Could the UK become a world leader in e-learning?

The UK's Department for Innovation Universities and Skills has launched a public discussion on a report commissioned from Sir Ron Cooke [300 kB PDF], about how the UK might become a world-leader in higher education e-learning¹. DIUS is eager to encourage discussion of this report, to which ALT contributed, and in partnership with JISC, a blog has been set up to record public comments on Sir Ron Cooke's report.

Personally I think that though the report's "The experience of Ufi/learndirect in providing high quality e-learning should also be built upon." is a correct sentiment to express, not enough is made of the need to examine and build upon the experience of Ufi/learndirect, one of the UK's few really successful large scale on-line learning interventions.

Readers who are enthusiastic about open educational resources will be pleased, as I am, at the overall strong emphasis on OER: "It is taken for granted in the research process that one builds on the work of others; the same culture can usefully be encouraged in creating learning materials." But, having nailed its colours so strongly to the OER mast, with five OER-related actions, of which this is one example:

"A comprehensive national resource of freely available open learning content should be established to provide an “infrastructure” for broadly based virtual education provision across the community. This needs to be curated and organised, based on common standards, to ensure coherence, comprehensive coverage and high quality."

I believe that the report somewhat skims over the profound cultural and organisational change that will be needed in HE if use of OER is to become really widespread, with the proposal for the setting up of a number of "distributed centres of excellence" in OER being insufficient to bring about the kinds of changes that are envisaged.

^1. ALT, for which I work part-time, provided extensive comments on drafts of Ron Cooke's report.