Mark Samuels

Public and private sector executives must use the example of the UKeU fiasco to help them understand that technology is only a very small part of an effective elearning system.

Last week, the failed online learning flagship's chief executive John Beaumont, and chairman Sir Anthony Cleaver, were castigated in an excoriating report from the Education and Skills Committee.

The committee's inquiry followed a 12-month Computing investigation into the project.

MPs drew attention to UKeU's failure to attract private investment, the project's inadequate marketing, and its impossibly ambitious business model.

But most importantly for UK IT directors, the committee said the UKeU executives had taken a supply-driven approach, failing to research customers' needs and preferring instead to shell out £14.5m on an IT platform in anticipation of success.

In short, this hare-brained scheme, which hoped to eventually sign up hundreds of thousands of students, allowed technology to drive its strategy.

And it had been this way from the very earliest days of the project.

When I met the people in charge of UKeU in October 2002, in the palatial surroundings of the company's Buckingham Gate office, Beaumont talked of the fantastic potential of the initiative's online system.

He also pronounced that the project would 'extend learning to people who wouldn't normally benefit'.

Two and a half years and £50m later, just 900 students had benefited from UKeU. What's more, only 200 students were actually using the company's learning platform.

Beaumont and company decided they needed an expensive bespoke platform before the rest of the project was fully scoped, and spent almost a third of their budget on it.

Concerns over marketing (who would actually use the platform?), and content (which universities would sign up, and what courses would they provide to UKeU?) were secondary.

The results were obvious. Business aims and objectives failed to match business reality.

After blowing millions, the executives at UKeU hoped to suck a further £15m in funding from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce), the funding body that had allocated cash to the project.

Unsurprisingly, Hefce pulled the plug on the disaster. And the funding body's new elearning strategy, released last week, sets out a plan for online learning in UK higher education over the next 10 years.

A number of lessons can be learned from UKeU's failure.

If you're an IT manager trying to win cash for an elearning project, recognise that technology is only ever a facilitator.

Undertake thorough market research, and work out precisely what your users demand.

Elearning managers must concentrate on content, rather than tinkering with technology.

There are expert suppliers, such as Blackboard and WebCT, whose off-the-shelf packages are specifically designed for online learning.

It's a real shame that the executives at UKeU didn't think harder about some of their original platform decisions.

Beaumont responded to Computing's original 2003 investigation into the flaws at UKeU by writing a column in rebuttal: 'Elearning is a revolution in higher education today that will provide significant dividends', (Computing, 12 June 2003).

The report found that it certainly paid off for him. Despite missing targets, Beaumont received a basic salary of £180,000, as well as a performance-related bonus in 2003 of £44,914.

The chief executive finished his piece for Computing by saying: 'If designed and delivered with quality, elearning provides a real opportunity to satisfy different higher education needs around the world.'

In the end, the man with the bonus described by the committee's report as 'morally indefensible' was right: quality elearning does provide a real opportunity to satisfy learners' needs. And Hefce is putting up £33m to ensure that online learning will now start moving in the right direction.

But it is both ironic and disgraceful that Beaumont's own elearning venture, UKeU, was such a waste of taxpayers' money.

Just make sure that you listen to the needs of your users, otherwise your elearning initiative could be the next to fail.