Background

This Guide is intended to be used to support those involved in innovation projects however large or small to help ensure that the benefits which emerge from these can be sustained beyond the life of the project and embedded into institutional and/or sector practice.

The Guide was initially developed as an output from the JISC Transforming Curriculum Delivery through Technology programme and Institutional Approaches to Curriculum Design programme.

It has been further enhanced following these key JISC events: 

• The JISC Innovation Forum (Royal Holloway – University of London – 28-29 May 2010).
• Higher Education Academy/JISC Open Educational Resources International Symposium (Holborn Bars – 23 July 2010).
• The JISC Innovating e-Learning Online conference (23-26 November 2010).

Rationale for this Guide

The rationale for producing this Guide is:

• A changing economic and funding climate will require higher education institutions (HEIs) and further education colleges (FECs) to seek out opportunities to more fully exploit investment of time and resources in innovation projects, through e.g. collaboration, capacity-building, institutional embedding and generally maximising benefits from sector investments in innovations.  

• There has been too much re-inventing of the wheel in innovation projects across the sector and a better balance needs to be achieved between institutions experiencing innovation projects for themselves and learning from others. JISC has already done much to promote this through encouraging HE/FE collaborations, supporting a considerably greater degree of sector engagement with innovation projects and implementation of concepts such as CAMEL cohorts and Benefits Realisation activities.

• There is increasing focus, at sector, institution and faculty/departmental levels, on return on investment and cost/benefits in relation to innovation projects.

How this Guide will evolve

It is intended that this Guide be a living resource, developed and enhanced by the sector.  Visit our page on Cloudworks to contribute.   

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Peter Chatterton for developing this Guide and to all those who have been involved in reviewing earlier drafts.  Thanks also to all those referenced in the Guide for their inspiring contributions.

This Guide is hosted by JISC infoNet, a JISC Advance service.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.