An article by Michael Fieldstein  on benchmarking e-learning caught my eye for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, my boss, Derek Morrison is currently seconded to the He Academy to work on the HEA’s benchmarking exercise. So I was interested Michael’s perspective on the matter. 

Secondly, the mention of the UKeU in the first paragraph caught my attention to see if Michael had any insights from across the pond on that particular episode in the UK’s e-learning history. (Coincidently (?) Derek was also seconded to work at the UKeU. You can find some of his postings on the matter at the University of Bath’s Auricle Blog).

And finally, as I read through the article his thoughts on metrics in organisations struck a chord with me as recently we’ve been asked to provide some quite, detailed, statistics for a survey (external not internal). In trying to answer the survey’s questions we have found ourselves wanting to put a lot of caveats around our answers but alas there’s very little option for doing that and hence one wonders what meaningful conclusions could be drawn from the survey… I’d be interested to find out.