We needed to develop online resources for the e-learning course. Sometimes these were online handouts written by us, with live internet links to associated resources. Sometimes they were direct internet links to associated readings, case studies and useful web sites.

The content alone in the materials could not provide a deep enough theory and practice context for development of reflective practice appropriate for professional learning at Masters level.

Although there are plenty of appropriate Internet resources available, it was not easy to find resources that were suitable for the Chinese context.

Quite often the resources were about e-learning practice and examples in a European or American context. We did not find it easy to identify internet resources in a Chinese context. All the resources required a high level mastery of English. We provided summary annotations in English to help with understanding, but obviously these needed to be translated into Chinese as well.

The following extract from the WUN eChina evaluation report illustrates
some of the issues about mastery of English:

Language was still a major barrier to completing the learning tasks in time and respondents were of the opinion that the course designers had not adequately considered their actual level of proficiency in English. Many participants stated that they had difficulties in following the English part of the content, which significantly slowed down the learning process and added to the time they spent studying. A Chinese-English bilingual glossary was suggested to facilitate and speed up their study.

Not surprisingly, some participants found reading from the screen difficult but a printer was not always available for them, which made the study more time-consuming. Several participants called for the materials to be available on a CD (which course designers did do later) or for the distribution of some printed handouts, in addition to being on the website. This may reflect a preference for being able to work off line and not incur internet charges, particularly as some of the participants were not be able to study in their work place due to their work commitments and priorities.

There were also issues about whether internet links could be accessed in China. Normally this was not problematic because most of the resources were accessed through an academic network, but sometimes there were problems, particularly given the difficulties of access of local learners.

For some of the internet resources, we had to check copyright access through the UK.