Changes to innovation support centres funding

We started to fund innovation and development programmes fifteen years ago. During that time we established three innovation support centres led within three different universities to develop best practice in open source development, the creation and adoption of open standards and innovative implementation and use of technology to help share and access digital content and related information.

We are refreshing the way we carry out our innovation work and this academic year August 2012 - July 2013 will be the last year that we will fund the current innovation support centres Jisc CETIS, OSS Watch and UKOLN with a yearly grant. We are committed to horizon scanning, future technology trends, experimentation and standards development and their implementation but we are changing the way in which this is delivered.

We have worked together with our innovation support centres to transform practice in the use and adoption of technology within UK education and research and are proud of what has been achieved.

Achievements and highlights

Jisc CETIS

Jisc CETIS has not only been instrumental in the development and take-up of educational technology and interoperability standards in the UK education sector and beyond, they have inspired early adopters and encouraged innovation by example.

Key achievements

Achievements include the leadership of, and contribution to, a number of European, British and IMS standards for educational content, eAssessment, achievement information and course data, as well as respected analysis and commentary on emerging educational technology and its use.

OSS Watch

OSS Watch provides unbiased advice and guidance with regards to the use of open source software and has been instrumental in ensuring that colleges and universities have benefited from free and open source software, whether through its adoption for key systems or by creating and sustaining innovation beyond its initial funded period.

Key achievements

The achievements of OSS Watch include the creation of sustainable futures for software projects emerging from UK HE and FE communities using open development methods. They supported software developed at the University of Bolton, which entered the Incubator at the Apache Software Foundation, and graduated as an Apache top level project (Apache Wookie) in 2012.

More recently, they supported the Open Source Options for Education, building directly on work by the UK Cabinet Office providing managers with open source alternatives to common software used in education.

UKOLN

UKOLN led the development of the UK’s information environment architecture to support colleges and universities with expert advice and guidance on the best technologies to use for sharing and accessing digital content and related information. The information environment underpinned Jisc’s provision of access to digital content and has been influential in similar initiatives around the world.

Key achievements

Many of UKOLN’s key achievements have been associated with digital libraries and in particular, with metadata and standards development for resource discovery in research and education. The long-standing engagement with the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) was instrumental in the conception of metadata schema application profiles.

Most recently, UKOLN has developed the application profile for research outputs (RIOXX) which will meet many essential use cases, such as enabling funders, like the Research Councils, to track research outputs associated to their grants.