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The Teaching and Learning Technology Programme

by Richard Millwood — published Sep 07, 2008 04:50 PM, last modified Jun 08, 2015 03:09 PM
The Teaching and Learning Technology Programme (TLTP) was jointly funded by the four higher education funding bodies, HEFCE, SHEFC, HEFCW and DENI, who allocated 22.5 million pounds over three years, starting in 1992-93, for the first phase of the programme and 11.25 million pounds for the second at a time when the sector was experiencing a period of rapid expansion. Added to the funding bodies' own commitment of 33 million pounds was the direct and indirect contributions made by institutions to the projects they hosted. The overall funding for TLTP was somewhere in the region of 75 million pounds. TLTP was launched with the aim of achieving productivity and efficiency gains whilst maintaining and improving quality in the provision of teaching and learning. Challenges had arisen in the form of increasing pressure on resource and the demand for high quality teaching and learning from what was fast becoming a large and extremely diverse student population.

It seemed, therefore, inevitable that technology had an important role to play in the future delivery of teaching and learning.
TLTP funded 76 projects in a wide range of subject disciplines; these were:
    * business and economics;
    * medical sciences;
    * staff development and study skills;
    * science, mathematics and computing;
    * arts, humanities and social sciences;
    * engineering.
The 76 projects fell into three broad categories:
   1. subject based consortia, principally concerned with the development of courseware;
   2. single institutional projects concentrating on the issues of implementation of learning technology and related staff development;
   3. institutional projects developing a range of materials of generic interest such as study skills and computer based assessment.
Those projects developing courseware involved academic staff from different institutions working in consortia.
The size of the consortia ranged from two to as many as fifty institutions.
Copies of materials were widely distributed by projects and information about the materials was available through publications
produced by the TLTP Co-ordination Team.
What did TLTP offer?
The 76 projects within the programme developed learning technology which encompassed many of the following application areas:
    * tutorials;
    * revision material;
    * information retrieval systems;
    * simulations;
    * microworlds;
    * cognitive tools;
    * communication tools.
These applications were considered to be ways in which teaching, learning and assessment could be substantially enhanced.
The inclusion of high levels of interactivity, graphics, animations, sound and video were believed to contribute greatly to the overall
student learning experience. Academic staff involved in the development of TLTP materials, and
also those looking to integrate the materials into mainstream teaching, began to gather the evidence needed to evaluate the
role learning technology could play in the delivery of high quality, flexible and innovative teaching provision for the future.

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