Six major projects, which aim to transform aspects of the student experience through e-learning, have been allocated £6 million by the Scottish Funding Councils for Further and Higher Education (SFC), it has been announced.
The FE and HE projects include the development of materials so that Higher National (HN), modern apprenticeship and degree courses can be delivered in new ways; the use of new approaches to assessment by higher education institutions (HEIs), and FE colleges and HEIs working together to ease the transition between sectors for learners.
The projects will be run by several FE Colleges and HEIs until summer 2007, and will test a key conclusion of the SFC joint e-learning report: that e-learning can produce efficiency gains for institutions by replacing existing processes.
Commenting on the allocation Roger McClure, Chief Executive of the Scottish Funding Councils, said: “The business case for e-learning must be about achieving improvements in quality while delivering real efficiency gains for institutions. I am confident that this programme will make a significant contribution to the development of approaches to learning across the UK.
“I am also delighted that the projects include substantial collaboration between FE Colleges and HEIs in Scotland, and that several of the projects explicitly aim to make the process of transition between the sectors easier for learners.”
The programme will be managed by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and overseen by their Distributed e-Learning Board. In this way the Councils hope to make productive links with JISC advisory services and similar e-learning projects being funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). The JISC team will also support the projects in observing good practice in areas such as accessibility, standards, legal issues and dissemination.
Ends
For further information please contact the Communiations branch, email: communications@sfc.ac.uk, Tel: 0131 313 6500
Notes to editors:
- for full details of all the projects please see the appendix;
- for further information on JISC please visit their website www.jisc.ac.uk;
- formative evaluation of the programme will be provided by Glenaffric Ltd www.glenaffric.com; and
- the Scottish Further Education Funding Council (SFEFC) and the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council (SHEFC) are the non-departmental public bodies responsible for securing adequate and efficient provision of further and higher education in Scotland. Together SFEFC and SHEFC distributes more than £1 billion of public money each year to 45 of Scotland's further education colleges and 20 higher education institutions (HEIs) for teaching and research;
For further information please visit our website at www.sfc.ac.uk
