E-learning models: a Web 2.0 approach to staff development in higher education
This chapter is written at a time of change and strong tensions within higher education. For the past decade, the introduction of e-learning and ICT more generally have been central to that change (see, for example, Bates 2000) and have served to highlight, if not aggravate, some of the tensions. It seems clear that Web 2.0 technologies, in addition to the opportunity for sharing knowledge that they promise, will provide fresh challenges. Here, we describe an approach to facilitating the uptake and quality of e-learning which uses characteristic Web 2.0 features and tools to help resolve some of the historical tensions surrounding e-learning. The approach is based on a highly participative community-of-practice model in which e-learning experts, novices and practitioners come together in the co-creation of sharable e-learning models of best practice.
Before turning to describe the approach, we briefly explore the contextual factors that inspired it. Online learning in higher education is at a curious cusp. As a surge of Web 2.0 tools is available, the long tail of academia is still trying to get grips with online learning characterised by monolithic virtual learning environments and many seem unaware of these emerging technologies and their potential impact. This is perhaps characteristic of a broader and underlying problem relating to the ability to change discussed by Shurville and Brown (2006). At a time when higher education is regarded as key to supporting the knowledge-based economies of the new century, there is some irony in the fact that, though specialising in developing and imparting knowledge, the sector seems to lack the agility necessary to transform in order to meet the challenge.
The reasons for this immobility are complex, but two are significant here. The first relates directly to libraries or information services in relation to the culture of academia. According to Becher and Trowler (2001) higher education is typified by a ‘tribes and territories’ culture which, Shurville and Brown (2006, 245), suggest, is manifested in a ‘cultural chasm between academic staff and academic-related staff’. However, it should be noted that this is clearly not the case at Staffordshire University. Geoff Walton’s work (Chapter 3) demonstrates how proactive faculty-service collaboration can lead to pedagogical innovation and shows how to circumvent some of the barriers discussed here. A second reason for the lack of agility stems from the tension between innovation and perceptions of control (Stiles and Yorke, 2006) and there seems to be a culture of resistance to strategic change, which stifles the embedding of innovation. Although many are eager to experiment with new learning and teaching technologies, the changes at an institutional level necessary to embed the technologies are often viewed as overly controlling. A contributory factor is the current context for staff development whose salient feature is the quality enhancement of teaching and learning through formalised, often imposed, professional development courses (Nicholls, 2001).
The ‘eLearning Models’ project was launched at Staffordshire University by the authors in May 2006 as one of a number of initiatives aimed at loosening some of the perceived bonds (Stiles and Yorke, 2006) as well as enhancing the quality and agility of e-learning development at the university. Early objectives for the project included the development of representations of approaches to e-learning which modelled good practice and, it was hoped, would guide the adoption of e-learning by novices and more experienced practitioners alike.
Best practice models
What is a best practice model? Finding a useful representation of practice is difficult because the vocabulary that individual practitioners use to describe designing and delivering e-learning is often different from each other, and the process that practitioners use to develop e-learning is often unique to the individual. The MoD4L project investigated issues of sharing and reuse of learning designs and found that ‘An effective representation for sharing and reuse has not, so far, been developed, even in Further Education where sharing and reuse are institutional norms’ (Falconer, 2007). We designed two different types of best practice model to explore the style that would be most useful for practitioners.
A design pattern approach was first developed and presented to practitioners. As developed by Alexander (1979), a design pattern describes a context, a problem and a ‘solution’ based on theory and practice, and typically includes the following characteristics:
the forces that play a role in coming to a solution
the solution itself (E-LEN, [2004]).
The advantage of design patterns is that they can be seen as a sufficiently generic solution to aid ease of use in any situation or context. A design pattern was therefore developed as a guide for planning online discussions. However, the design pattern emphasis on being a solution to a ‘problem’ proved challenging – what is the ‘problem’ that an online discussion is trying to resolve? In addition, the ‘design pattern’ framework was seen as ‘getting in the way’ of the guide to planning online discussion. After discussion with practitioners, this approach was abandoned in favour of a simpler, more transparent ‘activity model’ that included simply a structure for an online activity.
