Quality And Profits: The Case Study of Introducing Moodle in a For-Profit Business School
Dr. Kendall, the Programme Director of the MBA programme in a management college in the city, was recently advised by the accrediting university that the ‘student experience’ in the course must improve. During a recent conversation, the students told the University representatives that there was very little interaction outside the classroom hours between the tutors and themselves, and often they felt that they had been rushed through the programme. They also indicated that they felt that there wasn’t enough library resources, and they were not sure that the programme was preparing them adequately for a career in business.
There wasn’t a
straightforward solution available to Dr. Kendall. First of all, his was a Higher
Education programme in the midst of a Professional Training college, where most
tutors were adjunct and they would not commit extra hours outside the
contracted time for student contact. Library resources were hard to come by, as
this wasn’t something the college administration really deemed necessary, given
their background in Accountancy training. Furthermore, the majority of students
were from overseas, balancing work and study, and were hardly available for any
extra-curricular engagement anyway.
However, Dr Kendall was
painfully aware that he must act, quickly and decisively. The university
moderator was quite clear that he might not allow the college to take on any
more new students unless actions had been taken to improve the student
experience. The college management was equally clear that the programme wasn’t
making money for them and they needed to take on more students and even be able
to raise the student fees for the forthcoming intakes. Besides, spread over
three campuses, the college management hardly ever interacted with the
students, and did not see any reason for Dr Kendall’s alarm.
The Convergence of Interests
One solution,
suggested to Dr Kendall by one of the members of the management team, Dr Eric Blair, the newly
recruited brand manager of the college, was to create a student community. The
rationale for this advice was more marketing than academic, but there was a
clear pay-off for Dr Kendall : The community might pull the students to the college,
making them spend more time and learning from each other and demanding more
from tutors. What’s more, Dr Blair suggested rather persuasively, the students might
feel more positively about the college if they were more involved, and this
might reflect in their feedback, formal or informal, to the university. Using
marketing-speak, Dr Blair talked about ‘engagement’ being the key to solve Dr. Kendall’s
problems as well as something that may help the college raise the fees over
time. Whatever was the merit of these arguments, Dr Kendall felt most persuaded to
follow the advice because Eric had some budget to enhance student engagement.
Unbeknown to Dr Kendall, however, Dr Blair
was also keen to explore options. First of all, he was not convinced that the
student experience at the college was good enough, and knew that any marketing
efforts would be quite ineffective if the service levels did not improve. He
was keen, from a business and marketing point of view, to help out Dr Kendall.
Dr Blair had a certain
influence on the owners and board members of the business. His experiences in
other large international education businesses were valued, but more
importantly, he had the experience of raising money, from venture capital
funds, for education businesses. The college wanted to tap such funding for its
future expansion and this was the precise reason why Dr Blair was offered the
position. Also, unlike Dr Kendall, Dr Blair was a business executive and spoke the language
the board members understood: He set a goal – being able to charge double the
fees for the MBA programme in twelve months’ time by enhancing the value
perception of the programme – which was fully supported by the bankers, the
Finance Director and the investors in the business.
The Baby Steps
Dr Kendall, therefore, was
happy enough to accept the suggestion of building a student collaboration
website which incorporates an online learning platform. This was to be a shoestring
exercise, and an ‘Open Source’ platform, Moodle, was chosen. This was, however,
a more difficult choice than it appeared: Both Dr Kendall and Dr Blair knew that to make
Moodle work, it would need more time and effort than something that could be
bought off the shelf. However, the upfront investment of buying a ready-to-use
platform prohibited such choice: Dr Blair was simply reluctant to go back to the board
asking for any significant investment upfront.
He could secure,
however, a coalition of the willing within the organization. One of the senior
managers, James, already tried using Moodle for professional accountancy courses,
but it gained no traction as the tutors refused to post their notes on the
site. Professional Accountancy training being tutor-driven as it is, James had very
little negotiating power and had to abandon his plans to use Moodle for these
courses. However, the infrastructure was already invested in, which Dr Blair could now
use without any additional investment.
He also enlisted Daphne,
the young IT specialist who recently joined the teaching staff of the college. Daphne had an Engineering degree, but completed Masters in Design from a Scottish
University. She took up the teaching job being without an option in
the recessionary job market, but was looking to move into User Experience work. Dr Blair convinced her to lead the task of running the Moodle for Dr Kendall’s students,
arguing that this would give her enough ‘user’ facing time as she wanted to
have and would allow her an opportunity to apply her professional expertise in
the field of education.
Dr Kendall also mandated
that all tutors in the MBA programme must use Moodle to post their notes and be
available to answer student queries. Tutors were aware that they did not have
as much negotiating power and mostly agreed to cooperate. However, they objected
to extra work, particularly as they had to learn a new software. This was
easily circumvented as Daphne, anxious to get the work going, volunteered to take
on the job of posting all the notes, as long as these were supplied in
Microsoft Word or PDF formats.
