Collateral damage

Diana Laurillard's call for the research assessment exercise to acknowledge teaching online misses the point ("Call for RAE to recognise e-learning", July 8).

In 2000, the Higher Education Funding Council for England stated that "it would be wrong to allow teaching issues to influence the allocation of funds for research". The RAE results in high-level research by the very few. The fact that it also makes producing e-learning, textbooks and discipline-based pedagogic research thankless tasks and devalues teaching is just unfortunate collateral damage. The system must have clear priorities.

Alan Jenkins
Oxford Brookes University