b) Policy

Description and Reflection

Once the School of Mathematical Sciences began to use QMplus for all its modules, I felt that we needed some guidelines that would help to ensure that usage was reasonably consistent. I wrote a draft document that we discussed at a Teaching and Learning Committee meeting in May 2014. Based on feedback from that meeting, I revised the document and produced a final version dated 1 August 2014. I put the document on our staff intranet and circulated the URL to staff.

In my policy document for QMplus module pages, I distinguished two types of content that I called formal and academic. I used the term "formal content" to refer to features that should be present for every module, such as information about the module organiser, syllabus, learning outcomes, etc. Most of this is set up and maintained centrally. Initially, this meant by me, but I am in the process of handing some responsibility for maintaining the formal content over to Professional Services colleagues, in particular our Undergraduate Programme Administrator. I used the term "academic content" to refer to teaching materials that would normally be created and/or maintained by the current module organiser.

The document ends with a very brief strategy section, which was more of a place holder than a serious strategy. I'm pleased to see that I have accomplished most of the three key strategy points that I listed in 2014. The point that still needs some work, and probably always will, is to improve consistency further. It was my expectation that I would revise this document again fairly soon although I have not yet done so. Our E-learning Unit is now in the process of developing a new e-learning strategy for the whole of Queen Mary, part of which is that Schools should also develop their own consistent strategies. I have provided some comments on the current Queen Mary draft, but there is not much point thinking seriously about revising our School strategy until the Queen Mary strategy has been agreed. It is likely to include a template for Schools to follow.

Policy documents like this need revising fairly frequently because the target moves and QMplus is evolving. In a footnote to our current School guidelines I referred to docking of Moodle blocks no longer being possible and an expectation that this would be fixed soon. That is no longer my expectation. I presume that the facility for docking blocks has been superseded by the facility to "zoom in" on the central content area, which happens automatically on smaller displays as part of the "responsive design" that was added fairly recently. So I will need to replace references to docking blocks with the suggestion to use the "zoom in" button when I revise this document.

A problem that I always spend a lot of time grappling with when developing any kind of policy document is deciding how prescriptive it should be. I don't want to state that staff must use facility X only to find that facility X is removed, replaced or significantly revised following the next software upgrade! In order to retain credibility, a policy document has to be flexible enough to accommodate such changes in the system to which the policy relates. I have also learnt from observing my colleagues' reactions over many years that they don't like to be told what to do, and often the only way to get a policy agreed at all is to express much of it as guidelines and recommendations rather than as firm policy. This is why our current QMplus policy document is actually entitled "QMplus Guidelines and Strategy".

One thing our current QMplus policy document does not mention is our School policy to make most of our module information publicly accessible. I probably didn't include this because it was what staff expected and so was not contentious, but it should be included when the policy is next revised. Nevertheless, open access involved quite a lot of negotiation when the School moved over to QMplus and it seems to be a somewhat unusual way to use a VLE. Other Schools at Queen Mary, especially in our Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, keep most of their information password-protected, which means that neither I nor my students can access it. I think this insistence on closed access is because these Schools' first use of the web was via a VLE rather than a conventional web site.

Previously in the School of Mathematical Sciences we published all our teaching materials on our web site and there was never any thought of restricting access. I think that was partly because there was no easy way for individual module organisers to do it. But we were (and still are) happy for our teaching materials to be freely available (in most cases) because it provides good publicity and allows prospective students to see what we provide. By contrast to a conventional web site, VLEs control access and require users to log in, and I don't think that guest access to QMplus was initially possible. Together with colleagues in one or two other Science & Engineering Schools, Physics in particular, I remember arguing the case for making guest access available. Currently, we have the option of allowing guest access to a QMplus page or not, and I think this has been the case ever since the School began mainstream use of QMplus.

Our access policy is that all of our undergraduate teaching materials are publicly available, which means that they can be accessed by guest users who are not required to log in. Our teaching materials for modules used only in our high-fee MSc in Mathematical Finance are closed access since students pay a premium for this programme. Our landing page, student support and generic information page are all publicly accessible. Until recently, we had one other generic information page that was not publicly accessible, which in fact was the first page I set up by migrating the content from Queen Mary's previous VLE, Blackboard. Now all our generic information pages are open-access but I allow only logged-in users to access a few resources. (I discovered very recently a way to do this by restricting access to users with a non-empty user id in their profile, which seems to work.)