These activity models needed to have immediacy, clarity and focus but to contain enough information to be useful. They needed to convey an easy entry point to designing an online activity that is also perceived as the ‘right’ way. Some new activity models were then developed from existing research-based material, for example, Salmon’s five-stage model (2004) and Mayer’s multimedia principles (Mayer, 2001). These models were then presented in a one-page PowerPoint slide designed to be the most simple and accessible format for users. Even in this format, some models were seen as more accessible than others. For example, Salmon’s model uses simple language for each stage, but Mayer’s model uses more complex language (for example, the spatial contiguity principle and the coherence principle) and despite the content being straightforward and clear otherwise, it is seen as a more difficult model.
Jones and Asensio (2002) argue that ‘design for learning’ requires the ability to be ‘critically reflective about practice’; therefore any staff development activity needs to include the opportunity for ongoing reflection. This is because delivering e-learning activities is a process in which problems are frequently encountered and need modification and alteration. Therefore it was decided to create models that were starting points for reflection and discussion for practitioners and that enabled these discussions and reflections to be made within a community that was supportive, inclusive and striving to design the best possible e-learning. A best practice model can therefore be defined as a ‘shareable model of practice’ (Goodyear, 1997).
Creating a community
‘Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis’ (Wenger, 2002). They can be defined along three dimensions:
what it is about: a joint enterprise as understood and continually renegotiated by its members
how it functions: mutual engagement that binds members together into a social entity
what capability it has produced: the shared repertoire of communal resources (routines, sensibilities, artefacts, vocabulary, styles, etc.) that members have developed over time (Smith, 2003).
Our intention was to engage e-learning practitioners in a joint enterprise (to develop e-learning skills), to create a social entity to support novice and expert practitioners alike, and to create a shared space for sharing communal resources (the best practice models). This was different from presenting them with models of best practice and hoping that they would be used as in the ‘build it and they will come’ model of staff development. Staff development is all too often a case of ‘giving’ staff information about the use of technology in teaching and learning without exemplifying the social constructivist principles that we want to encourage them to use. Beetham suggests that many e-learning practitioners have learnt to use technology through ‘peer supported experimentation’ and that they may well be keen to use communities of practice (Beetham, 2002). The community of practice has therefore been designed to harness collective intelligence, enable egalitarian participation and use social networking as tools to enable the community to create, share and develop the best practice models for e-learning.
There are communities of e-learning practitioners in existence (the most successful is probably the further education ILT champions JISC e-mail list, whose members share knowledge, resources and solve problems, but there is little focus on structured activity leading to a shared outcome. These champions were funded to support teachers developing e-learning in colleges of further education in the UK.) This project aimed to harness the collective intelligence of a wide range of practitioners in such a way that we would produce the shared best practice models. All activity in the best practice models for e-learning online community (http://crusldi1.staffs.ac.uk/moodle) is open to all members, but some activities are led by ‘experts’ in the ‘Ask the Experts’ online sessions. These are practitioners with high levels of experience and expertise (often published) who have offered to share their extensive skills with the members in the online events. This ensures that discussions are based around sound theory and relevant experience.
The online community of practice to support the best practice models project has been designed to exploit many features of Web 2.0 as both an exploration of the possibilities of the ‘participatory web’ and an exemplar of good practice. Web 2.0 can be seen as an attitude of egalitarian participation and shared construction of content and process. There is often a focus on participation, sharing and community for entertainment and learning. ‘Here’s my take on it: Web 2.0 is an attitude not a technology’ (Davis, 2005).
