PUMR Best Practice Cases

This is the eco-milk float from Solent University’s award winning project known as Eco-Ernie. The University’s enterprise team worked with their students and the local community to develop a simple and effective way of collecting rubbish and recycle textiles and recyclable items, from student’s homes and halls of residence, during the student changeover period and throughout the academic year and these goods were then used by the community in a number of ways.

This is a screen shot from ICCARUS - a multi-media learning simulator, devised by staff from Portsmouth University, who worked closely with fire officers and staff the National Fire College. The simulator simply coached working fire officers in the most effective ways of controlling major fire incidents. It has been successful used to train a new generation of effective fire officers.

Salford Money Line is just one of 13 successful and sustained ‘Community Banks’, operating across the whole UK. It has been developed by ordinary people, with support from their local university, to meet real local needs, as conventional banks ‘flee from poverty’. The university gave its local community the support, confidence and ability to develop such micro finance organisations for themselves.

Many universities are now working actively with local communities, using the most advanced learning technologies, to open up higher learning to people of all ages. And it’s not too young to start this process as the photograph opposite portrays; indeed, many ‘toddlers’ now use smart mobile phone, iPads and simple computing tools long before they learn to tie their laces; 72% of children under five spend an average of half an hour on line each day.