Real-time money
The University of Teesside's Virtual Reality Centre has won a £675,000 grant from the Higher Education Innovation Fund to set-up a real-time interaction centre. Part of the money will be used to develop processes that allow real-time design changes in business projects such as digital media and construction.
Details: www.tees.ac.uk
Communication key
Two new courses at the University of Teesside aim to plug the internet skills shortage. The BSc in web development and the BA in creative multimedia focus on communications skills as well as technical mastery.
Details: www.tees.ac.uk
Planned freedom
The University of the West of England has launched a business plan competition with a £20,000 cash prize and an option for a year's rent-free desk in UWE's business incubator facility Bristol eMedia. Deadline for registration for the internal competition is November 30.
Details: www.uwe.ac.uk
Ukerna chief
Robin Arak, head of information services at the University of Brighton, is the new chief executive of the United Kingdom Education and Research Network. Geoff McMullen, present CEO, will retire at the end of the year.
Details: www.ukerna.ac.uk
Literary licence
Sixty-four Canadian universities have jointly financed a C$47 million (£20.3 million) deal to buy nationwide site licences for online scholarly journals. The National Site Licensing Project will provide 650 journals and numerous citation indexes to its members over three years.
Details: www.uottawa.ca/library/cnslp
Art resurfaces
Art by German psychiatric patients dating back to the 1920s will be exhibited at a new museum in the grounds of the university hospital in Heidelberg, after four decades of being stored in a hospital cellar.
Details: www.prinzhorn.uni-hd.de/geschichte_eng.html
German merger
Legal formalities for the merger of the German National Research Centre for Information Technology and the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft are complete. The merger will create Europe's biggest research body for information and communications.
E in error
The market for e-learning, recently heralded as the optimum choice for training managers, has been overestimated, according to research by OvumHolway, the analyst and consulting company. It says the UK information technology training market will be worth up to £650 million by 2004. E-learning will constitute just 20 per cent of this.
Details: www.ovumholway.com
Just cause
The Educause Center for Applied Research has appointed Mary Beth Baker, former partner in higher education consulting services at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Robert Albrecht, founding chancellor of Western Governors University, as senior fellows.
Details: www.educause.edu/ecar/
BBC link
The University of Westminster is to train BBC employees in media technology. The deal, worth £40,000 over three years, will enable staff who have completed the corporation's internal engineering course to gain entry to level two of the university's part-time BSc in media technology.
Musical development
The Royal College of Music has launched LiTMus Online, a professional development scheme over the internet. The service is designed for musician-teachers in higher education. It will provide self-paced online learning with one-day seminars at the college.
Details: www.litmus.rcm.ac.uk