You take the high road: National Programmes for the Development of e-Learning in Higher Education

by Terry Mayes, and Derek Morrison in Reflecting Education, Vol 4, No 1 (2008), 6-16

Abstract

The central question addressed by this paper is the effect of national initiatives in e-learning within the Higher Education sector. Two national programmes for the promotion of e-learning in UK higher education are described, and some tentative lessons are drawn from their comparison. One is the English Benchmarking and Pathfinder programme, still ongoing, in which £8M has been distributed widely across over 70 HE institutions, and the other is the £6M Scottish e-learning transformation programme, involving six large-scale collaborative projects. The scale of these two programmes is comparable to the Pew Grant programme in course redesign in USA higher education, which claimed both improved learning and reduced costs through the introduction of technology enhancements. This paper considers how these claims influenced the UK initiatives, and how divergent strategic considerations led the national programmes to be defined differently. A conclusion is that the way the initiatives were framed has influenced their outcomes. However, both programmes have succeeded in building a cross-institutional level of capacity development that offers a policy direction for the future.

Reflecting Education, Vol 4, No 1 (2008), 6-16; You take the high road ... (PDF)

Reflecting Education, Vol 4, No 1 (2008),  Table of Contents

Commentary by Seb Schmoller

Date: 19/7/2008

I enjoyed this article, but I was left with slight sense of disappointment. I'm not sure what is wanted or expected by way of peer commentary and it may be the comments below are wide of the mark.

1. Some basic data about the number of projects in what kinds of institution and with what sort of focus, would have helped the more distant reader grasp the nature of the initiatives discussed as well as giving Terry and Derek better scope to differentiate between the national programmes.

2. The Pew Grant programme had, as I recall, a strong element of giving participants analytical tools to aid decision making and planning, which was not as I understand it a feature of the UK intitiatives. That would be a point worth drawing out, for example in relation to the discussion of the Scottish Transformation Projects on page 14.

3. I watched TLTP (initially with FE envy, and then as a participant - in the Focus Project - one of the very few TLTP projects that had FE involvment), and I personally feel that some work should be done to see where TLTP people finished up and what they are now achieving before "dissing" TLTP as having had little effect. (Focus, for example, had involvement in it from amongst others, Grainne Conole, John Cook, Adam Warren, Tom Boyle, Dick Moore [now D of Technology at Ufi], Martin Oliver, and though "nowt happened" as a direct result of Focus, it is conceivable that TLTP acted as a giant distributed networking, professional development and capacity building programme, and that its longer term effects were substantial. Has anyone researched this?)

4. I bridled a bit at the term "Web 2.0 pedagogies" feeling that this kind of shorthand for a diverse set of kinds of activities and approaches by learners and teachers that should always be avoided. (I am quite close to this stuff, but for the life of me I would struggle to summarise what is meant by "Web 2.0 pedagogies".)

5. I marvelled at the 106 word sentence in paragraph 3 of the Discussion, as much for its overoptimism as for its excessive length!

6. Finally, the tangible benefits of elearning work led by JISCinfonet with ALT, seems to show that a lot of progress can be made on a disciplinary basis; some of the Scottish ELTP projects had a strong disciplinary focus (CELLS, say), and it would have been interesting to get a sense of the interplay between institution and discipline in the discussion of the pathfinder projects.

About the commentator(s)

I combine half-time employment with the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) and work as an independent consultant. Between 1996 and 2002 I was Learning Technology Development Manager at The Sheffield College, and am now a Governor there. I used to be a member of the JISC Content Services Committee and now represent ALT on the JISC Learning and Teaching Committee. Since late 2002 I have written Fortnightly Mailing initially as a web based newsletter and since 2006 as blog+emailed summary.