Up-to-the-minute insights into the innovative use of technology in further and higher education.
Ebook standards may lack the glamour that the technology attracts, but the arrival of ePub3 has the potential to transform how the academy creates and delivers its content to students and researchers.
Just weeks into the New Year and already there is a new ebooks revelation that colleges and universities need to digest. January saw the launch of Apple’s new iBooks2 software which grabbed headlines (see the BBC article here) and sparked heated debate across the academic community.
JISC has long been associated with licensing and exploring ebooks for education, and research by JISC Collections has shown increasing numbers of students enthusiastic about such resources as publishers and librarians seek to find suitable business models in a changing environment. So it didn’t come as much of a surprise to me to hear that now Apple’s released their own version of ebooks for learning (BBC article here), which you can see reviewed elsewhere. But a week on from the announcement I am interested to know where individuals at JISC stand on Apple’s product.
Stanley Fish recently published a blog post in the NY Times with the grandiose title, The Digital Humanities and the Transcending of Mortality. The article is engaging; it seems to sharpen the knife for the Digital Humanities but then decides not to stick it in (although that might be to follow).
What strikes me about the post is that is latches on to some recent synthesis work on digital humanities, extracting some of its findings and treating them as an ideology to be critiqued.
Flickr: peterkaminski
Is your institution adapting and responding to the fast changing marketplace as quickly as it might?
Changing demographics, government policies and shifts in economic pressure are all taking their toll on education organisations and now, as the UK seeks to strengthen its world-class reputation in teaching, learning and research, leaders in our universities and colleges need to ensure they maintain their competitive advantage.
Activity data is big business. We see it in the recommendations we get every time we look at something on Amazon, we see its importance every time we get asked if we have a club/nectar/loyalty card when we buy something and we see it in the fascinating story of the Netflix million dollar prize to improve film recommendations for their users. Higher education institutions have all sorts of data stores about the activity of their employees and students. Are there ways that this data can be used to improve the research and learning experience?
Image from The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, University of Oxford www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit © The Imperial War Museum
The legacy of World War One in terms of social, economic and political global change cannot be overstated; it changed the individual’s view of society and their place within it with far-reaching effects into their future and our past. In the words of H.G. Wells: ‘This is the end and the beginning of an age’.
To mark this event in international history is therefore a key priority for custodians of heritage and educators alike.
We’ve already made considerable efforts to preserve online the memories and writings of those active during the First World War. The popular Great War Poetry Archive was funded by JISC to digitise precious documents relating to the poetry of the Great War – including Wilfred Owen’s original notes for the well known poem Dulce et Decorum Est.
Is your institution ‘open’? Open education resources are becoming an essential component of academic practice.
With the uncertainties of a new funding model to deal with, it is becoming harder than ever to convince institutional managers to support nice-to-have projects. Everything needs to be justified, both on a balance sheet and within a wider battle for hearts and minds. But the way in which open educational resources (OER) allow institutions to meet their strategic goals alongside making the world a better place means that it is moving from being nice-to-have to becoming an essential component of academic practice.
Suddenly it seems as if everybody is waking up to the potential of open educational resources. People have been sharing digital teaching materials for years, but now creative commons licensing, increased familiarity with the web and increased attention from policy makers have created a surge of activity. The question was recently posed [don't more academics use open educational resources] on the Guardian which has made me reflect on some of the core issues.
On Friday I shared with you my thoughts on the recent UUK report and why it’s important for universities to engage with it at a strategic level. In the spirit of sharing work that JISC has undertaken or has underway that go some way to addressing the recommendations, today I’ll give some pointers to some of the relevant JISC activity alongside some of the recommendations; this is only a small taster of some relevant work.
Earlier this month Universities UK published its report on ‘Efficiency and Effectiveness in Higher Education’. Today and Monday I’ll be sharing my own views of the report – today, an overview of its strategic direction, and on Monday, a more detailed look at some of the recommendations and how JISC can help institutions respond. Read more
As chair of the UK Open Access Implementation Group, I and the group welcome the setting up of an independent working group to examine how UK-funded research findings can be made more accessible. The Group, whose members include Universities UK and the UK Research Councils, sees this as an excellent opportunity to pursue the policy work recommended earlier this year in the “Heading for the Open Road” report. Welcomed by publishers and the HE sector alike, this report recommended that the prudent policy position would be, with sensible safeguards, to take steps to encourage open access, both using repositories and open access journals.