Finally, Dr Kendall also decided
to review all contracts and move the tutors from an hourly to a package rate
for teaching; the new contracts offered more money to the tutors but covered an
undefined amount of extra work which must go into supporting students online.
Most tutors did not see the students using the site anyway: They agreed.
Here come the students
When the first batch
of students was registered on Moodle in October 2010, the expectations were
rather modest. The site, despite the tacit agreement with the tutors, was
bereft of any content at the time. This was not due to tutor’s reticence, but
more because there was no content to give. Most tutors used whiteboards or
overhead projectors in the class, and those who used Powerpoint slides were
treating these as tools of the trade and did not see the point of giving them
away. Desperate to register an early win, however, Daphne set up Moodle registration
sessions, where she would hire out large classrooms with computer terminals,
make all the students sit together and register into Moodle. This was
effective: She had almost 200 students registered on Moodle in a matter of a
few days.
These numbers were an
important catalyst in a number of ways. Dr Blair declared an early victory and
informed the board members that 90% of the MBA students registered on the Moodle
platform within the first seven days of launch. It was an important half-truth:
He never said that this was done through organized classroom sessions, but this
allowed him to project this to be a popular initiative that the students love
and ask formally for resources, including an Online Library subscription, to be
integrated into it. He further pressed on the other departments, such as IT, to
integrate various workflows, covering important other tasks that an overseas
student needed done – such as request for council tax exemption letters, travel
letters, holiday work authorization letters, turnitin access to check for
appropriateness of referencing – to be integrated in the same platform.
Dr Kendall, meantime, sent
the same message to the tutors, that almost all the students had now registered
on Moodle and, even if they have no content to give, they should start
answering the student queries etc on the Moodle forum.
The Unexpected Consequences of Being There
The students, however,
started using Moodle straightaway, even before any content was posted onto it.
The first post on Moodle forum, dated October 12th 2010, hours after
the students were registered, read – “Moodle is the best thing that the college
management has ever done. At least, we can now talk to each other about our
studies, and get to know the students in other classes”. By October 17th,
a Sunday, a student was writing about “forming a club of students which will
run sessions… Can we have a petition to the college management to give us a
classroom after the college hours?”
The first tutor notes
came in a week later. The Marketing Strategy tutor reported that the students
requested if the notes could be made available online, and he had to give in to
them. Soon, almost all the module tutors got some notes onto the platform. The
CEO of the company wanted to check out what’s going on and wanted to access Moodle:
His first post, responding to the student request for facilities for the
student club, was made on the November 24th, a month after the original
post: “It is good to know that you wanted to take the initiative. Let your
course administrator know when you want to organize this session and a room
will be made available. I would love to attend the session.” The discussions
with the course team resulted in formation of ‘Enterprise Network Club’, a
monthly evening event where local entrepreneurs and employers were invited to
talk face to face with the students. The first meeting of the ‘club’ was held
on the 12th January, three months after the idea was proposed, and
the CEO of the company did attend, much of Dr Kendall’s relief.
Everyone’s Baby
Despite its apparent
success with students, six months after it was first launched, the site was
still thin on content on some of courses. Two of the most highly regarded
tutors refused to give any content for putting up. One of them wanted to
protect his intellectual property and insisted that the site did not have the
adequate level of security. The other argued that his content is mostly on
Overhead Slides which he wrote by hand in the class; he also argued that he did
not want to give his slides to students who did not come to the class. Some of
the other tutors objected that they were having to do more work than they
thought would be necessary, as the students kept sending queries through Moodle
and annoyingly for them, N almost always did a follow-up.
Dr Blair was not successful
in getting an Online Library subscription: The high cost of doing so deterred
the board members. Instead, he secured an access to the university online
library, which all students could use. This did not happen through Moodle, but
he was happy nonetheless that this was now available. However , he had some
minor wins: The board agreed to invest a modest amount in a Department library
instead. The IT department was also lately persuaded to allow the Moodle to be
connected to their databases, allowing the students to make the request through
the Moodle rather than having to fill up a form physically.
Dr Kendall regards Moodle as
a personal victory – he got annoyed when some of the tutors referred to it as
‘Noodle’; light-heartedly, they insist. He retained his accreditation, and has
a greater quota nowadays. The university moderator is quite happy with
progress, but the students are now complaining that access to Moodle is often
difficult as the college does not have enough computer terminals for use of
students. The university has now recommended that the college reviews its IT
infrastructure, including the number of computer terminals and broadband access
and load. Dr Blair has a new thing to argue about – giving a free laptop to students
when they sign up for the course: He believes that this will enhance the
‘perception of the course, introduce a touch-and-feel dimension of the technology
orientated nature of delivery’. The CEO contends that he recognizes the
marketing-speak, but he would want to talk to some students first.
