BENVIC benchmarking in context

BENVIC was developed under an EU project, also called BENVIC (in full, Benchmarking of Virtual Campuses) in the era 1999-2001 There is a project web site still at http://www.benvic.odl.org/ – but it has not been updated since 4 February 2002. The consortium was led by the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) and had a strong set of partners (including UCL in the UK). However, for various reasons including retirement of key staff the work does not seem to have continued – anyway, follow-up work is not evident.

It has proved to be quite easy but also informative to correlate the BENVIC approach with the Pick & Mix system. This demonstrates how the value  of BENVIC can be preserved within the modern context of benchmarking e-learning. Indeed, it is planned that some insights from BENVIC will be incorporated into the next release of Pick & Mix, available August 2006. The full report gives more details of the correlation, its conclusions and implications for the development of Pick & Mix.

Paul