This is very good time to talk about effective research data management. It has recently hit the headlines and now that a tweet can be considered a valid freedom of information request, the issue will become even more pressing for researchers and the organisations for which they work. Universities are already thinking about their submissions for the research excellence framework, which will comprise a complete set of data about staff, outputs, impact and the research environment. Some of this information may stretch back historically to before the staff preparing the submission even started in their roles. So the need for a proper strategy is becoming ever more critical. Read more
The environment of further and higher education is changing in response to economic pressures, government policies and a cultural shift marked by an increasing emphasis on student satisfaction and concerns about the impact of rising student fees.
In addition, the rapid growth in personal ownership of new and more powerful technologies such as mobile phones and tablet PCs, along with the pervasive use of social software is changing the way we work, socialise, communicate and collaborate. It is only natural that students will expect to see the powerful benefits these technologies offer – technologies that are common-place in many aspects of our working lives – used to support their learning ambitions as they endeavour to balance the competing pressures of study, work, caring and social responsibilities.
So how are colleges and universities responding to these challenges and preparing for the future? Read more
JISC is considering future opportunities for innovation funding in collaboration with university web departments who manage the .ac.uk pages of their website, and we’d like to make sure that what we are proposing would be of value to the sector and is interesting enough for several of you to consider bidding. Please make your opinion known using the #lncneu hashtag on Twitter or via the comments below. Read more
How do universities and their libraries respond to an increasingly mobile world? At what point does mobile find itself at the heart of what a university does? Are we at a tipping point with those that fail to address students’ mobile expectations experiencing falling numbers? Read more
We now have approximately 198 repositories in the UK and JISC programmes have played a major part in the set up and development of this infrastructure. Drivers for this growth vary from open access to research, to better information management or easy access to digital collections for teachers, learners and researchers.
Last month I was asked to submit evidence to the UK parliament’s science and technology committee for their report about peer review. Though most researchers agree with the principles of peer review, many feel there is room to improve how that process is implemented. JISC is already looking into tweaks to the current system, such as open peer review, including funding universities to develop open access academic journals which are compiled from other openly available material.
The committee’s report, now available online, describes access to data as ‘fundamental’ for researchers to reproduce, verify and build on each other’s results. It highlights that reproducibility should be the gold standard that all peer reviewers and editors aim for when assessing a manuscript. This spirit of openness is something JISC supports, through its work with the UK Research Councils. Read more
One hundred years ago this year the very first explosive device was dropped from the air in Libya, of all places, and the age of “war from the air” was inaugurated. Somewhere in Italy’s state archives in Rome are the photographic and audiovisual records of that war. But how easily accessible are these documents to researchers and learners?
It is becoming evident that the conflicts and indeed the events of the 20th century can be fully investigated only when today’s historians have the equivalent relationship to the moving image as they have to the recorded text.
It is a challenging time to be educating the next generation of learners. As fees increase, so do the expectations of learners who need top-quality courses with a broad appeal that equip them effectively for future employment. Keeping the curriculum responsive to these changing demands is essential to any institution’s marketing and learning and teaching strategies.
Planning and designing the curriculum involves every aspect of the business from market research and course development to quality assurance and enhancement, resource allocation, timetabling, recruitment and assessment.
If you are looking for audiovisual content it is hard to know where to start. Google can search vast amounts but there is a whole section on the web that is only available to education, and Google by itself is not enough for scholarly use.
When we started creating a search environment to look at multiple databases in one we were given the oddest, but most precious piece of advice: ‘lose the search box’. The stunned looks around the project team’s faces said it all… isn’t searching about, well, searching?
It has been a busy week for research. The UK Research Councils (RCUK) and HEFCE announced plans to work together on open access. JISC’s Executive Secretary, Dr Malcolm Read, gave oral evidence to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee Inquiry into peer review, alongside Mark Patterson from the Public Library of Science, (a leading open access publisher) and in Denmark, there have been meetings at the ministry with the European Commission holding a public hearing on access to scientific information next Monday in Luxembourg.
Why all this interest now? One reason might be the overwhelming evidence that open access is a desirable destination for all kinds of reasons. A joint report was released last month from JISC, RIN, Publishing Research Consortium, RLUK and the Wellcome Trust, which showed clearly that moves toward open access were supported by an analysis of the costs, benefits and risks in scholarly communication. A recent Danish study of SMEs showed that most of them struggle to access findings from publicly funded research, which surely inhibits innovation. JISC, on behalf of the UK Open Access Implementation Group, is commissioning three further studies to discover how open access can support the work of the private, public and third sectors, and these studies will report over the next six months or so.
