learning providers

UCD has been discussed with multiple learning providers – at the secondary, FE, and HE levels – as well as with Jisc, a charity with a remit to facilitate IT development in HE and FE. While Jisc is, in principle, independent, a large part of its funding arrives as grant from the government. 

The general reaction of learning providers, and Jisc, to UCD can be summarised as:

• we understand the logic for UCD, and see potential benefits, both to ourselves as organisations and to learners as our customers;
• while we recognise that UCD can be piloted within a single school, FE college, and university, we agree with UCDx that the proposal is about creating a new class of digital infrastructure, and so believe that local pilots will only make sense in the context of a national programme to develop such infrastructure; local pilots outside such a programme would risk much effort without the reward of being seen as sucessful pioneers;
• also it is clear that UCD will require software changes by the suppliers of our Managament Information Systems; these firms will likely cooperate at speed if the need is presented as part of a national initiative, but will probably drag their feet, and charge £££, if the request is seen as a local initiative.

As soon as UCD wins backing from government, UCDx will form a Learning Providers Reference Group, and invite representatives of HE, FE and secondary to join  the UCDx board.