UKeU

UKeU, whose official name was "UK eUniversities Worldwide Limited", but often just called the "UK e-University", was a company that commissioned and promoted online degrees from UK universities. As such, UKeU was not a university in its own right.

UKeU delivered courses over a learning environment developed by Sun Microsystems UK. It was set up with UK public funds under the auspices of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and started operation in 2002 after a prolonged planning phase.

In 2004 it was announced that UKeU should be wound up as it was a failure - having cost £50m and recruited only 900 students.

A highly critical report by the UK House of Commons Select Committee on Education and Skills was published in March 2005. In an accompanying press release, Committee Chairman, Barry Sheerman said: "UKeU was a terrible waste of public money. The senior executives failed to interest any private investors and showed an extraordinary over confidence in their ability to attract students to the scheme. Any private company which rewards underperformance of this scale would normally face severe criticism from its shareholders."

The URL of the UKeU was http://www.ukeu.com but the link no longer works as the company has ceased to operate and was finally wound up in mid 2006.

Reports and case studies

There are a large number of reports on UKeU - see Publications. It will take some months to get them all indexed.

Follow-up

Many people are still interested in UKeU but it is hard to believe that much new can be added now. Perhaps the best thing is to work on generalising the conclusions drawn from its failure to other institutions. See in particular Lessons to be learned from the failure of the UK e-University by Paul Bacsich.

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