Professor Mark Brown:

Regarding guidelines, standards and quality, I come very much from the philosophy that we must work with people and bring them with us. The importance of building the capabilities and capacities of our teachers has already been acknowledged. This needs to be driven from within the profession. It is a common framework or language we can use in a constructive, positive way and the process is probably just as important as the outcome. Given that the field of online learning is very dynamic, we must be very careful not to lock ourselves in in a rigid way.

I have made a very strong case on infrastructure, drawing from experience in a small country very similar to Ireland which I thought was lacking in infrastructure. We are being filmed today. It is a challenge at DCU to scale that up on an enterprise-wide basis for our entire campuses. We aspire to provide our students with rich media learning, not lecture capture, as some have done, because that is just taking an old technology and using it to continue old-fashioned ways. Our investment aims to have all our staff easily able to record brief videos at their desktops to add a personal touch for students, whether campus based or distance. The literature tells us that teacher presence is crucial and in the online world we can feel very connected. DCU has introduced the brand DCU Connected to describe our flexible offerings and we see it as a metaphor.

The last kilometre or mile is an issue because much of the argument to invest in this is to serve those who are not accessing universities. Whether they are undergraduate or postgraduate students, and putting the fee issue to one side, part of the reason for this is to give people in the regions the opportunity to take advantage of being connected. This is a worldwide problem. Small regions in the western world are suffering.