We make online courses with partners in the University of London family, employers and other organisations.
New ideas – business planning
New ideas usually emerge from our deep relationships with our partners in the federation, or we might be approached about a new collaboration, or we might put a call out around subjects that we have identified for new work.
We’ll share our market insight, and then work with the partner to develop an initial business case. If that looks promising, we will do the detailed business planning together, agree commercial terms, one of our Academic Project Managers is assigned to the project and it enters production.
(Our marketing and quality teams are also brought in at this point to work on the recruitment campaign and steer the programme through the academic approvals process, if needed.)
Production – our approach
Once we’ve agreed to do a course together, our digital learning specialists work closely with faculty to produce high quality modules.
There’s a world of difference between putting your learning materials online or live-lecturing over the web – and creating digital-first high quality online learning experiences.
While the principles behind effective teaching and learning are similar whether you are on campus or online, the practice can be very different, so you can’t just ‘lift and shift’ from one mode to another and expect it to work.
To do it well, it has to be a collaboration between subject matter experts, people who understand the pedagogy behind online learning, and people with the technical knowledge to make it sing – multimedia, web development, platform expertise, UX design….
(You also have to think about how to write for the web, copyright, digital library licences, accessibility, how ‘contact’ and learning hours work online, universal design, cultural applicability of materials, structuring feedback and assessments & etc.)
That’s why we treat every development as a co-creation, and have a guided process that enables everyone to bring their talents together to develop high quality online learning that’s built to last and to work well at scale.
This simple overview shows how we do it: