Designing for the institution:
building eLearning policy from the ground up

This work was undertaken voluntarily, reflecting a continued personal investment in HLSCC's mission rather than a contractual obligation.

HLSCC is the only tertiary institution in the British Virgin Islands. My connection to it goes back nearly two decades, and my relationship with the college has always been about more than the work itself. When I came back to contribute after completing my doctorate, one of the things I noticed immediately was that digital learning had grown significantly across the institution without any shared framework to guide it. Every course was different. Every lecturer made their own decisions about quality, accessibility, and structure. There were no agreed standards and no institutional language around what good digital learning at HLSCC should actually look like.

Writing a policy is a very different kind of work from designing a course. With a course, you have a clear brief, a defined audience, and a relatively contained set of decisions to make. With institutional policy, you are trying to hold a much wider set of perspectives at the same time. Academic freedom matters. So do practical constraints around resources and time. So does student welfare. And in a small institution where everyone knows everyone, the way you go about the process matters just as much as what you end up writing. A policy that people feel was handed down to them will not stick, regardless of how good it is.

Before I drafted a single line of the policy, I spent time in conversation with faculty, academic leadership, and student representatives. Not as a procedural step, but because those conversations were where the real design work happened. I learned what was actually causing problems day to day, where faculty felt unsupported, and where the gap between what the institution aspired to and what was currently possible was widest. That informed everything that followed.

The policy was grounded in established quality frameworks including Quality Matters, and drew on current research in accessible and digital pedagogy. It went to senior leadership with a practical implementation plan covering not just the standards themselves but how the college would support people in meeting them. It was formally passed and implemented, becoming the first policy of its kind at HLSCC.

Digital education improvements across the institution during this period contributed to a 25% improvement in student engagement and satisfaction and a 15% reduction in course dropout rates. I share those numbers carefully because many people contributed to those outcomes. What the policy created was the shared language and shared standard that made improvement possible at an institutional level rather than just within individual courses.