Oxford University has a lengthy and active history of participation in e-learning, both in the development of educational technologies and in the hosting of local and national projects focusing on teaching with IT. E-learning initiatives predominantly started in the mid 1970s when “the University realized that it needed to do more to promote the use of computers in the humanities” (Tosca, 2000). In response a highly successful concordance programme was initiated which eventually led to Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS) becoming the national co-ordinating body for the Computers in Teaching Initiative (CTI). Running between 1989 and 2000 this initiative consisted of a number of subject-specific centres based at universities around the country who advised academics on the electronic resources available to them and how to integrate these within their teaching , one of which, the Centre for Textual Studies, was based at Oxford.
Oxford’s growing specialism in humanities computing led to a number of other programmes being based within OUCS including the Oxford Text Archive (OTA), who since the mid 1970s has been providing electronic texts for Arts and Humanities teachers, and the Humble Humanities Hub (1991) which provides a large gateway of catalogued and reviewed on-line resources. In 1988 the Centre for Humanities Computing (CHC) was established to provide a base for Humanities lecturers to come use computers and provide computer training to staff and graduate students within the division. In 1995 the Humanities Computing Unit was set up to rationalize all the different humanities computing sections within OUCS and run them as a service to the University.
During this time a number of nationally funded projects were also initiated. Between 1992 and 1994 the Information Technology Training Initiative was commissioned to develop two applications for teaching literature; The Poetry Shell, which allowed academics to create hypertext editions of texts, and a hypertext edition of the Anglo-Saxon poem The Dream of the Rood (an applied version of The Poetry Shell). In 1996 OUCS successfully won funding under the JISC Technology Applications Programmes (JTAP) to develop software that worked with large multimedia archives to create on-line tutorials. This was put into practice using large amounts of digitised media from the First World War to create the award winning Virtual Seminars project. In 1998 Project ASTER was started to look at the effectiveness of IT in small-group teaching across a variety of disciplines, producing a range of case studies and an extensive bibliography as its output. Following a survey of academics within the humanities at Oxford the Humanities Computing Development Team (HCDT) was set up in1998 to work collaboratively with individual and groups of academics to develop technology-based teaching and research resources.
It was not long however until the university called for the expertise in e-learning based within OUCS to become available to all the university divisions, not just the Arts and Humanities. Eventually, in 2001, the HCU was disbanded and a new group was formed named the Learning Technologies Group (LTG) whose specific aim was to “support all divisions within the University of Oxford in the development and innovative use of IT in teaching and research” (LTG Website: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/). In parallel to this the HCDT expanded its remit to work with all five academic divisions and was renamed the Academic Computing Development Team (ACDT). In the five years that it has run the LTG has been at the foreground of a number of initiatives. In 2001 it implemented the university-wide Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), WebLearn, it has supported a huge expansion in training courses and workshops offered to all university staff and students, and introduced high-quality, showcase, lecture rooms at OUCS which are available for staff to use. It continues to bid successfully for external funding from bodies such as the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and Higher Education Academy (HEA) and has seen it’s staff numbers rise to nearly 30. Additionally, in 2005, the LTG collaborated with the Department of Educational Studies to run an MSc in E-learning.