Harness collective intelligence
The strength of communities of practice is their potential to harness collective intelligence, of which the most famous example is Wikipedia (http://wikipedia.org). Members are enabled, in a similar way to Wikipedia, to add content, discuss content, rate content and use core data in an innovative way. E-learning practitioners are often ‘crossing borders’ between their roles as teachers and technology experts. They are often innovators and may be working in isolation in their team or organisation. All those practitioners who are willing to share their experience and expertise of using e-learning are invited to join the community. Their shared domain of interest is in implementing e-learning in their institution. New members of the Best Practice Community are invited via a range of existing networks – the FE ILT Champions list, JISC, regional support centres and so on (regional support centres are funded through JISC to advise and support the use of e-learning in colleges). The Best Practice Community has members worldwide – there are currently 740 + members, mostly from the UK, but many from the USA, Australia and Asia. This has enabled a rich range of experience and expertise to be shared.
The content of the Best Practice Community site consists of models and associated resources for a range of e-learning activities, for example, online discussion, online collaboration and online case studies. The activity topics were selected to appeal to tutors as likely e-learning activities. Each of the topics has been structured in four parts:
a research-based model presented in easily adopted format (PowerPoint presentation)
sample case studies of the practice (links and contributed case studies)
a selection of ‘how-to’ guides (for a range of tools, not just in-house ones)
an online discussion forum for practitioners to share experience of practice.
Members can discuss content in the discussion forums created for each topic area, respond to existing topics, and participate in discussions during events. Users can rate models and see the ratings given by others. Most content is added by the project leader: the best practice models, links to selected case studies, links to tutorials and so on. However, several users have contributed case studies based on their experience and user discussions on e-learning topics are retained for reference. The core data already exists elsewhere – the models are in published literature, case studies and tutorials, largely available on the internet. Hence, the project has gathered them together in e-learning ‘topics’ for review by the community members in an innovative, coherent and structured way. The shared expertise and experience of this wide and varied community has become available to all. The possibilities of harnessing this collective intelligence are many, and recent developments include a small number of projects that have been instigated by members in creating new types of content to share, for example the Ecto project (http://www.ectolearning.com) and the ‘Benefits of using a
VLE’ wiki (see below for more) produced by contributors after a very lively forum discussion.
Egalitarian participation
The community is a place where members interact and learn together. In this community, a range of different activities has been planned and members have participated in many different ways. It is often assumed that Web 2.0 participation is common, that everyone can and will contribute, for example, in a similar way to Wikipedia. However, the number of folk actually contributing to Web 2.0 is generally very low. For example, the Wall Street Journal reports: ‘At Digg, which has 900,000 registered users, 30 people were responsible for submitting one-third of postings on the home page’ (Warren and Jurgensen, 2007). And McAfee states that
In November of 2005, the most recent month for which comprehensive stats are available, Wikipedia had over 850,000 articles in English, and 2.9 million across all languages (including more than 10,000 in Esperanto). This content was generated by fewer than 50,000 contributors in English, and 103,000 [in] total.
Many online communities, like Digg and Wikipedia, seem to have a high level of ‘non-participants’ or ‘lurkers’ and this is true of the Best Practice Community. A recent survey and anecdotal evidence suggests that although the participants value the resources and are interested in the ongoing discussions, they contact other members directly to discuss topics further or they follow up links and resources without always feeding back to the group. Lave and Wenger (1991) argue that learning ‘is a process of participation in communities of practice, participation that is at first legitimately peripheral but that increases gradually in engagement and complexity’. Therefore, many of the Best Practice Community activities are specifically designed to actively interest and engage participation and to draw members gradually into the centre of the community, rather than waiting for it to occur.
The best practice model for an e-learning online community has run a wide range of face-to-face and online activities to encourage staff to participate in the community. The following account demonstrates that some activities are more likely to lead to staff participation in creation and development than others.
In October 2006, an event, ‘Collaborating on elearning models’, was set up to introduce staff to the existing models and to run an activity to engage them in discussion about their e-learning practice. It was intended that there would be additions to the models as an outcome of the event, but the staff felt unsure about adding to an existing model; however, they contributed items for discussion, for example:
The following is an initial list of ‘areas’ considered to be relevant to engagement – have any been missed off this list? Is this on the right lines; are there any other issues that have been overlooked?
Discussion guidelines are necessary for effective engagement.
Tutors need to decide on discussion ‘mix’ at outset (asynchronous reflection?) versus synchronous (immediacy of engagement?).
A different activity, ‘Comparing models of good practice’, asked participants to review an existing model and a sample case study describing the e-learning activity in use. The participants were able to compare the extent to which the case study matched the model, but were then able to see that the model could be used to compare with their own practice. This seems to create a sense of distance from the model that allows practitioners to use it without feeling that it is too restrictive. For example, one participant commented:
It motivated me to critically analyse the case studies – thus developing my ability to critically analyse my own practise.
In the ‘Ask the experts’ sessions, members (‘experts’) with experience of the topic were invited to present their case studies. During the session, members were able to ask open or unstructured questions to the ‘experts’ and to each other. This simple model of an online workshop has enabled members with very different levels of skill and experience to learn from and connect with each other.
Later activities with shared outcomes, which we call ‘topic workshops’, have been more successful in engaging practitioners with creating material. Indeed, these have sometimes been instigated by members, as in the discussion about potential uses for Second Life in education. A member of the community raised the topic in the forum, and another member volunteered to run a live demonstration at the university. As a result, a wiki with the discussion outcomes was created to contribute to the community. In addition, a workshop on the use of Skype using a Google docs page to collate contributions was delivered in response to questions about the use of the tool. After the event, a volunteer from the group adapted the discussions and ideas into a short guide to using Skype for teaching, which was then posted back to the community. The range of innovative suggestions suggested that the participants were considering new uses for Skype and not just enhancing existing practice. For example, they suggested that Skype could be used for:
ice breaking activities in advance of more organised group work to enable students and tutors to develop a social presence
students’ peer discussion (recorded) to reflect on as a learning article
a formal Q&A session between tutor and student as part of assessment
individual presentations by students to groups of students or to tutors
providing feedback about assessments
drama, play reading, role playing, debates; use images and icons to represent different characters, roles or teams
As the community has become more mature, other projects have emerged that do not rely on the ‘seeding’ of the community co-ordinator. For example, a recent discussion on the benefits of using a VLE started in one of the forums. This developed into a very extensive discussion with over 40 posts in a few days. The instigator and another volunteer agreed to summarise and organise the discussion into a wiki page. This is now available to the community as a valuable resource and is still being edited. The editor of the wiki said:
I found working on the recent Wiki on ‘Benefits of a VLE’ interesting and informative. I had never contributed to one before so I can now add this to my CV! After all, isn’t this e-learning thing all about social collaboration? I thought that my post precipitated the very best of this – people posted in many ideas, thoughts and experiences that I would never have got from anywhere else. The phrase ‘social collaboration’ seemed an empty one before this!
To continue the range of opportunities for egalitarian participation wikis have been created for the online discussions topic in the community to allow participants to add their own comments and ideas for activities.
Social networking
Finally, the use of Web 2.0 social networking tools such as Facebook and Ning has been explored to see what it could offer to the community. A review of these tools and the current community created in Moodle showed that:
There are a large number of asynchronous discussion forums in the Best Practice Community, but no way to see easily what was new, or who was contributing. The forums are set to send an e-mail copy to all members automatically and many members simply read the postings (or filed them) without logging on.
Facebook and Ning show ‘social exhaust’ – list postings, comments and contributions – as current activity. The Moodle community has no way to show that anything was happening. It made the site look like a flat website full of resources.
Editable personal profiles are available in the community, but they are not easily visible and it is not possible to create networks of friends, or to see the friends of your friends. Facebook makes it easy to add friends with common interests and to see the networks around them. Ning also allows you to create networks within the community, and to see friends and networks of your friends, but you can’t add them as your friend, and you can’t easily join other people’s networks.
