Proposal
Proposal to director, ITforDev. ITforDev is a fictional mid-sized, distributed and virtual organization of IT professionals who offer their time at zero or low cost to grassroots and community-based organizations.
Upon the recent completion of our e-learning exploration, assessment and planning phase, we have decided to implement Moodle as the learning management system (lms) and general e-learning server software. This decision is based on a number of factors with the selection process outlined below.
A selection matrix was developed to assess the suitability of available LMS systems. This matrix was founded on a combination of an existing model, the Bates and Poole’s (2003) SECTIONS framework, with the inclusion of a secondary stage of more context specific criteria evaluated – our IDEAL extension to SECTIONS. These criteria were designed to constrain the underlying SECTIONS framework within our current context and ensure the selection of the most suitable system. SECTIONS facilitated a better examination of broader organizational and pedagogical issues – an important issue as our organizational expertise lies in technology.
The SECTIONS framework provides a set of heuristics to follow while evaluating educational technology across;
Students: what is known about potential students, their use of technology, their motivations, context, etc.
Ease of user and Reliability: How easy is it for instructors and students to use it for learning?
Costs: What are the various costs involved?
Interactivity: what types and levels of interactivity will it support? Can it be extended to accommodate more?
Organizational Issues: How is the organizational culture regarding technology, what changes and/or assistance might be needed at an organizational level?
Novelty: How new and ‘trendy’ is the technology?
Speed: How efficient is the technology with all users/roles
time i.e. how quickly can a course be designed and delivered?
The secondary IDEAL selection criteria provide some guidelines to help further assess the systems;
Ideology: Since the ideologies our organization and associated organizations are aligned along is central to their functioning, the stated or implied ‘ideology’ of the systems and platforms is important.
Development Environment: As an activity in organizational learning, it has been decided to contribute an open source extension to the chosen system within whatever public domain channels seem appropriate. As such, the development culture around the chosen LMS is vital.
Extensibility: See above.
Adaptability: See above.
Leverage the diversity of our team: Since we are careful to acknowledge individual learning styles, the software must be appropriately positioned to accommodate a diverse set of learners.
As our budget is severely limited, we were forced to make this a central consideration. However, due to the inclusion of several in-kind contributions of basic hosting, technical consulting, etc., the LMS became one of the few outstanding components to procure before moving on to deployment and testing phase.