Unlike the political turmoil at Westminster there was an atmosphere of consensus at the Curriculum Delivery Programme meeting in Birmingham last week. The consensus emerging was around how best to sustain and embed project outputs after funding has ended. Here are my reflections from the day.

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A day after the Curriculum delivery programme meetings it was the turn of the Curriculum Design projects to gather at Maple House Birmingham to catch-up on progress and see some examples and tools being used to support curriculum redesign. Here are my notes from of the day.

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Two years ago the JISC e-learning team launched the Learning and Teaching Innovation Grants Programme to encourage innovative approaches to learning and teaching for projects that didn't easily fit into its current development areas. Now in its fifth round we asked Heather Williamson, the current manager of this programme, about some of the projects funded so far and what the JISC has learned about funding the "bright ideas" that people have.

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In August TechWatch published their report on the recent JISC Enterprise Architectures pilot projects. "Unleashing EA:Institutional Architectures and the value of joined up thinking" offers a comprehensive overview of the successes and challenges faced by the projects and discusses the applicability of the approach to Higher Education.

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Reflections from the CETIS09 conference held in Birmingham last week. Everyone will have had their own experience, so this is not a comprehensive report but picks out some of our highlights of the event.

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This article by Paul Richardson of RSC Wales explores the world of Open Educational Resources from the perspective of informal learners. Paul argues that while open content offers many opportunities a number of barriers are preventing many informal adult learners from using these resources. The article explores technical issues, business models for resource production and the context of adult community learning, and suggests ways in which these barriers can be overcome.

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Different perspectives on Open Educational Resources were explored yesterday at the “OERs Matters – vision, reality and uncertainty” symposium at the Association for Learning Technology Conference in Manchester.

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The Pspex project which started in April 2007 undertook "a case study based analysis of the business domain impacting and containing all interactions with Programme Specification production and usage". Developing a programme specification is a key part of creating new university courses, and yet the processes involved are often poorly understood within institutions. In this article Dr Samia Oussena, the Pspex project manager, and Professor Balbir Barn discuss the approach the project team took to domain modelling and the development of the problem frames technique. This article will be of interest to those modelling the curriculum design process in their institutions, particularly the current JISC projects in this area.

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We interviewed JISC programme managers, Sarah Knight and Lisa Gray, about what the JISC Institutional Approaches to Curriculum Design and Transforming Curriculum Delivery Through Technology Programmes aim to achieve and progress to date.

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Attendees at the recent IMS Learning Impact Conference 2009 held in Barcelona agreed that creativity and innovation in education were of critical importance in enabling us to adapt to the radical changes taking place in our environment.

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Some might argue that the National Curriculum is at the core of our education system. Curriculum is also at the very core of higher and further education, providing a blue print for what teachers teach and what learners learn. How to transform the curriculum was the problem being discussed at this week’s JISC Curriculum Delivery and Design Programme meetings, “Transformation: Managing and Measuring Change” at Aston University [1], [2].

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Yesterday the University of Bolton launched a new Course Catalogue that can export data in the exchanging Course related information (XCRI) CAP (Course Advertising Profile) specification format, one of the first institutions in the country to do so. We interviewed Patrick O'Reilly Bolton’s Head of Information Systems and Technology to find out more.

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There was plenty of practical advice on offer at the Paradox of the agile institution: Enterprise Architectures as a strategic enabler of change session at the annual JISC conference this week [1]. The session heard from a number of speakers from institutions now using enterprise architecture (EA) and service oriented approaches (SOA) in practice.

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JISC CETIS have produced a new online publication on service oriented approaches to technology change in education. Several authors explore why you might want to move in this direction, how to assess your readiness, approaches you might take and some of the technological options available to you.

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This in-depth article by Sarah Currier, the Product Manager for Intrallect Ltd., introduces SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) to those interested in sharing, reuse, repurposing and management of teaching and learning materials. The article provides an overview of the tool, technical details of how SWORD works and four case study vignettes, or SWORD Stories, on work that is already under way, which illustrate how SWORD streamlines the process of depositing learning materials into repositories.

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