consequently they were often not appropriately overseen, and this led to courses
omitting the collection of relevant information for quality assurance and
enhancement purposes.
■ The disaggregation of processes found in e-learning courses - usually organised
so that the tasks of design, delivery and assessment were carried out by different
teams - affected the levels of coordination and communication among team
members, and this impacted in particular on the allocation of responsibilities for
quality assurance processes, so a survey might be designed by a development
team, but not then administered by the delivery team because no-one was
designated to carry it out.
■ E-learning course teams were taught by a mixture of full and part time tutors,
tutors with fee-based contracts and tutors working from home or elsewhere. This
distributed feature of teams was often not fully recognised by course leaders who
often failed to adapt their communication mechanisms appropriately, tending to
rely on the rather informal strategies used for on-campus course teams. As a
result, team members who were located off campus did not have all the
information regarding quality assurance and enhancement processes in place.
■ The distance of students directly impacted on the implementation of the
mechanisms for establishing student views as students were usually unable to
attend on-campus meetings and tutors were not able to directly interact with
students in order to obtain feedback about course processes. However, these
difficulties were found to be partially compensated for by strong and trusting on-
line relationships between students and tutors which were built up in some
courses, though these opportunities were not always taken up by course teams.
The fourth factor identified in the literature - openness to review - was not found to
impact on the application of mechanisms to collect feedback from students. The
possibilities offered to course teams by the use of technologies to record and collect
student participation, views and feedback were overlooked.
The specific impact that these factors were found to have on the mechanisms for
collecting feedback - module evaluations and student representation - will be
presented in the next two sections.
5.1. Module evaluations
Three of the four case studies had module evaluations as their main strategy for
collecting feedback from students.
The data gathered about module evaluations showed that this quality assurance
mechanism was problematic even at the level of formal compliance. Each case study
presented a different way of implementing module evaluations, and most of them
showed an evolving practice, in that they had changed their practice more than once
in recent years either to get better response rates or to get a higher quality of
feedback. A brief account of the approach to module evaluations found in each case
study is presented below:
In Course A a number of different methods were tried before coming to agree
on a simple but well-defined strategy, which involved sending a personalised e-
mail with a small number of open-ended questions after each assignment
together with the assignment feedback. The e-mail was sent by the