While e-learning is not new and there have been exponents of its use in higher education for many years now, it is perhaps fair to characterise its implementation as being on a piece-meal or individual level. It is only recently that many UK higher education institutions have started to take a more strategic, institutional level approach to its development and implementation across their campuses.

This paper offers some observations about such an approach in one of the U21’s institutions. There are two main aims for the paper: the first is to show how the University of Nottingham (UoN) has attempted to develop greater use of e-learning across its campuses (both UK and overseas), and the second is to invite comment and generate debate about how best to encourage take-up of e-learning in a researchintensive environment.

The paper begins with the local and national level context in which the UoN developed its e-learning strategy. It shows how the higher education sector in the UK viewed the HEFCE funded UKeU as a possible model for development but when it failed, universities were encouraged to explore their own models to developing elearning. At the local level, UoN had a number of e-learning based proponents in the technical, teaching and research arenas. The key question was how best to build on these relatively disparate foundations to ensure that existing good work was developed but not swamped while at the same time taking into account the challenges presented by the development of campuses overseas in Malaysia and China.

The model adopted by UoN took a top-down approach to strategy whereby resources were directed from the centre to be concentrated on specific activities rather than simply offering a generic, campus-wide support service but with very thinly spread resources. The paper highlights how investment in technical staff was central to project based activities in a number of disciplines with further developments including the use of audio and video, e-assessment and the establishment of a set of resources that will be on an open access basis through the u-Now project. Illustrations and examples from across the projects will help demonstrate the approaches taken. T

he paper examines the major challenges posed by e-learning developments. Key features touched on include staff and student expectations, the nature of technical and other support and the question of how best to pull together a number of related but disparate stakeholders in the process (research, technical support, academics, training support, students etc). In highlighting the specifics of the Nottingham case, the hope is that more generic concerns about how best to employ e-learning will be raised. Specifically, this can be framed within the context of re-evaluating teaching and learning approaches more generally and also can touch on the question of constraints and how to deal with them, al of which it would be hoped could engender sharing of best practice across U21 member institutions.