New HEFCE E-Learning Strategy Document
Last week HEFCE published its ”Enhancing learning and teaching through the use of technology – a revised approach to HEFCE’s strategy for e-learning”.
This re-shapes the 2005 e-learning strategy from HEFCE. Its purpose is to help HEIs to take a strategic approach to the use of technology in support of learning, teaching and assessment (and in support of the student experience, student retention, etc).
Key things to note include:
- Though they didn’t quite define ‘e-learning’ as a term in 2005, here they indicate that it is intended to be taken very broadly, as the whole business of enhancing learning, teaching and assessment through the use of technology.
- It does not specify technologies (e.g. VLEs, MLEs, PLES…), but rather suggests various goals which, aligned to strategic priorities, technology might help institutions to achieve.
- It suggest that e-learning can deliver benefits at three levels: efficiency, enhancement and transformation.
- Para 36: “We believe that the importance of using technology to enhance learning and teaching is such that institutions will need to consider this a strategic priority when making investment decisions. Recurrent and capital funding in the block grant to institutions can be used to support these developments, and we would expect institutions to consider the ability of technology to support the enhancement of learning and teaching when considering how to allocate these funds.”
- The document divides e-learning activity into seven areas: Pedagogy, curriculum design and development; Learning resources and environments; Lifelong learning processes and practices; Quality; Research and evaluation; Infrastructure and technical standards.
- It’s a framework to help HEI’s think about e-learning in a strategic context, particularly as they come to write their next Learning, Teaching and Assessment Strategies
In all, it’s telling us that e-learning is able to help HEIs realise their goals in a number of areas, that ‘e-learning’ as was is now better thought of as simply ways of using technology in support of institutional goals, that there is no new money attached to this revision of HEFCE’s e-learning strategy but that, as an embedded acticity, it could be funded through capital and/or recurrent funding within institutions, and it focuses on agency rather than function – what you can do with technology rather than what technology ‘does’ in itself.