Ian Litterick was asking for ideas on costs.
As far as part-time students are concerned they do not have DSA so they
would either have to pay to make the service self financing or we would have
to cover the funding. Since it is the University's requirement that there
must be an assessment to qualify for examination facilities and since, for
the most part, no other students have to pay for proof of disability, my
personal feeling is that the individual should not have to pay, at least not
for the total amount. Obviously they will have something - the assessment
and recommendations - which will be useful elsewhere. This reasoning is not
specific to computer assessments; it is true for dyslexia assessment in
general.
ISL have suggested to us that one way of funding StudyScan would be to
charge students a small fee for QuickScan. QS is a useful 15 min part of the
package for identifying learning styles and doing a quick screening for
possible dyslexia. Many non-dyslexic students, particularly new students,
may be interested to know what is or have confirmed their prefered learning
style along with some ideas on strategies to build on. The problem with this
approach is that big organisations do not find it cost effective to collect
lots of small sums of money. The OU falls into that category. In fact, I
think that would even extend to charging say around 50 pounds for a Study
Scan assessment. We already use Jiig-Cal, a vocational guidance package
which is analogous to StudyScan in many ways. We have considered charging
students for this service but this failed both on logistics and the
principal that we felt vocational guidance should be free to our students.
I have looked at the cost involved with Jiig-Cal:
For the interactive version 'Pathfinder' - which may be more analogous with
StudyScan - we
pay a licence fee of 105 pounds per region per annum and that can be used on
up to 4
machines in each region - meaning that we can take it to summer school or
study centres. We have 13 regions. Any number of students can use it. There
is also the hidden costs of staff time etc.
This seems to be to be a good starting point for thinking about the price of
StudyScan. Charging students, as I have indicated, is not an option though
asking students who can afford to, to make a contribution to the student
hardship fund would be. I don't think we can make the service self funding.
But the pressure is on everywhere for such services to be exactly that. I
have also been trying to think of ways we could collaborate with other
institutions. For instance, I am based at our Cambridge office. It would be
useful if a student based at Kings Lynn for example, could be tested at UEA
by some agreement rather than have to come all the way to Cambridge. We
could explore the possibility of us offering a service to smaller
institutions who were not able to commit themselves to the annual
subscriptions. If this type of collaboration were possible then I imagine
that ISL would like the subscription to have some per capita element to the
price.
I hope these thoughts are helpful to Ian at Iansyst and to ISL. The
commercial sector needs to get its head around funding as it is in HE and be
realistic. The market is, on the one hand potentially large but on the
other, limited. Institutions will not be able to subscribe unless the price
is reasonable. Their fiscal constrictions lack flexibility. Maybe this is
something that the HEFCE could take on board? Lump sum pump priming is all
very well and useful but it would be good to see some proper money with a
disability label on it. It would be a pity to see what looks like being a
good facility, fall be the wayside because the price was wrong.
These are my views not necessary those of the OU!
Bonita
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Dr Bonita Thomson
Adviser
Open University in East Anglia
Cintra House
12 Hills Road
Cambridge CB2 1PF
01223 364 721
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