Working with Seb Schmoller and David Kay of FD Learning, I was commissioned to research and prepare a strategy and action plan for e-learning for the North West of England. This strategy was signed off this week.

We articulated a range of possible interventions, mainly targeted at the public agencies involved in learning, which we mapped into a holistic framework that combines, on one dimension, the facets of e-learning capacity:

• infrastructure
• content and services
• human and organisational development

while on the other dimension were the economic and social goals of the region:

• social inclusion (tackling digital divide, rural access etc)
• economic growth (exploiting R&D, growing knowledge-intensive industries)
• regional integration.

Our client for this work was North West Node, part of the North West Regional Assembly.