions of ’success ?’
In my point of view it is just an administrative and cost cutting success but a poor achievement for the student beings. At the present time it is difficult to prove an effectively improvement in the learning for the students. The College is not dupe and concludes by “[we manage] the belief that this was cost-driver measure rather than one drive by concern for the student learning”.
To make sure that the project may continue the School want to coerce the students in considering “making completion of 80% of [on-line] assessments in order to attain 10% of the module mark”. How to be certain about the person that log to the service ?
