Intute has made some changes to its provision for Further Education (FE), with FE resources now integrated into the main service, meaning the separate section on the website called “Resources for FE” has been removed.
Many Intute services will still be relevant to FE and we will continue to make all our services and resources freely accessible to FE users, as per the JISC agreement with the Learning and Skills Council in 2006.
Some of the FE-specific services were legacy services from the RDN (the former incarnation of Intute), which were developed with JISC X4L Project funding that ended in 1995.
Intute has reviewed the best strategy for these legacy services: we will no longer provide distinct services for FE, but will offer resources suitable for FE where these resources are also of benefit to HE users.
The main Intute Database will no longer segregate FE resources. Intute editors will continue to include resources that are suitable for FE by discretion, and so the database will continue to include many Internet resources that are still relevant to FE users.
The Virtual Training Suite tutorials continue to cover subjects of relevance to FE, and include resources of relevance to FE learners, as outlined in a previous news release.
User-feedback indicated that the FE Case Studies had become out-of-date, with references to old FE curricula and qualifications and so these have been removed.
Recent market research carried out for Intute suggests that the service is still popular among the FE community, and we hope this move towards an integrated rather than segregated service will be a positive one.
Tom Roper says: October 1, 2008 @ 3:20 pm
I see that the FE button has yet to be removed from the sidebar. I’m in two minds about this…on the one hand greater integration of resources might show learners a richer array of resources. But you say you will continue to ‘offer resources suitable for FE where these resources are also of benefit to HE users’ which sounds as if you start from an HE perspective and then add FE on as an afterthought. Could you not work the other way round, that is to say seek out and evaluate resources suitable for FE and include them if they would be of relevance to HE too?
Emma Place says: October 1, 2008 @ 9:11 pm
Hi Tom, We’ve had a lot of internal debate about this and do see FE as an important group of users. However, at this time we’ve had to put our time and focus on HE. This is not ideal and we’re hoping that over the next year we’ll get the opportunity to revisit this.
The FE button has gone now gone – with the services fully integrated into the main service.