About the duologue project - Purpose & Background

(page 1 of 5)

Purpose

The duologue project set out to pioneer and assess the value of the Blackboard system for an English department which had not hitherto ventured into the world of Virtual Learning Environments. (About Blackboard™)

We used the system as established by the Durham University Learning Technologies team — duo (Durham University Online) — to pilot, develop and evaluate a variety of VLE features across a representative range of postgraduate and undergraduate modules in English Studies. Our immediate purpose was to introduce and test the uses of this platform for developing learning and teaching support in our department, particularly at a time of rising numbers and diminishing resources; and to explore the responses of students and of colleagues with varying levels of e-confidence and expertise. Our further aim was to share our experiences with English colleagues elsewhere, particularly with those who might be contemplating a similar trial, and who might welcome the chance to discuss the pros and cons with fellow novices.

Although we had considered the prospect of devoting a project to developing one or two more 'advanced' resources for one or two modules, we rejected the 'hot-house' approach as inappropriate for our circumstances. Such exclusive experiments might have been of interest to other e-learning developers, but, at our stage in 2001, did not strike us as especially useful for most of our students or for our department.

We committed the funds instead largely to offering some 'goodwill' hours to colleagues (5 hours each) for getting acquainted with the system and for putting some basics online, and to team members (20 hours each, in all) for training, duo development, peer-mentoring, project management, meetings, liaison with university and LTSN support, evaluation, report-writing and dissemination activities; the remaining funds went towards dissemination costs. We drew on the considerable expertise of the English Subject Centre and of the Durham University Learning Technologies Team for guidance in participant induction and technical advice; the Learning Technologies Team also helped to evaluate student response through their annual duo statistical surveys. Colleagues in both centres also expressed a kind interest in all our efforts, and kept encouragement at a high level throughout.

top

Background and contexts

When we began to become aware of duo, the system had been in place for just over 12 months and had already generated 9-10,000 student user-units—an extraordinarily rapid take-up of the system, going far beyond the limited trial initially envisaged by the Learning Technologies Team and the university was already being cited as a flagship client. We were among the few departments, it seemed, still generally immune to VLE fever; and one or two of the others were already keen web-users, employing wide-ranging web-resources of their own. We were not averse to IT or entirely computer illiterate. Individual colleagues in English had developed various specialist web-resources, and we also had some basic programme information available in the student pages on our public web-site; but duo seemed to offer a common platform for making more module-specific resources and facilities widely available to students, and the system looked useable even for the more technophobic among us.

top

Immediate prompts

As with most projects, various forces (pedagogical, instrumental, individual and institutional) triggered duologue. They included (in no particular order):