More information about the RSC

The East Midlands Regional Support Centre (RSC) is one of thirteen spread across the UK funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to enable post-16 education and training to capture the benefits of Information Communication Technology (ICT) and e-learning.

History

We are currently in our third round of funding, which is in place until July 2010. The work of the RSC has changed since it inception in 2000 to meet the needs of the learning providers who we support.

• Round 1 (2000-2003) - predominantly a technical perspective in ensuring that learning providers were connected to the Internet.
• Round 2 (2003-2007) - a move to include a greater emphasis on the curriculum and how teaching and learning could best use new technologies.
• Round 3 (2007-2010) - again building on existing support but with more focus on the strategic aspect of how technology can be used right across learning providers for teaching and learning, and also business support areas.

Core Remit

Our current Core Remit has three key tasks:

• provide advisory and support services to nominated learning providers and regional/national organisations to help them develop e-learning capacity;
• link nominated learning providers to JISC;
• partner appropriate regional and national organisations to further the core remit.

Download a full version of the Core Remit in Word.

Who we support

The RSCs have the origins in supporting Further Education and Sixth Form Colleges but have developed over the last decade to provide their support to a wider range of learning providers in the post-16 education and training sector.

The different sectors have much in common and most of our services are available to everyone. However, because the different sectors operate in different contexts and have different priorities, some RSC activities are sector specific.

A brief timeline of when we first started supporting different parts of the sector:

• 2000 - Further Education and Sixth Form colleges
• 2003 - Specialist colleges and aspects of Higher Education, especially Higher Education in Further Education Colleges
• 2004 - Adult and Community Learning
• 2007 - Work Based Learning
• 2008 - Offender Learning (OLASS)

We are not currently funded to support other sectors, but everyone is welcome to use the material on this site.

The RSC provides a variety of different services and works with a wide range of staff in the learning providers that we support. In particular we work closely with:

• strategic and operational managers
• curriculum staff
• staff development teams
• teacher trainers
• technical staff
• learning resources staff