I’ve been to many conferences about net-based learning and have created a wide contact network thanks to them. I come home every time with new ideas, good examples and countless links to interesting projects. The discussions are valuable and inspiring.
However, it’s not so easy to put these good ideas into practice back home. The people who make the decisions seldom if ever attend these conferences and are not convinced of the advantages of flexible learning. Issues that seem self-evident at the conference are far from so when you sit down to talk to heads of departments about where they should invest their often limited resources next year.
Net-based learning at many universities is still a grass-roots movement with teachers and IT developers working often with project money. Few institutions have integrated this into their core activities though there are I’m sure some excellent exceptions.
The question is how do we get the real decision makers to attend this type of conference so that they can hear how much good work is going on and realise that we have to move from pioneer status to mainstream? It would be interesting to know how many university principals and heads of faculty are present in Berlin just now.
