18 | PROMOTION: ULCC
CLOUD FORMATIONS FOR CURRICULUM TRANSFORMATION
How the University of London Computer Centre (ULCC) helped Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) provide a cost- eff ective, personalised, extensible and mobile learning experience to over 34,000 students.
ABOVE: Manchester Metropolitan University
The challenge In 2010, with top level support and direction from the Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Student Success, Manchester Metropolitan University set up the Enhancing Quality and Assessment for Learning (EQAL) Programme. This programme set out to make a step-change improvement in student satisfaction by refreshing the entire undergraduate curriculum. Change on this scale is extraordinary for the sector and the university’s new Business Improvement Team worked hard to ensure that work in four complementary areas was coordinated effectively.
What are the four strands and their intensions?
Each strand of work depended on the others to deliver the programme’s intended benefi ts. New rules were required for the new undergraduate curriculum that would dovetail with smarter administrative processes and systems. Quality assurance and enhancement processes had to be redesigned to cope with the simultaneous redesign and approval of every fi rst year module, then every second year and eventually every fi nal year. New web and mobile technology had to be developed and built to ensure that all
students would receive maximum benefi t from the changes.
The approach After an extensive and public review of its learning technology requirements, MMU chose
to move from Blackboard Vista to an integrated and extensible Virtual Learning Environment that could provide students with seamless and personalised access to study information and learning activities from a variety of devices. MMU decided on a blended shared-services approach to deliver its vision based on integrating cloud services – Moodle, Equella, Talis Aspire, campusM and Offi ce 365 – with administrative systems run in- house. To deliver this ambitious vision, MMU needed an experienced hosting partner with a strong track record of integration and customisation who was willing to collaborate with other partners. This required the right partners who had the skill and expertise to deliver MMU’s vision, but also make sure there was expertise in the institution to bring it all together and wrap it around the learner. The Open Source nature of Moodle meant that MMU could customise and experiment
whilst drawing on ULCC’s extensive experience in delivering Moodle to the UK education sector. “We knew that people knew Moodle a lot
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better than us, and wanted to tap into that expertise. Hence the decision to go with a shared service and hence the decision to go with ULCC, because we’d heard very good things about them from the rest of the sector.” Mark Stubbs, Head of Learning & Research Technologies.
The project so far MMUs timescales
were fi erce: six months of planning, consultation and preparation culminated
in new curriculum rules, which
set up the fi rst 12-month implementation cycle. Web forms were developed for capturing curriculum once and ensuring that all relevant information flowed without further manual data entry to the systems where it was needed. Programme teams and module leaders really stepped up to the challenge, entering their newly designed
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