Up to 30 places available with fixed funding of £6,500 per fellowship.

Committed to encouraging and supporting a culture of using and conducting research, and practitioner-led enquiry, in order to drive improvement in the sector, LSIS is funding another year of LSIS-IfL Research Development Fellowships (RDFs) during 2010-11, again working with IfL and with SUNCETT (University of Sunderland Centre for Excellence in Teacher Training) to deliver the programme.

LSIS Research Development Fellowships are open to practitioners working in England whose primary function is as a provider of further education and training. Eligible providers will be organisations funded by the Young People’s Learning Agency (YPLA) or Skills Funding Agency (SFA) and subject to inspection by Ofsted. The only eligible Higher Education Institutions are those with learning and skills provision funded by the SFA and subject to inspection by Ofsted. Schools and school sixth forms are not currently eligible to bid for this funding.

 Applications may be from individual practitioners or from co-applicants who are a pair of practitioners who wish to work together on the same project. Co-applicants may be from the same institution or from two different institutions. LSIS would particularly welcome paired applications that involve a manager and a practitioner working together to bring about institutional change.

Deadline for applications is 5pm on Friday, 28 May 2010.

Full details and application form from:
http://www.excellencegateway.org.uk/page.aspx?o=200603
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Every learning and skills provider funded through the LSC/Skills Funding Agency is now able to benefit from a new LSIS Account.

Nearly 2,000 providers across the sector are receiving an LSIS virtual credit worth between £1,000 and £7,500 – depending on the scale of their SFA funding – which can be redeemed against LSIS events and conferences during the 2010-11 financial year.

Qualifying providers should have been notified about how they can activate their LSIS Account; registering is through a simple online process. Prices for LSIS events will be £150 for one-day conferences and £75 for half-day seminars.

More information about LSIS Accounts (PDF)

Below are some upcoming events in the leadership and e-learning programmes.
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JISC RSC London launched its suppBLort of the Business and Community Engagement (BCE) agenda with a recent event at ThamesValley University. This important agenda, of interest to all post-16 sectors, will continue to receive prominent national and regional support in our future activities.

Read the full event report.

Launched at the AoC Conference in November, ‘Working in Partnership‘ demonstrates how FE is using the full range of JISC services.

Collectively,  JISC services offer:

• Access to high-quality digital resources to support learning, teaching and research
• Advice on the creation and preservation of digital resources
• Guidance on the implications of ICT,  including legal and organisational issues
• Advice and training on technical and network matters
• Opportunities to trial tools for resource creation and to share and repurpose resources
• Front-line support through the JISC Regional Support Centres

In many cases, collaborative partnerships between services have enabled learning providers to achieve deep and transformative change, becoming a beacon of good practice to others.

As a result, a high regard for the JISC services is felt by many in the FE communities, as is evident from the case studies in this publication. Supporting each account are testimonies from senior managers, practitioners, sector associates and learners.

Download or order a printed copy of Working in Partnership

JISC Collections would like to invite you to participate in a survey of everyone involved in the provision of learning materials and their use in Further Education colleges in the UK.

JISC Collections has commissioned a team of consultants to undertake work on how e-books might best be provided to the FE sector and this survey will greatly influence our recommendations.  We are asking all FE institutions in the UK and would like to understand more about your current situation in textbook provision and the potential for providing textbooks online, including how these may be paid for and incorporated into existing systems.

We would like to encourage you to fill it out and to recommend that your librarian, VLE manager, instructors and students participate.

We have added an incentive of a prize draw for all participants completing the survey.  The prize is Amazon vouchers worth £25 for each category of participant:

• Librarian/library staff
• VLE Manager
• Course Leader
• Instructor
• Student

To fill out the survey please go to:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=rh_2bXQdEVvbz5Uti1PZLLZQ_3d_3d

We would like to thank you in advance for your assistance.

This RSC London case study for the Excellence Gateway, focuses on the whole-organisation approach to improving teaching and learning at Lewisham College, and how through personalisation and mobile learning, this approach is being realised in practice.

Read how the College sets out to create a:

• stronger sense of responsibility and ownership among learners of the outcomes of their programme of study
• clearer distribution of responsibility within the management of courses
• more defined approach to individualising student programmes.

Lewisham College: Personalisation and mobile learning at the heart of the learning strategy

Bromley College wanted a better system for tracking student grades, monitoring progress and setting pastoral targets. The College had clear ideas about what was required. It wanted the solution to:

be online so that learners and lecturers could access it from anywhere;

have clear graphical feedback so that it would be easy to see at glance how well learners are progressing towards their individual goals and motivate them to reach their potential;

bring together grades and attendance records into one place;

support the learner-lecturer interface by providing practical tools, such as action plans and feedback sections and general pastoral monitoring;

have a section for ‘cause for concern‘ notes;

have good analysis tools so that lecturers could identify issues early and act on them immediately; and

conform to RARPA principals (recognising and recording of progress and achievement).

Read the full case study on the Excellence Gateway

JISC Legal has published a short four page paper that considers the legal issues which may arise in relation to the use of e-assessment in further and higher education. The document (PDF format) can be accessed at:

http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/Portals/12/Documents/PDFs/Legal%20Aspects%20of%20e-assessment.pdf

The JISC invites institutions to submit funding proposals for projects to explore aspects of Green ICT in higher and further education in the UK as outlined below:

Study of Ownership and Responsibility for Energy Costs: Total funding of up to £90,000 is available for this study – including £50,000 for undertaking the study and recruiting the case studies and £40,000 for the case studies (at £10,000 per case study). The study will run for 18 months.

Small Scale Exploration Studies of Aspects of Green ICT: Total funding of up to £300,000 is available to fund between 5 and 8 projects at between £30,000 and £70,000 per project. Projects will run for between 4 and 12 months.

Demonstrator Projects: Total funding of up to £300,000 is available to fund 6 projects at £50,000 per project. Projects will fun for 12 months.

The deadline for all proposals is 12 noon UK time on 28 October 2009. All projects are expected to start on 18 January 2010.

Proposals may be submitted by Higher Education (HE) institutions funded via HEFCE, SFC, HEFCW and DEL Northern Ireland, and by Further Education (FE) institutions funded via SFC, DCELLS Wales and DEL Northern Ireland. FE institutions in England that teach HE to more than 400 FTEs are also eligible to bid provided proposals demonstrate how the work supports the HE in FE agenda.

Further information and full funding call available at:

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/Home/fundingopportunities/funding_calls/2009/09/0909greenict.aspx

Since 2006 Barry Spencer at Bromley College has been exploring the learning possibilities of Second Life. In January 2009 he introduced this 3D online environment to students taking specific modules of the BTEC National Diploma for IT Practitioners (Software Development).

The course project involved the students:

• designing and coding programmes to calculate electricity generation of wind turbines;
• using the Second Life multi-user virtual environment to simulate the effect of ‘real world’ variables on turbines of different design and displaying the output of electricity generated; and
• evaluating their experience of using Second Life for learning

Read this RSC London case study on the Excellence Gateway

The windfarm in Second Life