elearning compendia

Benchmarking e-learning bonanza

By Paul Bacsich, 28 September 2006

Further to the earlier posting on BENVIC, there is now a revised analysis of BENVIC. Some insights from BENVIC were incorporated into the new release of Pick & Mix (2.0) available in beta. 

In related work, a number of other reports on benchmarking are available, thanks to my work for the Higher Education Academy on the Concordance Project. These include:

1. MIT90s, including a literature search
2. Pick&Mix new material including a project report, the version 2.0 beta and a broad version of Pick&Mix 2.0 for learning and teaching (not only e-learning).

The work on ELTI is being urgently corrrelated with other input from pilot sites in order for colleagues to define the next release of ELTI.

The work on adapting eMM to the UK is now not so urgent since eMM is not being used in the Phase 1 round of benchmarking work in the UK (although it continues to be used at the University of Manchester).

Paul Bacsich

BENVIC benchmarking in context

by Paul Bacsich, 14 June 2006

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

Prehistoric benchmarking e-learning

By Paul Bacsich, 13 May 2006

Having at long last decided to organise a web site with details of my company Matic Media Ltd and lots of stuff on my main publications and presentations, I have spent some days going back in time through outputs from my work, and got to the mid 1990s just as I left the OU for Sheffield Hallam U.

I came across a paper (still online) on virtual universities which I remembered - but what I had not remembered that it has a benchmarking aspect. In the section on so-called Dimensions of Virtuality, I put together a table of criteria for a set of virtual universities, and scored them on a 1 to 10 scale. (Indeed, I dimly remember even runnning a participative workshop or two on this - most likely at Online Educa - with members of the audience shouting out suggested scores.)