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Abstract
Higher education institutions are introducing standardised electronic course profiles (ECPs) to advance quality outcomes. Involving both ‘message’ and ‘medium’, they alter traditional practice and interpretations. Critical examination is required of the values, presuppositions and operation of the nascent system. Lacking much theory, analysis relies on emerging empirical evidence. Having considered the ECP's context and composition, its message is then scrutinised, attention focussing on the intent of the document and complicated elements it contains. Next, the medium is examined, with concern expressed over technical aspects, and equity effects implicit in this new form of delivery. From these investigations, a logical exegesis details how an ECP can maximise pedagogic dividend. Conclusions suggest developmental avenues for the best practice ECP and support its eventual inclusion in competitive e-learning suites.
Notes
1. http://www.med.unc.edu/ois/etg/eshelp/ (accessed October 2007).
2. See http://www.park.edu/cetl/quicktips/syllabus.html (accessed January 2009).
3. Material in this subsection sourced, sometimes verbatim, from Institutional websites.
4. Logically, this must be so, since universities do not advertise extra-mural outcomes such as transcendence, political acumen, achieving a fortune, etc. They can only promise outcomes pursuant to their teaching interventions. Any others must somehow occur by mitosis within a scholarly ‘ambience’. See Barrie (2007, 456).
5. For fuller Australian research on graduate attributes, see Atrens et al. (Citation2004), Barrie (Citation2004 ,Citation2006 ,Citation2007), Bath et al. (Citation2004), Crosthwaite et al. (Citation2006) and Manathunga, Lant, and Mellick (Citation2007).
6. See, further, Krathwohl (Citation2002).
7. For examples of detailed self-examination, see Atrens et al. (Citation2004), Bath et al. (Citation2004) and Crosthwaite et al. (Citation2006).
8. In light of Sumison and Goodfellow's (2004) and Barrie's (2006, 2007) research on the complexity of graduate attributes, the pedagogic efficacy of actually checking on-screen boxes could be reconsidered. Note also the view of Bath et al. (2004, 316): ‘… a checklist approach to graduate attributes is considered extremely dangerous as it encourages a fragmented curriculum, as do mechanistic approaches to teaching and learning such as the ‘bolt-on approach’ …’.
9. The best practice account offered here proceeds within the fairly mechanistic framework so far developed. Yet, even if the ECP's message were altered (e.g. made less routine, more qualitative, relativised or softened), the electronic delivery medium still has its own imperatives. The question for the future is how much educationalists wish to subscribe to the apparent Diktats of a generic electronic format.
10. In so far as this interpretation might be simplistic, it can be argued as logically congruent with the managerialism dominating the modern university. Actually, it adopts the most comprehensive of Barrie's (2006, 229) phenomenonographic interpretations of graduate attributes (i.e. as ‘enabling’).