I restrict access to a small amount of information that we cannot release publicly, such as how students can install Maple for free on their own computers, and an e-book version of a module textbook written by one of my colleagues that is commercially published. I have progressively made more information public. My original policy was not to make information publicly available if I felt it would only be of interest to current students but I have now changed to a more flexible policy of making information publicly available unless there is some very good reason not to, such as a legal or commercial reason.

A policy matter that I am currently working on is the School of Mathematical Sciences Q-Review Policy and Guidelines. Q-Review is the Queen Mary lecture capture system (currently using Echo360). Lecture capture is generally popular with students but not with staff. Q-Review has been available for at least four years but has not been used much by the School of Mathematical Sciences until this year. One concern staff have is that if students know that a lecture will be recorded they will skip the lecture with the intention of watching the recording later, whereas the recording should be used as backup, such as for when a student has to miss a lecture for a good reason, or for revision.

A specific concern for Mathematical Sciences staff is that many prefer to lecture by developing their mathematical argument on a blackboard, or failing that a whiteboard, which requires writing a lot of detailed mathematical notation during a lecture. This is not captured in any very useful way when a lecture is recorded, at least not by our current lecture capture system. Staff take the view that this makes recording lectures pointless, especially since we normally provide detailed, often typeset, module notes in QMplus. Students claim that they like to listen to a lecture whilst following their own lecture notes and/or the notes from QMplus, although staff generally remain unconvinced about the value of this.

In the hope of improving student satisfaction generally, the School of Mathematical Sciences management were keen for Q-Review to be used as widely as possible. About a year ago, there was discussion about making the whole Science and Engineering Faculty a "Q-Review Faculty", meaning that lectures would be recorded by default, but Schools or individual lecturers could opt out. Our Director of Taught Programmes, our Education Manager and I all believed that it had been decided last summer that Science and Engineering would be a Q-Review Faculty from this academic year, on the basis of which our Teaching and Learning Committee agreed that Mathematical Sciences would be a Q-Review School from this academic year. Therefore, I added a "Q-Review Block" to all our QMplus module pages. We then discovered that it had not been agreed that Science and Engineering would be a Q-Review Faculty, so we had to drop our proposed policy to be a Q-Review School. In view of the lack of enthusiasm from staff we felt that we did not have enough Queen Mary support.

It was finally agreed very late in the autumn semester that Science and Engineering would be a Q-Review Faculty from the spring semester, so we took the opportunity to become a Q-Review School. At our Teaching and Learning Committee meeting in March I was asked to develop a Q-Review Policy and Guidelines to try to codify some of the information we had gleaned so far about how we could and should use Q-Review. I wrote a first version of this document by selecting information that I thought was most relevant from the fairly large amount already provided on the web by our E-learning Unit. I tried to focus on issues that I knew were of concern to my colleagues and my first draft had as part of our policy that staff should check that their lecture recordings were "fit for purpose".

However, our Teaching and Learning Committee took the view that this was not the job of the lecturer and that it should be the students' responsibility to complain promptly if a lecture recording was not fit for purpose. In my third and current draft, I moved the paragraph about checking recordings from the policy to the guidelines and changed it significantly so as effectively not to require lecturers to take any responsibility at all. The review period expired and I had no further comments, so my latest draft has become our policy and I have put it on our staff intranet and notified all staff.

Evidence

I normally write policy documents initially in Microsoft Word, which I then export or print to PDF so that I can circulate the document to a small group of people for discussion, usually before, during and/or after some committee meeting. Relatively few of my colleagues in the School of Mathematical Sciences use Windows (most prefer Linux), so they tend not to have access to Microsoft Word or a reliable alternative that will open Word documents. I therefore normally circulate documents as PDF, which colleagues using other platforms can open reliably. However, I prefer to use HTML for documents on the web unless there is very good reason not to. For documents that I write, I have the source version in Microsoft Word, which I convert to HTML. This means it will subsequently be easy for anybody with appropriate access to edit the version in QMplus without having to deal with the problem of editing a PDF file without access to the source document! I provide my final PDF versions of two policy documents below since the HTML versions are on our intranet, which is not publicly accessible.

QMplus Guidelines and Strategy (Francis Wright, August 2014)
Q-Review Policy and Guidelines (Francis Wright, May 2016)

Francis Wright's CMALT ePortfolio

Francis Wright's CMALT ePortfolio

CMALT 3

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