Lots of inventiveness and endeavour but is it just re-inventing the wheel?

In the past fortnight I have attended a couple of JISC events. I would imagine although I do not know that this organisation is another candidate to be thrown onto the bonfire of quangoes although in my view it would be a great shame if this was the case. Certainly the event in the North West was a good testimony to their ability to put a large number of IT suppliers for educational purposes and interested delegates in one place and create an interesting dialogue. 

I had a very interesting conversation with David Hopps from Hargreaves Training at the event in Leeds. David is someone who is a real enthusiast for technology but in a very pragmatic way. We discussed the notion of having an e-portfolio with the ability to register candidates at the beginning, manage the learning journey and then spit out the paperwork at the end. As David succinctly put it one input, multiple interventions and one output all managed in the same system. It maybe closer than we both think.

At the event in the North West what was noticeable was the number of learning institutions who were devoting lots of resources to create technology based solutions themselves.

This is entirely laudable, indeed all systems need to be routed back to the learning experience, however you have to question whether such an investment is justified when they already lots of organisations who have invested millions of pounds of research and investment to create solutions that already work well.

I recall a conversation with another training provider who when discussing e-portfolios said we had a go at building one but after they had invested £70k gave up. At least he knew the figure, I wonder how many of the educational institutions at the JISC event who had developed or were developing their own software know how much it has cost them and their funders so far.