Dr. Jim Murray:

We undertook a major project on flexible learning in recent years, which was funded under one of the strands of the HEA's strategic innovation fund, SIF. The issue is whether online learning will be a replacement for traditional lending or something that will be used as part of a package of learning. New possibilities for running full programmes of online learning are emerging all the time. This amounts to a major ongoing pedagogical revolution, with some of the Ivy League colleges, for instance, providing mass online courses free of charge. The question is whether the types of competences to which Professor Ryan referred can be imparted purely in an online context or whether a blended approach is preferable.

There is academic debate about that and there is not a definitive consensus on it.

As part of the place they will find within the new higher education landscape different institutions will need to make strategic calls on where different specialisms will occur. Some institutions, and this is not entirely predictable, may end up being specialists in online learning. Others will use blended learning techniques where they will have face-to-face learning. This will be part of the broader discussion on missions in which all the different institutions are currently engaging. Regional clusters and different types of collaborations may have strategies on online learning but it is worth recalling that some of the preliminary results that have come out from a national employers' survey is that they are looking for competencies such as team work and so forth, and there is an issue about how much of that can be taught online. One cannot predict it but it is difficult to say that face-to-face learning will disappear but online components are and will become even more a part of the pedagogic and learning environment.