New report: transforming curriculum delivery through technology

The JISC have recently published a new report entitled Transforming Curriculum Delivery through technology: stories of challenge, benefit and change. This is available from:

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/curriculumdelivery/curriculumdeliveryguide.aspx

There was a couple of messages and observations I've taken from the report for the future direction of technology enhanced learning at UCS. Firstly, the report reviews a wide range of effective uses of technology which have had an impact at the local level, and influenced institutional policy. Therefore, for us to take advantage of these projects, and emulate the success we need to ensure the discussion around the opportunities technology offers is at the start of the project and not as is common, introduced further down the line, and is less effective as it is a bolt on. As identified in the report, "the starting point for each project was to identify challenges in their particular context that might be addressed by the intervention of technology" (pg 2).

Secondly many of the projects focussed on the effective fusion of institutional services and tools, with externally hosted web 2.0 solutions. This is very much inline with our current model, and at one level the report helps to evidence the success of this approach, while also making us reflect on where we need to go to make it work for us. I'd suggest there are a number of questions we need to answer, in particular have we the guidelines in place to help staff make well informed decisions around using externally hosted solutions, and is there at the staff development and support programmed in place to enable staff and students to effectively navigate these different learning spaces? I'd suggest we are making good progress on the first issue, although there needs to be significantly more work around digital literacies. In terms of the second issue, I think we need to prioritise a better defined hub - spoke model, which will deliver the needs of practitioners at the coal face.