Abstract:

Only two and a half years ago in Riga Technical University (RTU) from complex maze of different systems, portal with essential tools for students and staff – email, study data, academic databases resources were created. An open source system – Moodle – was integrated in portal for e-learning and all data were given through special synchronization system. In the end result was an e-learning course, generated for each subject and teacher separately with automatically enrolled students. Every term there are about 2500 courses in RTU with all of 17000 students participating. System was implemented with minimal resources. When most of technical issues were solved, it was time to promote new portal and especially unified e-learning system.
Some of lecturers responded quickly and began working with Moodle. Their feedback was collected and in possible cases used to make system more convenient. They were also given a chance to participate in discussions regarding new e-learning platform and its usage. Some progress showed up, but still majority of work had to be done.
To raise usage of e-learning system and it could be done only by involving new teachers. We defined four keywords to each of our approaches – teaching, encouraging, inspiring and supporting. To teach academic staff video tutorials and textual documents were created. They are rounded up in special well designed Moodle course where every student and employee is enrolled automatically. More than 1/3 of University’s lecturers have already participated in first level workshops and their feedback is used to make them better and concentrate on areas where more support from IT Helpdesk or second level workshops is needed. Workshops are organized at least once in two weeks.
Department of IT was also supported from pro-rector of Studies. At the beginning of fall term 2008 a call from pro-rector to place subject’s calendar plan and requirements for successful passing in Moodle was given. A lot of academic staff began to show interest about Moodle and everyday click count in Moodle grew up 3 times. Together with growing demand for e-materials from students this encourage was a successful and similar call will be given each term.
Significant part of academic staff doesn’t work with e-learning, because they are simply afraid. To inspire them make first steps, IT Helpdesk hammered out graphical upgrade that will be included in to synchronization application. Selling this standard to lecturers not only gives chance to gather information from each of them individually, but also makes e-course easier understandable for everyone.
RTU has technical background, so it is essential for students to know subjects as mathematics, physics chemistry etc. There were a plenty of e-study materials but there was no chance to place them in each of about 25-35 courses for subject and still maintain good course managing. To support these lecturers, materials for each subject were placed in one course where more than 1500 students from different small courses were enrolled. This project was successful and metacourse system is used now for smaller and more specific subjects like material science or descriptive geometry.
RTU is trying a different approach from what is used in most of Universities, so there is nothing not worth trying. There is still a lot of work to be done, but for next steps new ideas and solutions are needed.

Keywords:

e-learning, promotion, marketing mix, marketing, goals, strategy.