Contributed by Organizations or Campuses, CMS, and E-Learning

Oakland University's LMS policy on support and users of Moodle and other online learning management software.

This paper analyses the university as an Internet intermediary in the current climate of online distance education, classifies the stakeholders associated with the university in Web course management, and explores the need for an “Instructional Design Copyright Law”. The situation is likened to a theatrical production, with front-of-house preparations, backstage operations, and tragic characters.

Higher education institutions undertake a range of approaches to evaluating and making judgments about
the quality of their e-learning provision. This paper begins by exploring benchmarking as one current
strategy in common use in universities to identify and implement quality practices: from the use of
checklists (for example, of best practices and standards) to a more contemporary dynamic systems approach involving continuous cycles of feedback and improvement centred around the learners' experiences of elearning.

These practices are influenced by the teachers' design of e-learning and emerging technologies as
well as by the institutional and societal contexts in which both learners and teachers operate. We give an
account of two major evaluation studies at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), utilising a systems
approach to investigate the consequences of e-learning, and we inquire into the value of this particular
institutional approach for deriving e-learning quality. We use selections from the large dataset to describe
and analyse students' and teaching staff's experiences of an e-learning system (LMS) over a two-year
period. Our findings reveal that learners' experiences warrant consideration in shaping future e-learning
developments at UTS, and that students value e-learning in facilitating their access to education for making choices about their learning and for enabling engagement in collaborative and interactive learning activities, while they also recognise the current constraints on e-learning imposed by the developers of LMS technologies.

Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia has a strong record of innovation in e-learning. LAMS (the Learning Activity Management System) is a new generation of e-learning software based on the concept of "Learning Design." LAMS has been under development at Macquarie since 2003, and after a number of individual course implementations in 2004/2005, an year long enterprise-wide rollout of the system was begun in mid 2005, with a likely second year follow-on project after an evaluation of the first year in mid 2006. This project, LAMS @ Macquarie, is investigating the issues associated with rollout, training, and adoption of a Learning Design system across a typical university.

As students initially learn how to work in a distance education learning environment, they can become frustrated because of the time it takes to "get around." When this happens, the instructor often has to spend a great deal of time responding to a variety of trouble-shooting questions. Regardless of the distance education courseware in use or the level of sophistication with technology that a student has, problems typically surface with each new course.

As a strategy for addressing this issue proactively, the author created a solution that was specifically designed to highlight the technology skills needed throughout the course. The goal was to reduce the amount of frustration that students often felt as they learned the new technology so that they could focus more readily on course content. The solution was the development of a preliminary assignment -- an on-line Scavenger Hunt -- that prompted students to learn or review all the technology-related skills they would need in the on-line course in a fun, non-threatening and purposeful way.

The use of the Scavenger Hunt game has made the use of a web-based course management system, like Blackboard, less threatening for students and has significantly reduced the need for additional instructor time to deal with technology-related issues throughout the course.