The Institution
e-TQM College, based out of Dubai, is promoted by Dubai Police. The college runs various online courses in Quality for Diploma, Graduate and Post-graduate students, besides professional programmes. The Academic courses include an M. Sc. in Total Quality & Performance Management and a B.A. in Business and Quality Management.

The Problem
The programmes are designed typically as a 40:30:30 blend of face-to-face classes: self-paced learning: online collaborative learning. The college did not want to invest in a full-fledged, self-owned development centre till 2008 to build the courses, since it desired to conserve and utilise the available resources for other activities. Hence, a dependable outsource partner who could take over this role till then and support all the course development efforts became imperative.The partner would also have to scale up on short notice, deliver rapidly and innovatively.

The Solution
While the relationship began as one of building need based courses, it has evolved over three years as a “core partner”. Since 2005, all work is based upon understanding the curriculum design and blending objectives of the college. All the e-Learning courses have been designed to blend seamlessly with offline classes and online collaboration after close interaction with the teaching and the e-Learning faculty.

A Global development centre has been set-up within C&K premises in Hyderabad, India to cater to the needs of the college. A core team of dedicated staff, with the required skill-sets and experience handles the college’s needs. When requirements peak, additional staff are deployed from other groups to work along with / under the supervision of the core team. Thus delivery targets, quality and consistency are maintained.

A large quantum of learning hours allotted have been designed, developed and deployed using this delivery model.

Development and Implementation
Over 100 Learning Hours have been developed and delivered across different domains in business, management and quality. The scope of work includes designing the e-Learning courses in synch with offline courses and instructional design. The work comprise creation of storyboards, digitising them in an interactive format as per SCORM standards and providing assistance in deploying and maintaining them over their Learning Management System (LMS). These courses have been hosted on the college’s own (LMS).

Innovative solutions developed include - mini-CD based e-Learning programmes in Excellence for a Virtual Executive Club of the Who’s Who of the Middle East; learner support material to induct first-time e-learners in a highly-interactive format; faculty-support in designing and developing a 15-hour, two-stage certification course that runs online amongst several others.

Results
A number of courses have been created using our rapid deployment model with 1 Learning Hour delivered every day during the first quarter of 2006 – a total of 38 learning hours in all.

The Education Ministry has recently approved the college’s blended model with C&K as the global development centre to create e-Learning courses. Moreover, the college has been accredited to offer the B.A. and M. Sc. courses.