Delivering What Students say they Want On-line: Towards Academic Participation in the Enfranchisement of e-Learners?

Abstract

Sustainable e-Learning holds the promise of enabling higher education to meet the needs of a large and diverse market. Central to this is the response of academic staff teams in meeting the needs of individual learners, in order to enfranchise them within an evolving, enabling learning context. Enfranchisement is underpinned by the management of learner-expectations in the value-added nature of the on-line learning experience. However, learner enfranchisement demands that on-line interaction is both accepted by academic teams and educationally liberating. Liberation requires meaningful existence, and hence active participation, within a 'supercomplex' world, in which both individual identities and the ability to manage information are tested. This paper assesses ways in which learner-enfranchisement can be encouraged by academic teams. It pivots around the outcomes from student evaluations of a strategic e-Learning implementation in one UK higher education institution. The conclusions that it draws focus upon strategies for adding pedagogic value, increasing academic participation and developing e-Learning sustainability in order to enfranchise e-learners. The argument highlights ways in which academic teams can move from a battery-intensive approach to e-Learning towards one that is more free-ranging. It highlights how academic staff can increase the sustainable, inclusive value of the learning experience at a minimised cost. From this basis, it is argued that any extant disenfranchisement in the delivery of e-Learning can begin to be addressed by increased team-work. A by-product for those teams is that in the very process of engaging their students, there is more hope that they will in-turn become empowered within their own use of e-Learning.