“We are historians, we’ve never studied people who answer back”. This is how a team member from the Old Bailey Online, a successful resource which provides access to nearly 200,000 trials of London’s central court 1674-1913, summed up the challenge they faced when trying to measure the impact of their digital resource on research, teaching and learning. Read more
We have today launched JISC Mobile, a cut-down version of the JISC website, optimised for mobile use.
The site contains recent content that users are likely to want to access whilst on the move, such as news items or podcasts. It doesn’t contain all the content on the JISC website and links are provided on every page back to the main site for those who want to explore further (although the main site is not optimised for mobile devices).
JISC Mobile is a pilot service and we have deliberately started small to assess demand and get early feedback from users. Please help us to improve the site by telling us what you think, if you value such a service, and what other JISC content you would like to access on your mobile device.
Blogging is a well-established vehicle for personal reflection and commentary and can play an effective part in the delivery of formal curricula. But blogs and social networking sites also have the potential to engage students and improve the quality of their writing and communication skills. We are seeing good practice emerging where tutors are guiding students on how they can effectively utilise these technologies for their learning. Read more
I have come to the conclusion that the answer to several questions is: the Open Planets Foundation (OPF).
That’s a good strong statement, but what are the questions? Before you read on, let’s just establish that you are interested in long term access to, and use of, digital information, otherwise known as Digital Preservation, because let’s face it, this isn’t a topic that gets a lot of people fired up. However, if you are still reading, then this is your chance to learn why the OPF seems to have some of the answers. Read more
Photograph (C) Andrew Hewson http://t.co/6g3ENKP
The higher and further education sectors in the UK are fortunate to employ talented and dedicated software developers. Without them, many kinds of technical innovation would be significantly more difficult, more expensive or even impossible. While the patterns of employment of ‘local’ (locally employed) developers varies considerably between higher/further education institutions, it is rare for such institutions to invest strategically in their local development capacity.
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At JISC’s recent annual conference, both Professor Eric Thomas (Vice Chancellor of Bristol University) and I stressed that higher education cannot afford to slow down in its adoption of information and communications technology (ICT). Quite the contrary: the challenging financial environment and the increased international competition require innovative approaches to ensure that the UK remains a leader in world class teaching, education and research.
As Eric pointed out, being innovative can help show prospective students that the university means business when it comes to staying at the top, thereby helping to drive revenue from course fees. It can also support widening participation by reaching out to students in non-traditional areas – as at the University of the Highlands and Islands, where technology is conquering geography and allowing students to tap into the network of over 80 different learning centres from their own homes and workplaces. There’s no doubt that smart technology use can enhance students’ experience of university, whether that be keeping in touch with a tutor out of hours or logging on to an online learning environment - like the University of Bristol’s online laboratory ChemLabs, which better prepares undergraduates for their real-life practical work. Read more
The UK keeps a huge amount of information about research. From funding applications to datasets, from HESA and REF reporting to publications lists. People and institutions across the sector need to manage and share this information at every level. The challenge, however, is that this information is often stored in different systems and formats, some commercial or proprietary and some home-grown and unique.
A recent TimesHigher article exposed concern over the financial health of UK universities. Andrew McConnell, BUFDG chair is quoted as saying ‘There aren’t many areas of our income that won’t be of concern at the moment. You can look at every category and say there’s an issue here that needs to be addressed in the next 12 months.’
Universities are facing such fundamental challenges, rare the senior manager who isn’t taking a closer look at the efficiency of their operations. But having invested in management, technology and systems integration for a number of years, JISC is well placed to offer support.
The UK is a knowledge economy and as the coalition government looks to also to make it a digital one – how is JISC helping to share the UK’s knowledge and our resources online?
In my role at JISC I look after our content programme which brings scholarly collections into the digital age – taking journals, newspapers, manuscripts, photographs and other material and putting them on the web. I have the pleasure of working with many outstanding collections in the UK and have helped unearth some real treasures that can be shared and used for education and research.
