Cheaper, flexible, effective institutions: technology, politics and economics

Part of the CETIS Conference 2010 Programme

Facilitated by: Li Yuan, Simon Grant and John Robertson

Discussions from DIY U group



Presentation from Business run group



David Willetts provided some initial political impetus for thinking about low-cost, flexible and effective higher education, as reported by the BBC. (Original video on YouTube.) What can we contribute? CETIS potentially has several angles on this question, for example as mentioned in a CETIS blog, and an earlier thought-piece video gives one possible vision of what it might look like in 2030 from the points of view of different stakeholders. But while CETIS often focuses on the detail of the technology and interoperability that can enable this kind of development, we need to think about how technology interacts with political and economic realities, if our thinking is to bear fruit.

In this session, we will start by looking at the big questions in terms of how technology interacts with policy, politics and economics. What might realistically work in the UK? What might work in an overseas campus of a UK university, where the learner financial resources are much less? What, indeed, might work in a university based in a country with a developing economy?

Participants are asked to bring their knowledge of political and economic realities together with the interests of CETIS, to suggest some approaches that have a chance of working in the real world. Ideally, we would like participants to write a short piece describing the ideas they are bringing, and we will link to these from this page, as happened with the Future of Interoperability Standards September 2010 event recently.

As well as different ideas, we expect different people to bring different political and economic assumptions. We are currently anticipating asking people to say a little about the political and economic assumptions they are bringing, as part of introducing themselves at the beginning of the session, and from that, get together small groups that can work from the same assumptions to put together a vision from that point of view.

A related session on Day 2 of the conference will look at Cheaper, flexible, effective institutions: community and learner support.

Some tweets from the introductory part of this session

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