Institutional Practices in UK Higher Education

Over the last decade, the UK higher education funding councils have funded a staggeringly large number of educational development projects under a range of teaching and learning programmes. Of these, a significant number aimed to develop and implement methods and tools specifically involving learning technologies. However, the sector has witnessed varying degrees of success in the way the innovative approaches explored by project work have been embraced, adopted and embedded. An evaluation of project success factors is therefore valuable across the sector in order to inform decisions about educational innovation in the future: to projects, to institutions and to national programmes and funding bodies. A study funded by the LTSN Generic Centre was undertaken to draw out lessons learned from a number of national projects that had shown success in embedding new practices into institutional teaching and learning. Projects were funded by the UK higher education funding councils over 1998-2002 and were generic or interdisciplinary, technology-related educational development projects working at institutional and multi-institutional levels. This chapter describes the experiences of the selected projects in institutional embedding, highlights approaches that appear to work well and identifies potential areas where embedding might be enhanced at project, institutional and national levels. It outlines the operational contexts in which educational development work is located and provides a practical framework for planning and organising project activities to take account of these