Melissa Highton reflects on her first year as Head of the Learning Technologies Group at Oxford University. The group provide IT services, teach skills to thousands of members of the University, publish open code and carry out pedagogical research. Oxford projects in podcasting, community created collections, virtual worlds, green IT and computer modelling have all hit the headlines this year.

In November 2009, I was very fortunate to be able to cross the Pennines and go and interview the University of Manchester’s four Faculty e-Learning managers about how they tackle the provision of e-Learning at Britain’s largest campus-based university.  The following represents a heavily edited digest of two hours lively discussion in which we talked about everything from the pressures on university funding, to the latest Web 2.0 initiatives. We have made the full interview available both as an audio podcast, and as a transcript.