The UK's Higher Education Academy is beginning to crank up its resource production capability and with the release of The e-University Compendium it has given e-learning 'historians' and policy wonks something meaty to get their teeth into. And if you look really carefully … You will find my name buried in there somewhere as one of the authors on several of the early scoping reports. The early reports look at the thinking and what was around globally and nationally and identified the issues and resources that would be necessary if a national e-University was ever to exist. These are now historical documents, but an absolute gift for those looking for material for an end-to-end case study of what proved to be an 'eTitanic' with different views of course being taken as to what the iceberg that actually sunk the putative leviathan actually was.
It's perhaps symptomatic of the many things that went wrong with the buiding of the SS UKeU that this information wasn't published when it really mattered most to the HE community, i.e at the beginning before the ship went down the slipway. Instead commercial confidentiality was cited as the reason for the secrecy. However, the sector and, ultimately, the taxpayer funded these reports and so it's more than a little sad that they are published now long after the event. But perhaps better late than never, so credit to the new Higher Education Academy for doing so!