Reflections
The experiences as
narrated here cover a number of perspectives and relate to a number of theoretical
perspectives on group behaviour and the research on introduction of technology
in an organization. In the following paragraphs, we shall reflect on two such
perspectives, one exploring the positive student experience and the other
relating to the challenges such technology introduction usually faces.
One of the most
puzzling aspects of this project is the students’ apparent satisfaction with
the platform without content. It is possibly appropriate, in context, to look at
the students as ‘digital natives’ and reflect on previous research on the Net
Generation’s satisfaction with Online learning (Dziuban et al, 2010). This
research identify six component areas from which such satisfaction emanates:
A.
Effective Institutional Responsiveness, or the feeling among the students that their
institution is making some effort to accommodate their lifestyle needs.
B.
Increased Educational Engagement, or the satisfaction with the ‘enhanced
ability to ask questions and clarify their concerns’.
C.
More Explicit Role Expectations, or knowing that the assessments are
responsive and equitable, and having a clear vision of rules of engagement
(achieved through interaction with others and tutors).
D.
Reduced Ambivalence, achieved through a ‘heightened sense of
engagement and clearer understanding of expectations’.
E.
Increased Information Fluency, by developing an effective filtering
mechanism, through interaction with others and tutors, of the information
overload.
F.
Increased Commitment to Education, through empowerment with a sense of agency.
(Dziuban et al, 2010)
It can be said that
the organizations commitment to deploy Moodle and engage students through this
created the overall sense of empowerment, created the positive engagement and
started the enabling conversations that the students craved for.
It is also interesting
to look at another perspective, that of the people initiating the project
inside the organization and the various challenges they faced in introducing
the piece of new technology. An useful perspective is provided by Grudin
(1994). In his effort to list the eight challenges that Groupware developers
face in an organization, he touched upon various areas which remain valid even
after a decade and half. Grudin’s list represents eight dimensions against
which various aspects of this case can be explored:
1.
Disparity of Work and Benefit: The tutors saw additional work in implementing
Online Learning, and the project would not have moved forward without the
Project Coordinator stepping in to take on some of the workload. The benefits,
increased student engagement, came only later.
2.
Critical Mass and Prisoners’ Dilemma Problems: The platform needed critical mass, and it
would not have been helpful for any one individual to start using it first. The
group registration session helped to get most people on board at the very
beginning and was crucial for eventual adaptation of the site as the principal
communication platform.
3.
Disruption of Social Processes: In some cases, introduction of Moodle laid open
the students’ dissatisfaction with some of the tutors and facilities, and
students took advantage of the direct communication facilities with the
Executive Management. Some of the tutors and programme administrators felt
undermined to a great extent. Their lack of enthusiasm, mainly due to this
reason, had to be addressed.
4.
Exception Handling: The Moodle platform was not there to solve
all the problems the students have, though there was an implicit expectation
that it would do so eventually. In the areas where it fell short, the users
were disappointed.
5.
Unobtrusive Accessibility: One of the most successful spin-offs from this
Moodle experiment was the start of the ‘club’, a real group activity involving
external participants and students on Moodle. The coordination of this activity
was through the general forum, which was actually the least used area of Moodle,
but turned out to be quite popular as this allowed the students to converse
regardless of their course enrolments.
6.
Difficulty of Evaluation: It was difficult for the Project Team and its
management sponsors to actually evaluate the impact of the project beyond
anecdotal evidence. The communication aspect was well understood by all in the
organization, but how it benefitted anyone was not entirely clear.
7.
Failure of Intuition: It was difficult for a management team to
design an appropriate learning and collaboration platform for a body of
students it did not know well. The project manager’s user facing design
experience was therefore critical, but the project still suffered, at times,
from the IT Team’s failure to understand the students’ needs and inability to
communicate in the users’ language.
8.
Adoption Process: It was not just a piece of technology, but a
culturally situated process of negotiation and involvement that was required to
get the project going.
(Grudin, 1994)
The above model
provides a framework to understand various aspects of introduction of a new
piece of technology requiring group participation, and the narrative of this
case can be explored in context.
References
Dziuban, C. D.,
Moskal, P. D., Bradford, G. R., Brophy-Ellison, J. and Groff, A.T. (2010)
Constructs that impact the Net Generation’s Satisfaction with Online Learning;
in Sharpe, R., Beetham, H., and De Freitas, S. (Eds), Rethinking Learning For A
Digital Age, Routledge, NY.
Grudin, J. (1994),
Groupware and Social Dynamics: Eight Challenges for Developers, Communications
of the ACM, Vol 37 No. 1, January 1994, NY.
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