Developing a 12-week e-learning course on software localisation at Imperial College London: design and insights from student feedback

As part of its Masters in Scientific, Technical and Medical Translation with Translation Technology (MScTrans), for the last six years Imperial College has been offering a six-week module component on practical software and website localisation. This module, however, has only been offered to one language group (German > English and English > German). In view of the rising level of interest amongst students and professional translators in localisation as well as the continued importance of localisation in the translation industry, a decision was made in 2007 to transform the current course unit on software and website localisation into a 12-week stand-alone e-learning course. The new e-course is to be made available to all of the MScTrans students (irrespective of their language combination) as an adjunct to the existing teaching. In addition, the course will also be made available to external delegates.
The aim of this paper is to describe our journey and to provide an analysis of the feedback received from the testers of this new e-course. During the creation and testing phase of the new e-course, it became clear that a simple transformation of the existing face-to-face course into an e-learning course was not possible and that a lot of work had to be put into adapting the content for an online course. An unexpected finding was that learners got through the online course content in half the time that it took to go through the same material in a classroom setting, even when the group in the class was quite small (2-5 students).