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BILL SEMINAR WEDNESDAY 18 MAY 2011
The Explore membership scheme - a new model of university lifelong learning for the post-Browne era?
Tim Crocker and Ian Ground, University of Sunderland
Can university lifelong learning survive the end of the grant funding era?
The University of Sunderland’s North East Centre for Lifelong Learning offers an experience which may help institutions answer this question. With a majority of its students already possessing a university level qualification, the Centre was faced with a loss of subsidy for half its programmes when the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skill introduced the ELQ rule in 2009. Its response was the ‘Explore’ membership scheme, a radical new model of lifelong learning, which substantially reduces delivery costs whilst maintaining (and even enhancing) the student experience.
In this seminar Tim Crocker, who heads the Centre, and Ian Ground, leader for the Explore programme, will explain in detail how the membership model ('a gym for the mind') works, before giving a sense of its level of success in financial and educational terms over the two years it has been running. They will then open a general a discussion of the scope for the model to be adopted elsewhere in the sector.
