Caspian Learning wins e-Government Award for Excellence in Education

On 17th January at the National e-government Awards ceremony held at the Savoy Hotel in London, North West Learning Grid received the accolade of e-government Excellence in Education for its work in creating and distributing educational resources, free, to more than 3,000 secondary schools and colleges.

The award category also included finalists from the Training and Development Agency for Schools; the Police National Legal Database; The National Archives and the National Pupil Database for Wales.

The awards are the UK’s highest level commendation for the best e-Government services – services which, through innovative online delivery or IT implementation, have positively transformed the lives of citizens, local communities, business and stakeholder groups.

The Awards were run by e-Government news service PublicTechnology.net and supported by the Cabinet Office e-Government Unit, the Office of Government Commerce, the Society of Information Technology Management (Socitm), and SOLACE (Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and Senior Managers

John Suffolk, Government Chief Information Officer, says: “It is essential that together we professionally transform Government in order to provide better, more efficient, public services. The Cabinet Office is supporting the e-Government National Awards in order to recognise and praise services designed around the needs of citizens and businesses that do make tangible improvements to people’s lives.”

Dr David Sanders, Chair of the North West Learning Grid stated that “The Award demonstrates that it is possible for public sector bodies, 18 Local Authorities in the North West of England, to have the vision and the commitment to work together and deliver something that has benefited schools across the whole of the United Kingdom. The DiDA Delivered Project has saved UK schools more than £9M per year as well as ensuring nearly half a million students have access to the most exciting and engaging digital resources possible.”

Gary Clawson, Chief Executive of the North West Learning Grid stated that ”The Award is a tribute to the hard work of more than 50 teachers, content developers within many of the Region’s City Learning Centres and partnerships with Bolton University, Caspian Learning, Edexcel, Microsoft, Adobe and Serif. Quite simply the biggest and best e-learning collaboration ever undertaken in UK Education.”

Graeme Duncan, COO, Caspian Learning adds: “The Diploma in Digital Applications course achieved the world’s largest ever deployment of a learning-based computer game and it’s fantastic that this groundbreaking project has been recognised by a national award. The game-authoring engine used in the project enabled educators and learners to develop games that tested and developed thinking skills essential to success in ‘the real world’.”

You can learn more about the project at: www.dida-delivered.org

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About North West Learning Grid.
The North West Learning Grid is a consortium of 18 North West Authorities working together to deliver regional Broadband, digital resources and Virtual Learning Environments.
It has more than 2,200 schools within the partnership and is one of 10 RBCs (Regional Broadband Consortia) nationally. It is the only RBC that develops significant levels of digital resources for national use.

The DiDA Delivered Project resulted in the largest e-learning collaboration in UK Education with 3,200 schools and colleges benefiting with free resources that had a commercial value of £9,000 per school over three years. The cost of £500,000 used to produce the materials will save schools more than £27M over the next three years, producing an excellent return on public sector expenditure.

North West Learning Grid will continue to build upon this success, producing further sets of digital resources and including leading edge use of technology such as 3D Games Based Learning.