Supporting lifelong learning is an ongoing process
The need for learners to gain new skills and knowledge on demand throughout their lifetime is challenging institution structures and processes optimised for delivering three-year undergraduate degrees. The convenience of planning for repeat delivery on the assumption of annual tuition fees, creating digital identities for students to engage with the institution, and employers being able to infer a level of roundedness and extra-curricular skills from successful completion of a degree all require re-thinking.
Being ready for this radically different future for education is stretching institutions’ adaptive capacity. Most offer flexible continuous professional development – some bend traditional structures to accommodate; others pursue more radical experiments, channelling 1990s learning organisation ideas of encouraging staff to imagine and learn collectively about how things could be different. Commercial entrants and affordances of emerging technologies such as Generative-AI have added new layers of opportunity and challenge into the picture.
With the current budgetary pressures in the sector, we at CoSector are working with our clients to help ensure they learn as much as much in this new reality as their students do. This means knowing how to evolve, adapt and integrate their systems and continuing to meet the real-world needs of the modern student.
Stretch your adaptive capacities
Although scepticism remains over the pace and impact of the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE) on UK Higher Education provision, the October 2024 budget made a commitment to LLE-eligible provision starting from January 2027 to encourage flexible, upskilling over a lifetime. Preparing for this radically different future for education while delivering high quality provision with a reduced unit of resource is stretching institutions’ adaptive capacity. Delivering flexible continuous professional development courses is already exposing limits for bending structures and systems optimised for three-year degree programmes but significant growth in credit-based fee models integrated with a new record of learner achievement requires innovation at pace.
Accelerate your flexible provision
CoSector is partnering with institutions that are accelerating flexible provision, establishing dedicated platforms that enable learners to bring their own digital identity to discover, register, engage with and complete micro and macro courses. For instance, CoSector helped one institution switch delivery in a matter of months from an OPM (Online Programme Management) platform to a dedicated platform that enabled more rapid and wide-ranging experimentation at reduced cost. CoSector is currently helping several institutions innovate short course provision through specialist advice and consultancy on how to extend and configure Moodle capabilities to streamline the learner journey.
Who we are
CoSector is the premier supplier of digital student experience solutions for the HE sector. We are the only provider created by a university for the benefit of universities.
CoSector’s digital teams have over 50 years’ of delivering leading digital services and solutions to help learning institutions achieve their digital ambitions and learners everywhere to have the best possible learning experience.
We have a reputation of reliability, credibility, maturity and flexibility. This is why we are the perfect choice to be your trusted digital partner.
Because of our unique position of being both a owned by a university and operated for the benefit of the sector, you can trust us to bring the right knowledge and experience. You can also rely on the fact that time and resource spent with us will mean that you become part of a community dedicated to the designing, building and maintaining of high-quality student experiences which all students and academics can benefit from.
Get in touch
If you would like to find out how your institution can learn from lifelong learning get in touch.