The community has a facility for sending messages, but these don’t always work, and there is no message centre to see sent, new and saved messages. Facebook allows you to comment on a friend’s page, add a message to a ‘wall’ or to send a private message. Ning allows similar features.
Ning has now been set up as a separate ‘open’ network to provide a social networking space for the Best Practice Community – non-members can join. There are forums, videos and RSS feeds from some of the main discussions on the best practice site and there are currently 155 members of this network. The Best Practice Community now has a link to the Ning network (with an attractive image!) and RSS feeds show the recent activity.
This new network has encouraged new members to participate. There have been several postings about the use of Ning on the Ning forums from community members who had previously been only ‘lurking’:
I already have a Ning account so thought I’d come along for the ride… I enjoyed reading and taking part in the various Best Practice discussions this week through the Moodle forums.
I too have a Ning account and several different networks that I have created or am participating in. I am very interested in the power of such tools and perhaps this may make me more active here than I was in Moodle.
Yes it is interesting that people tend to prefer contributing to social sites. I am currently involved in a number of different initiatives both here in France and back in the UK involving social networks on Ning. The aims and expected outcomes of these initiatives are all quite different but there is one common feature emerging and that is that interaction between the participants is much more active and engaged on the Ning Social Networks than on the established VLEs of the different institutions (i.e. Web CT, Blackboard, Moodle, Sakai).
I’ve been following the lively recent discussions and, as ever, learning much from them. Oddly, I was thinking these discussions would be great in a Ning site or in the wider community at Classroom 2.0 when I noticed you have set up this network. Is there now a need for the Moodle space? What might be criteria for deciding where to post?
In summary, the project aimed to facilitate the creation and use of best practice models of e-learning by practitioners. An online community of practice using some Web 2.0 style tools was created and a range of activities planned and delivered. The community has enabled much harnessing of collective intelligence, egalitarian participation and the growing use of social networking. The models are not fixed templates for practitioners to ‘use’, but fluid starting points that can be shared together with our experience of using them.
A model for developing models of best practice has therefore emerged through the community of practice (Figure 4.1). Practitioners review the models provided in the community; then compare them to case studies of e-learning in their own and others’ practice in formal and informal community activities; finally they contribute their own discussion, summary or case study to inform the use of the model in practice.
Discussion
Quality: shifting the locus of ownership
Many universities have been quick to spot the practical merits of e-learning, such as enhancing the flexibility of time and place of study and helping to reach new, often global, markets. However, these expectations have been accompanied by deep concern over whether technology will be used in a way that enhances the quality of learning (e.g. Mayes, 1995, or Stiles, 2004). This, coupled with a tradition in approaches to quality in higher education towards monitoring and control, can lead institutions to adopt rather onerous and unpopular processes to assure the quality of e-learning which can stifle innovation. At Staffordshire University, the e-learning model work is central to a transformative approach to quality aimed at loosening perceived bonds of control and enabling innovation. The models are used to provide examples of good practice which academic developers can use to transform their practice as they adopt e-learning. However, combined with the supporting case studies, they provide a powerful means of enabling academic staff to interrogate both the model and their own practice. Although the models suggest approaches in which quality is inherent from the outset, the supporting case studies elucidate how it can be built into course design. Together, they provide a means of improving practice in a thoughtful way in which quality enhancement is likely to be perceived as a constructive and reflective process rather than imposed.
A deep approach to e-learning?
In assessing the importance of the strategies used by the project to share good practice in e-learning, it is useful to note that staff in higher education, faced with understanding how to use new technologies to support learning and teaching, are effectively placed in the role of student. The manner in which students approach learning and its relation to the quality of understanding has been illuminated by the research of Marton and Säljö (1997) and Entwistle (1998), which showed that students tend to take a surface or deep approach. Although we are explicit about expecting students to take a deep approach to learning and berating those who take a surface approach, it is all too common in staff development to use approaches that not only encourage a surface approach, but seem almost to impel it.
