Changing Practices in the Development of Digital Resources

The scale of investment in new technologies by learning organisations now generates e-learning projects whose long-term success is no longer independent of the character and structure of the host organisation. Organisations expect an efficiency that will allow their investment to generate impact beyond the lifetime of any individual project. To achieve this successfully requires an organisational shift in the processes and practices associated with an innovation. Linking process with practices opens the way for generating measurable and specified change in terms of human and organisational behaviour. This can be set in the context of a production or content life-cycle.The e-Learning Maturity Model (eMM) provides a first step in being able to identifyprocess and practice sets that may be associated with individual educational technological innovations, such as adopting a content management system (CMS). The question is how to approach managing the changes that adopting a CMS will bring? eMM can provide a framework to help identify stakeholders in both old and new practices, to identify and agree information flows and dependencies as well as ownership and use of artefacts and information and the scope of responsibilities. This approach, fully consistent with established socio-technical approaches to organisational management and driven by the capacity for shared understanding provided by high level modelling, provides a promising way of embedding new practices in e-learning. The HEA Pathfinder project at the University of Manchester builds on Manchester’s benchmarking pilot in which eMM was trialled under the constraints presented by UK Higher Education. This included its ability to assess high-volume data representing suborganisation level units (such as individual faculties) and specific organisational functions, rather than being based primarily on data generated by projects that are considered to be representative of an organisation. This ability to use eMM as a tailored tool provided the basis for its use in identifying and constructing new processes and information flows relevant to the introduction of new technologies.