8.3 The subject materials

Both learners and educators rely on high quality content to learn and to teach. E-learning content can take a number of forms, from entire online courses of varying duration (for example ECDL), to discrete 'chunks' of learning sometimes known as 'learning objects'. Whatever its form, content must above all be relevant and quality assured. The DfES comments that the UK currently has an underdeveloped e-learning resources market (DfES 2003a), and this is true in social care, where high quality e-learning content is thin on the ground. Given the number of potential learners, there is scope for a thriving market, and partnerships between social care organisations, educational organisations and commercial developers will be key to this.
A prerequisite for developing this market in the social care sector will be supporting and implementing guidelines, standards and specifications. Of particular importance are pedagogical guidelines, which ensure that content is developed with input from both social care subject matter experts and instructional designers who understand the specific context of online learning. Standards, specifications and guidelines for usability and accessibility will ensure that as broad a range of users as possible, including those with disabilities, find the content efficient, effective and satisfying to use. Finally, technical standards and specifications are overseen for the UK public sector by the e-Government Unit and the e-Government Interoperability Framework (e-GIF), and set by national and by international e-learning standards bodies. They aim to ensure that content can be catalogued, located, downloaded and effectively used by all educators and learners, and that consequently the e-learning content market is as open as possible.
Where the market for social care learning content is too small or specialist to provide viable commercial opportunities, appropriate funding support and resources will need to be provided, subject to quality assured standards and also to the principles outlined in Section 7.
There are significant issues surrounding intellectual property rights (IPRs) in e-learning. The ease with which digital material can be retrieved, copied and re-purposed or otherwise amended poses specific challenges in establishing appropriate contractual and licence arrangements for the numerous stakeholders involved in e-learning content. These include authors, technical developers, commissioners (such as SCIE or TopssEngland), providers (such as higher education institutions or commercial training organisations), purchasers (such as local authorities) and individual learners. The principle of open access provides a starting point for an IPR strategy: arrangements must protect intellectual property, and take account of commercial exploitation issues, while promoting the sharing of resources.