What Others are Doing with the eMM
The eMM is still actively being applied down here in Australasia with projects following up on the ITP sector assessments and with ACODE applying the eMM in large Australian institutions. I also just spent last week in Perth presenting on some ideas for relating eMM assessment results to institutional frameworks and priorities (I'll post the link to the paper as soon as its online, you can find the abstract on the conference site at the moment). Paul Basich has also drawn my attention to the recent publication of the University of London eMM report, an extensive document that contains some very useful observations as well as a positive endorsement of their use of the model. I thought however, that I'd talk about some of the work that others are doing with model. These are projects and papers that I'm completely uninvolved with. Its great to see others taking the ideas and making them their own.
First up is a paper from Thailand, presented at a recent IEEE conference. Entitled "Applying eMM in a 3D Approach to e-Learning Quality Improvement" it discusses the inclusion of the eMM in a three stage process - Diagnosis, Development, and Delivery (the three 'd's' of the title). The analysis presented is unusual. Rather than presenting (presumably hypothetical) data for each of the 35 processes, the authors have adopted a summary approach reducing the model to a five by five grid of numbers, which are then plotted in two dimensions. My reservations about the use of numbers have been outlined elsewhere, and I'm afraid that this paper illustrates rather clearly how much is lost rather than gained by the practice. Still, the eMM is proposed as a tool for diagnosing areas in need of attention in the Thai university sector, which is good to see, and I wait with interest further developments, perhaps their ongoing work will be persuasive.
Closer to home, Juliana Mansvelt and colleagues at Massey University have examined the relationships between e-learning quality and professional development. Drawing on the New Zealand eMM reports and documentation as descriptions of quality they have interviewed and surveyed New Zealand tertiary teachers in order to determine what factors influence professional development. This is a detailed paper full of rich information that will be incorporated into the practice support materials I'm currently working on. The conclusions are in line with those from the New Zealand and international assessments (including ones not cited in this paper). Institutions are not yet showing evidence of systematic engagement in e-learning, driven by strategic outcomes. Consequently, staff development activities are informal, lacking cohesion and a sense of purpose, and are not related to key organisational goals and objectives.
The implications of capability assessments for e-learning is also a focus of the paper from Manchester "Learning Needs Analysis through Synthesis of Maturity Models and Competency Frameworks." Tim Cappelli and Alisdair Smithies outline a mechanism for translating the eMM processes and practices into a staff competency framework that can be used by individual staff and managers, and which supports the development of a training needs analysis tool.
References
[1] Tawsopar, K. and Mekhabunchakij, K. (2009). Applying eMM in a 3D Approach to e-Learning Quality Improvement. Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Computer Engineering and Technology. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?isnumber=4769407&arnumber=4769488&count=130&index=80
[2] Mansvelt, J., Suddaby, G., OÕHara, D. and Gilbert, A. (2009). Professional Development: Assuring Quality in E-learning Policy and Practice. Quality Assurance in Education 17(3). http://www.emeraldinsight.com/Insight/viewContentItem.do?contentType=Article&hdAction=lnkpdf&contentId=1785025&history=false
[3] Cappelli, T. & Smithies, A. (2008). Learning Needs Analysis through synthesis of Maturity Models and Competency Frameworks. In K. McFerrin et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education International Conference 2008 (pp. 2448-2455). Chesapeake, VA: AACE. http://www.editlib.org/d/27579/proceeding_27579.pdf