Identification of critical time-consuming student support activities in e-learning

Higher Education Staff involved in online education often struggles with organizing their student support activities. This is due, to a large extent, to the high workload of such activities. A survey was conducted to identify the most critical support activities. The rationale of the survey is to identify support activities that are both time-consuming and amenable to the use of information technology. We distinguish support related to Learning contents, Learning processes and Student products. The brainstorm representing stakeholders resulted in four priority categories of support activities: assessment of student contributions, answering questions of the students, monitoring and assessment of study progress and community and group support. We chose to work in our Technology Development programme on Learning Networks on the Question-and-answering issue as this involves an almost continuous interaction of a tutor.