Every programme needs a programme leader. It's an admin. job for academics that involves representing the course on various committees, dealing with internal and external examiners and other 'quality assurance' issues. Most programme leaders are specialists in the field of study, but it's not an essential requirement.
I am the programme leader for this programme (the MSc Mobile Telecommunication Engineering). I was appointed instead of a subject specialist because I have a lot of experience in supporting postgraduate work (going back to 1984) and also in educational innovation, including e-learning (going back to 1979 - yep, I still have in my possession a 300bd acoustic coupler). It is an unusual programme because of the Mpirical/Middlesex partnership and because of the e-learning. Although it is not exactly ground-breaking, the e-learning aspect is quite innovative. Everybody is familiar with the idea that Web 1.0 was about one-way content delivery over the internet whilst Web 2.0 is about two-way delivery - i.e. the 'consumers' are also major originators of content - and this gives rise to the phenomenon of social networking.
There has been a sizeable group of educators that has been waiting for a long time for this development - they are adherents to the constructivist learning philosophy of education. This holds that people create their own knowledge (i.e. learn stuff) by constructing meaning from their experiences. Some of these experiences might involve interacting with formal sources of knowledge (books and lecturers) but others could (should) involve interacting with fellow learners. [You'll find a more detailed explanation at http://www.exploratorium.edu/IFI/resources/constructivistlearning.html.] So by analogy we have e-Learning 1.0 where the teachers upload their material onto some website (by far the most common kind of e-learning) versus e-Learning 2.0 where the learners collaborate together electronically to construct their own materials and hence knowledge. Other educators call this networked learning.
You can see, looking at the portfolio requirements, that students are supposed to develop and submit both 'traditional' and constructivist elements. At this stage we don't know what knowledge the students are going to construct and one of my jobs is going to be to try to determine the expectations of the assessors and convey these back to the course team and students. So that's one of the things I'll be tackling in this blog.
... not that I expect it to be possible to define a sort of performance standard of networked interaction. That's because another line of educational research looks at differences in individual learning styles. [We even did some work on this at Middlesex - e.g. http://ebookbrowse.com/dimitrova-sadler-hatzipanagos-murphy-2003-final-pdf-d57080683.] The content that goes into a Learning Management System tends to be fairly static so it is especially important in e-learning to make sure that you cater for all the different styles. So I want to develop this in the blog and I'll try to comment here about any observed styles of learning, particularly in respect of some of those constructivist activities like forum contributions.
Finally, Middlesex tends to be very prescriptive about the way that the learning materials in our LMS are structured and formatted - it is our pedagogic model or 'instructional design' if you are American [see http://michaelhanley.ie/elearningcurve/discovering-instructional-design-13-icare-model-middlesex-universitys-experience/2009/06/12/]. The Mpirical LMS has a different pedagogic model and the Middlesex QA processes require this to be validated by one of the in-house experts. This is not an area where I am anticipating any type of problem but it will be an interesting exercise to draw the contrasts between them and I'll try to report my findings here.
