Use Cases

The teachers

13. Dr Simons and her team are keen to develop an online version of her face-to-face diploma in biology. The course is successful but will require a certain amount of re-structuring to ensure effective online learning. The team hopes to be able to syndicate the course to a range of HE and FE institutions and they are aware that the most efficient way to do this will be to construct properly formed content packages. Dr Simons’s institution already has a major VLE which is capable of working with standards compliant content packages. Teachers within the team have HTML editing skills but no knowledge of how to structure an online course or how to create a compliant content package. The institution’s VLE is highly flexible, allowing authors to work with a wide variety of formats; however, it offers no clear model for creating and organising courseware.

14. Dr Simons uses Reload with the course specification wizard to create the structure of the course. The wizard takes her through the process, helping her to clarify aspects of the course that are currently ill-defined within the face-to-face version. She breaks the face-to-face course into a manageable set of named modules, units and pages, each with clearly defined metadata, resources and learning outcomes. The wizard then converts this structure into a content package manifest and a suite of HTML files. Each of these files has an appropriate name, metadata and suggested resources (including references to discussion areas). The HTML is within a folder structure that mirrors the structure of the course. The content package containing the HTML is placed on a shared drive and individual teachers within Dr Simons’s team are tasked with authoring relevant sections. As the course is written, authors add resources to the package and request changes such as the creation of additional pages. Dr Simons can control and monitor this using Reload, making adjustments on a day-to-day basis. Once the course has been written the package is uploaded to their VLE and sent to partner institutions for use in a variety of standards compliant VLEs.

The developer

15. A team of teachers has consulted with an e-learning expert in the creation of a course format which will support a variety of subjects at Higher-National-Diploma level. Sarah, a developer who is responsible for supporting e-learning, is tasked with finding a way to streamline the production of these courses and to help the institution retain tight control of the format of the courses, which will be written by diverse authors.

16. Sarah creates an XML instance and schema for the WCKER using the course format supplied for reference. The resulting wizard guides the authors through the process of specifying a course within the format provided. The wizard releases a range of options at each stage, giving the flexibility required to account for differing subjects without allowing authors to stray too far from the overall course format. Once each course structure has been created it can be checked and edited in Reload by an e-learning expert in conjunction with the author. Having agreed the details, adjustments are made in Reload. The author then populates the files produced and uploads the content package to the relevant repository in their framework MLE.