I had only heard a little about UKeU and that it wasn’t doing well. Now that I see what it was doing, it was clearly doomed for failure.
The latest Educause Quarterly talks about the failure of UKeU. I had heard a little about it during the summer when working on the eteam. The article lays out what may have led to it’s failure.
In a nutshell — Feb 2000, UK government sets aside $113 million in public funds to make a national, commercial e-university. Fast forward to Feb 2004, it is announced that UKeU has been failing to meet recruitment targets and it would not be around much longer.
This example shows how revolutions fail, evolutions succeed in the realm of elearning. This was something wholly new that would be built from scratch — even the course management system would be built from scratch. OK, the CMSes out there aren’t perfect, but building your own can be costly and slow. The article suggests they spent $35 million to partially develop a CMS. Really, I think for $1 million they could use an off-the-shelf CMS and spend the rest on pedagogical training/support to make the courses great or do better marketing.
While I am suspect of a body that contracts with other institutions and doesn’t issue it’s own degrees, at Educause I attended a session by the University of Texas TeleCampus that essentially does that and does it well. The article calls out the problem of branding and marketing. Something like UKeU isn’t as tangible as an established university offering the same quality of courses online. Evolution again….
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