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TALENT
Overview
The original TALENT Project was funded under the Teaching and Learning Technologies Programme (TLTP) Phase 3. It was a collaborative project between the Universities of Canterbury Christchurch, Kent, Leicester and Northampton and its aim was to work with a small number of HE institutions to disseminate good practice in learning and teaching using various learning technologies. One of the deliverables of the project was the Book of TALENT which now appears in its original form on a Web site at the University of Leicester - see http://www.le.ac.uk/talent/index.html.
As the archivist of that site noted in 2005, "Although over five years old much of what the TALENT Project was attempting is still current today". Among its more benchmarking-related aspects, TALENT adapted one of the MIT90s models (Venkatraman’s model) to create a transformation model oriented to education which describes the stages an institution may go through in the process of transforming from a traditional institution to an ICT led educational institution.
It is particularly interesting to note that Canterbury Christ Church University and the University of Leicester were active in the HE Academy Benchmarking Programme (Pilot Phase and Phase 1 respectively) and more specifically used Pick&Mix which is a lineal descendant of TALENT
Details
One section of the "Book of TALENT" - on Use of Matrix Profiling Tool - gives a few details of the benchmarking tool. Readers will see that the concepts look surprisingly modern - (a) five levels and (b) criteria with simple names and simple scoring statements at each level. Perhaps it is a pity that more benchmarking schemes did not go back to such illustrious roots.
Where used
No longer used. It has not been used for many years.
Relevance to UK HE
Of historical interest only. The concept of the TALENT Matrix Tool was incorporated into Pick&Mix and ELTI and into the FE benchmarking schemes also.
Further reading
- TALENT(1999?). “The Book of TALENT", http://www.le.ac.uk/talent/book/index.html.
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