The recent ascent of ‘knowledge transfer’ and a focus on the efficiency of learning rather than its effectiveness may further encourage approaches to staff development along the lines of the ‘Nurnberg funnel’ (Carroll, 1990) model, in which learners are treated as the passive receivers of information, poured down through the ‘funnel of staff development’ into their awaiting ‘sponge-like’ brains. The tendency of such strategies to promote surface approaches is reinforced by the climate of fast-moving change in which many staff feel under time–pressure: it is our experience that time – where to find it – is one of the most frequently cited issues by those embarking on using technology to support learning.
One of the characteristics of a deep approach is the intent on the part of learners to understand rather than only to memorise (Entwistle, 1998). How to motivate this intent by designing learning environments and activities that foster a deep approach rather than inhibit it is an enduring concern among staff in higher education. Although we have found it very difficult to derive models that, when used alone, promote deep learning, it is becoming evident that the combination of strategies used as part of the e-learning models project seem to be more successful. We summarise these as follows. First, as we have noted, the case studies we provide to accompany the models seem to be used by practitioners to reflect on the model, to interrogate it or to shed more light on it. The ‘Ask the experts’ sessions allow practitioners to develop their understanding of models and improve the quality of their own technology-supported learning through verbal question and answer sessions around the use of a particular model. Both these methods are seen as helping to promote a deeper understanding of a model in order to apply it. Other strategies we use, principally to help share good practice, encourage a deep approach in other ways. For example, during the ‘Sharing good practice in e-learning’ seminars, we ask practitioners already established in using e-learning to share their approach with novice practitioners by comparing it with one of ‘best practice models’. This encourages the established practitioners to reflect on their own approach as well as engage them with other approaches. The depth of critical reflection evidenced – the models seem to enable practitioners to critique their own approach – and its success in engaging novice practitioners has been one of the most revelatory successes of the project.
Formal staff development strategies
In addition to the strategies towards ‘informal’ staff development described above, e-learning models have also been embedded into formal, accredited, postgraduate-level staff development opportunities (Stiles and Yorke, 2006). The intention with which models are used here is opposite to that described above where they were seen primarily as a way of helping practitioners focus on the practical aspects of using e-learning to understand underlying quality issues and pedagogic theory. In the formal staff development opportunities, models are used primarily to help practitioners make links between theories of learning and teaching and e-learning practice, to help them understand how to put theory into practice.
Bridging chasms
The ability for non-academic staff to engage academic staff and to communicate with them meaningfully across their institution is imperative if technological developments are to lend and develop the agility sought of them. At Staffordshire University we are using the e-learning models work as a significant way of enabling learning technologists to develop meaningful discourse with academic staff in the design and development of e-learning, which goes well beyond the topic of ‘how to use the technology’ that such discourse often covers.
Models can act effectively as conceptual frameworks for approaches to e-learning and at the same time act as ‘bridges’ between practice and theory. As conceptual frameworks, they can provide a means of enabling academic and non-academic staff to develop a shared language and understanding of approaches to e-learning, although as we have discussed this process needs to be augmented with other resources, such as case studies. As ‘bridges’, models allow ‘tribes’ to gain deeper insight into the theoretical underpinnings of those approaches and to discuss them in both practical and more theoretical terms. Models also provide a means for comparing different approaches to e-learning which, together with the greater theoretical understanding they foster, can enable discussion about the appropriateness of different models for different educational contexts or aims in a critical and objective way. Used in this way they provide an approach to staff development which is exploratory rather than prescriptive.
