e-Benchmarking for the UK

The UK's Higher Education Academy is carrying out a pilot e-learning benchmarking exercise, and my institution is going to be participating come October. The idea is to capture an overall picture of e-learning provision at Cambridge. The first phase will be fairly low-key, but intensive, and will involve desk research, reading reports on teaching and learning, and talking to people. The next phase will require us to raise the profile of the e-benchmarking project, and to decide on a framework and tools to help us capture the data we need.

This will be a new project for me, so I'm curious to learn more about e-benchmarking approaches and how other institutions (in the UK, and elsewhere) might be going about it.

In an interesting development, the HEA has required all institutions participating in the pilot to maintain separate e-benchmarking blogs (as a sample, try the Institute of Education and the University of Strathclyde), and there is a collective e-benchmarking blog hosted at the HEA which seems to contain some good introductory material. Defining that old chestnut, "e-learning", is an issue that seems to be bothering most (e.g. does all VLE use count as "e-learning"?). I'm going to try and follow these discussions quite closely and will be interested to see how "open" the discussions are.