Shaping Our Future: Toward a Pan Canadian E-learning Research Agenda

Hi all

(I apologise for intervening so late but I was on holiday last week and this week I have been in incessant meetings and travelling between them with inadequate access to internet. And it will continue next week too. So my interventions will be brief and sketchy.)

I think one has to take care when interpreting international reports as it is very easy to get the wrong view of a country. It is particularly hard when there may not be much agreement even within the country as to what is going on and why. So I read with interest (even if quickly) the international report as it related to the UK. I have to say that I found many points I would disagree with even at a general level. Some may have been due to the age of the report (as others have noted) as much has changed in the last two years, but others not.

1. UK is no longer (nor has been for some time) a country with a monolithic approach to education across the four home nations - England, Scotland and Wales are all now different in their emphasis on and approach to e-learning, some considerably so (N Ireland is small and a special case due to history and politics). The writ of DfEE (now replaced by DCSF and DIUS) runs to England only and not beyond that in any meaningful sense. Likewise Becta.
2. There is far more to e-learning development and operational activity than DfEE, JISC and Becta - even in England. DfEE and its successor bodies do little now directly at an operational level. In the last three years the Higher Education Academy has been very active in fostering the more pedagogically oriented aspects of e-learning through the Benchmarking and Pathfinder projects involving over 50 universities - and there are also more specialised but vital agencies such as the Leadership Foundation with their Change Academy (joint with HEA).
3. Despite having four nations with separate approaches, there are agencies especially JISC and HEA that do do coordination between the home nations, to an extent. This is tricky for them - but perhaps a clearer understanding of how this works in UK would help Canadians to get the right balance between central and provincial activity.
4. UK in fact now does relatively little fostering of e-learning research. There is an active Technology Enhanced Learning research programme run by ESRC wth support from EPSRC but this has a small budget and currently has completed its second and last round of funding allocations. At present for various reasons (and with some notable exceptions) the UK is not well represented in European Framework projects in e-learning and the main e-learning strand in FP7 is in fact only a half-strand (and the smaller one) of the "Digital Libraries and e-Learning" strand.
5. Analytic work we are carrying out under the Re.ViCa programme (http://www.europace.org/rdrevica.php - funded under the EU Lifelong Learning Programme) across Europe suggests that there are only a few Major E-Learning Initiatives (MELIs) based in UK HE institutions. (See also the MegaTrends report.) Going beyond the obvious cases - the Open University, University for Industry and the University of London External Programme - one probably comes down to a list of well under a dozen universities across the UK with significant "throw weight" in operational e-learning - where by "significant" we mean they could stand comparison with the top tier of US, Australian or Canadian HE players in e-learning services.

But that is enough of criticisms from a UK standpoint. It would be particularly useful - including to me - if we had similar analyses from French and Korean experts on these sections. The French situation is not clear even to UK experts so near to it (geographically), whereas for various reasons we feel we understand more about Netherlands, Switzerland and Finland.

My final remarks that in order to compare one has to know what it is one wants to compare? I still do not have a clear sense of what Canada wants to do in e-learning - and why. (Maybe it is buried in the 100s of messages.) Don't worry - this dilemma affects many European countries too, especially IMHO the Netherlands and Finland among countries of potential relevance to Canada. The current UK focus is increasingly on reskilling workers for the global economy - but that begs many questions.

Sorry for not providing a good report as an attachment for you (I wish I could - most of our stuff is very much confidential and contested work in progress). If you wanted just one URL which perhaps Canadians are not very familiar with yet and gives a good flavour of HEA work I suggest http://elearning.heacademy.ac.uk/wiki/index.php/Main_Page. And yes, it is a wiki so it might be of relevance for next week. It links to blogs too.

If any of you are coming to the EDEN conference in Lisbon in June, or ALT-C in Leeds or the EADTU conference in Poitiers (both in September) I will be pleased to have much more discussion on our work both in Re.ViCa and in Benchmarking.

Paul Bacsich