User:Pbacsich

Paul Bacsich became a full-time consultant in April 2004. In his earlier career he was at the Open University for 24 years, finally as co-founder and Assistant Director of the Knowledge Media Institute. In 1996 he left to take up a professorship in the School of Computing and Management Sciences of Sheffield Hallam University. He set up and ran for three years the Virtual Campus Programme, and the Telematics in Education Research Group (TERG) from which bid for and won many contracts in the general area of e-learning from JISC (costing and change management), Becta, DfES and Sun Microsystems. In 2003 he joined the UK e-University as Director of Special Projects and in 2005 he became a consultant to the Higher Education Academy, first through the three phases of the benchmarking e-learning Programme, then for Pathfinder Phase 1 and more recently for the Gwella benchmarking and enhancement project in Wales, with recent responsibility for Glamorgan and Aberystwyth Universities. He has personally benchmarked over 20 universities and his team have benchmarked over 40. Benchmarking is now one of the core activities of Matic Media Ltd.

In August 2007 he took up a part-time Senior Consultant role with Sero Consulting Ltd, working on a range of research and development contracts mostly for Becta (CAPITAL project and others) but also with involvement in JISC (Libraries 2.0 and costs), Becta and DCELLs (Wales). More recently he created, bid for, won and now leads the EU project VISCED (Virtual Schools and Colleges) which started in January 2011 and (with Bieke Schreurs) created, bid for, won and now leads the EU project POERUP which started in November 2011.

He is currently working on a range of topics including benchmarking, quality, retention, cost-benefits, time, OER, 21st century skills, competences and other topics relevant to the new ICT-enabled broad-spectrum providers of education in the future.

He was formerly Chair of the Publications Committee of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT), a member of the Steering Committee of Online Educa Berlin and held visiting/advisory roles at Middlesex University and the Beyond Distance Research Alliance based at the University of Leicester, and in 2012 at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.