Conclusion
We end this chapter by commenting on some important issues highlighted by the e-learning models project. First, we have suggested models can be thought of as representations of practice. However, finding an adequate way of representing practice has proved extremely difficult. That said, some of the characteristics of good representations are becoming clear. These include simplicity and accessibility. It is important that neither jargon nor the framework itself act as barriers to initial engagement. The framework needs to be self-evident – as in Gilly Salmon’s five-stage model (2004) – or transparent. It is also vitally important that the model seems to make sense so that it engages at a ‘practice level’. Most importantly, if they are to be taken seriously, models need to be based on sound evidence of what works and on credible theories of learning and teaching.
Despite the difficulty of finding adequate representations, the e-learning models project has clearly demonstrated the power models have in attracting and engaging practitioners and in building a community of practice. However, as we have stressed, models need to be augmented by other strategies to enable them to be useful beyond that initial revelation of ‘common sense’, and at a level that enables a deep understanding of how they enhance learning and teaching and can be put into practice. Diverse strategies also need to be used to keep the community vibrant and progressive and to prevent it from becoming a static resource.
Finally, there is the issue of ownership. Salient among the diverse strategies aimed at encouraging a sense of ownership of the models among individuals and the community of practice we have suggested is to see the models not as the static representation of expert practice, but as adaptable. Models are useful, as we have noted, in providing initial conceptual frameworks for people to start to engage with how e-learning might be approached, but that is also their limitation. Meaningful practice is too fluid to be captured fully by a framework and so it is important to ensure that the framework is used only so long as it is useful and does not becomes a stricture.
As we have discussed, ownership of an approach at an individual level is almost a necessary criterion for promoting reflective practice in which concerns for quality or the critical enhancement of practice can be adopted by practitioners themselves. However, important as individual ownership is, institutional ownership is crucial to ensuring that the good practice that the models endeavour to mediate is recognised and endorsed.
In our experience, it is clear that models provide a way of engaging different ‘tribes’ in the joint pursuit of sharing good practice in e-learning. Moreover, there is good reason to hope that, by using the additional strategies we have described and models to mediate ‘expert practice’, we can promote consistent good practice across the many territories which make up a university. There is good evidence to suggest that the community of practice we have established within the university is helping to provide ‘horizontal coherence’ (Romanainen, 2004) by providing a way of enabling novice practitioners to learn from those with greater expertise. Within the community, the models help to mediate the transition of novices from being (legitimate) peripheral observers of good practice towards being expert practitioners by providing representations of ‘expert’ knowledge. Importantly, they promote coherence through the consistent representation of ‘expert practice’.
Although a community of practice approach may help foster horizontal coherence, this is only one step towards ensuring that good practice is embedded. Indeed, such approaches may not have the means to achieve full organisational embedding until they themselves are integrated into existing organisational processes, which can be a challenge:
The very characteristics that make communities of practice a good fit for stewarding knowledge – autonomy, practitioner-orientation, informality, crossing boundaries – are also characteristics that make them a challenge for traditional hierarchical organizations. How this challenge is going to affect these organizations remains to be seen.
Stiles and Yorke (2004) discuss the importance of achieving vertical and horizontal coherence in the effective embedding of e-learning. In other words, practice, institutional policy and processes need to be in consistent harmony across the institution for embedding to be achieved. Vertical coherence is the role and realm of governance and although communities of practice may provide an informal means of establishing horizontal coherence, they can only promote institutional coherence to the extent to which the processes and practice reflect or inform institutional policy.
In our opinion institutional quality processes hold the key to ensuring that these horizontal and vertical dimensions are joined up. Thus, in the specific case of the e-learning models project, a key strand of work still in progress is the development of particular models, which will be ‘exposed’ to university quality processes with a view to achieving the university’s endorsement of those models and embedding them into the quality processes. A secondary aim is to ‘badge’ certain models in the development of a ‘fast track’ through the quality process: basically, the idea is that course leaders who can demonstrate that their course adheres to one of the ‘badged’ models need not go through the more onerous process of demonstrating the validity of the approach.
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