Problems with E-learning in the UK

Posted by in Uncategorized Feb 28th, 2004

There are some definite issues the UK needs to work out with its UK e-Universities Worldwide (UKeU). Here is a BBC article about talks for restructuring UKeU, mainly due to the fact that traditional universities have started offering their own online distance education courses and that the overseas students the program meant to target would actually rather study in the UK.

What jumped out at me was the huge cost of the program at GBP62m of funding coming from the UK Governmentand GBP5.6m from Sun Microsystems. That's a huge, huge, huge cost compared to the actual number of students that benefit from the program .. some 900 in 38 countries according to this article. If those figures are right, that comes out to something like GBP70,000 per student. Hell, they may as well bring four students TO the UK for that amount of money.

The bad thing is that other private online university institutions around the world have to compete with UKeU in the market to attract students. I have no idea what the WTO rulings are in educational trade, if there even are any, but competing against this governement largese definitely puts other programs at a disadvantage. I guess the only consolation they can take is that this venture seems to have failed. Now they want to 'restructure' and turn this state funded company into a 'broker' for UK universities to offer online courses.

Here is a quote from the article …

Four years ago, the then Education Secretary, David Blunkett, in a speech on higher education in the 21st century, said: "The arrival of the knowledge economy has intensified the competitive pressures on higher education institutions.

"Learning has become big business. So a new national initiative is needed to maximise Britain's chances of success in this global environment."

If anyone out there knows the numbers on any US government funding for online universities, I'd sure like to have this information.

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