UCISA, UK’s Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association, published a few months ago its report on the ninth Survey of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) for higher education. In this report it offers a longitudinal perspective of TEL developments over a 17-year period within UK institutions. According to Rob Howe, Head of Learning Technology at the University of Northampton “…the TEL survey provides a comprehensive sector view of the current state of play that impacts staff and student experiences. It allows us to importantly benchmark our current activity against our peers and also inform future planning decisions. It is an essential read for all those working and supporting technologies at their institutions.” A common set of institutional TEL services supporting course delivery has been established across the sector. The top five services include the virtual learning environment (VLE), text matching tools, provision for the electronic management of assignments (EMA), reading list software and lecture capture provision.
The report focuses on the current provision within universities and other higher education providers, and the emerging and planned patterns of learning technology usage across the UK HE sectors. The agenda for this year’s Survey also addressed developments in services related to the student learning experience such as lecture capture. Interesting trends are the fact that over half of responding institutions have chosen an external hosting model for their VLE service, and just under half have done so for their lecture capture provision. Cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) provision is the most common way of supporting digital repositories and media streaming services.
The 2018 Survey of Technology Enhanced Learning for higher education can be found on the UCISA website: https://www.ucisa.ac.uk/bestpractice/surveys/tel/TEL_survey_report_2018/
