5 Impact on infrastructure and support services

This section reports on the findings relating to the impact of networked learning on infrastructures and examines technical issues, technical support, staff development and library and learning resources.

The questionnaire asked about both the technical and support infrastructure, and there were also references to changes in the infrastructure within the documentation. However, during interviews the respondents were not asked any direct questions about the infrastructure, nevertheless the interviews proved to be a rich source of information about both the technical and the support infrastructure. The information presented in Figure 5-1 to Figure 5-7 below represents summaries of some of the main issues arising.

5.5 Discussion

All of the case study institutions have invested to ensure the robustness of the technical infrastructure, sometimes after periods of difficulty. Centralisation of services, technical training for staff and students, and the provision of induction packages appear to be the rule rather than the exception. These changes must necessarily have had a major impact in terms of funding, staffing and staff workload (6.3) to support and develop this infrastructure to the level that has been reached.

These changes could also indicate that these institutions regard the increasing use of technology in teaching and learning as an inevitable trend, which they must support with an appropriate infrastructure.

Certain sections of the institutions have seen a major impact; technical and support services have been affected because of the demands upon the infrastructure, and in addition, libraries and learning resource centres have seen major changes. The libraries and learning resource centres have been affected by the increased demand for online journals and also in their changing role to become facilitators of learning. In one respect the HE institutions differ from the FE institutions since three of them have developed some level of integration between the library and the VLE, this is likely to result from differences in funding, sizes of institutions and levels of support available within HE institutions. It is worth noting another difference between HE and FE and that is that a number of FE colleges are now using the learning resource centres differently in that students are expected to access a great deal of their learning through the computers provided in the learning resource centres (see Figure 5-5 above).

There seems to have been a differential impact in terms of staff support and this appears to depend in part upon the type of institution. Informal support is more widely found in HE institutions and is likely to be related to institutional size and structure, which was referred to in section 4; informal support would probably be more likely in a large, devolved HE organisation than in an FE college. The availability of PCs for each individual member of staff is often problematic in FE institutions and is probably related to limited funding; in the previous section it was noted that funding problems were mentioned in FE institutions but not in HE institutions.

Finally, many institutions are providing support in the form of champions or support units, the latter being more common in HE institutions and larger FE institutions or those FE colleges, which have been involved in networked learning for a considerable period.