Accessing freely available media digital content and tools can be an effective way to improve educational provision and maximize resources in difficult times. On the other hand, without support, a sharing of best practice and awareness what we’re getting into we might waste a lot of time and money undertaking tasks which, on reflection, should have been done by someone else or done in a different way. The sharing of good practice and direct experience, in addition to free content and open source tools, may be the only way to ensure we receive the benefits of digital media while avoiding the pitfalls.
There are clear financial benefits for universities and colleges in ensuring that as many students as possible complete their course. Equally learners are paying more than ever for their education, so will be keen to see a return on their investment.
There are a number of reasons why students drop-out of education due to issues such as financial pressures, difficulties with their home lives, dissatisfaction with their course or problems with assessment.
Therefore I think it is no surprise then that there has been a renewed emphasis on ensuring that student perspectives are actively sought on their educational experiences and expectations.
With just one week to go before the JISC11 conference in Liverpool, the final preparations are in full swing. We are working hard to ensure those of you planning to follow the conference online have as full and interactive an experience as possible.
For someone choosing to follow a conference remotely, it is rarely now a one-way communication channel. With the benefit of more sophisticated technology and social media, taking part in many conferences online can now be an immensely beneficial and interactive experience.
To help you get the most out of following JISC11 online, I have put together a list of suggestions. We realise we won’t be able to have your full attention for the whole day, with your workload and emails undoubtedly being a major cause of distraction! Nonetheless, I hope this list will help you ensure the time you do spend online with us next week is time well spent.
Those of you unable to come and see us at the JISC11 conference in Liverpool next week will no doubt be keeping one eye on what is happening throughout the day with the help of your laptop, phone or tablet. As an event organiser I love experimenting with new and interesting ways to amplify events as well as enhance the physical delegate experience. Sometimes we get it right and sometimes we get it wrong. But this is all part of the learning curve and helps us make the ‘online’ experience of the conference better each year.
For those just dipping their toe in the event amplification waters it can be daunting. Here at JISC we have been experimenting for a few years with different ways to ‘amplify’ an event using digital technologies. I’ve come up with a top ten list of things to think about when planning the digital amplification of your event.
There is a great William Gibson quote, ‘The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.’
I believe that working with developers to share experiences, ideas and expertise will help distribute those slices of the future that are carved out by innovative developers in individual institutions.
Dev8D is JISC’s annual event for software developers working in higher education. The event is in its third year and kicks off today. It provides opportunities for training, sharing of good practice and creative problem solving for people who work with software for research, teaching and administration in universities and colleges. It is a vibrant and exciting event that produces a flood of ideas and prototypes while providing a unique personal development opportunity for delegates.
Sarah Porter gave account of the strategic pressures upon institutions in the Winter Edition of JISC Inform. There is much to challenge us all, but Sarah’s message is clear, collaborate and make use of the technology potential. The 2011 Leadership Foundation summit, ‘Leading Internationalisation: Raising our Game’ emphasises the need to collaborate to achieve long term success in the context of the international market.
JISC works closely with the Leadership Foundation because we’re committed to encouraging a greater understanding in the potential of technology within higher education. Our pairing also brings many rewards, not least because good partners bring fresh perspectives and challenge us to raise our game too.
We are heading into a new chapter in JISC’s history as we embrace the opportunity to change for the future.
It is very pleasing to see that HEFCE’s review of JISC considers us to be a valuable organisation and one that makes an essential contribution. The review makes a number of constructive recommendations designed to help us continue to add value to the education and research sector through the next, difficult, five to ten years.
In the week following what President Obama described innovation as a “Sputnik moment” and Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport launched the Year of Philanthropy – an attempt to get more FTSE100 businesses to provide financial support for the arts - it seems timely to consider how innovation in a time of fiscal tightening can be achieved and supported. Organisations such as JISC, whose role includes nurturing innovation and providing shared services that save colleges and universities time, money and effort, have stepped up their efforts to monitor, interpret and report on the financial implications (income and savings) of a range of activities.
Last month, Tim Marshall’s blog post suggested five ways in which universities and colleges could respond to a changing landscape, the fifth of which was “Seeing over the Horizon”. Whilst confidently predicting the future of UK higher and further education over the next decade would tax the prognostic powers of Faith Popcorn, it is possible to identify at least four drivers of change.
To me, one of the enormous surprises regarding the Browne review of Higher Education funding was the complete absence of any mention of online or blended delivery. Here was a report about the future of the delivery of education at university level, but it missed a trick by omitting the innovative online delivery going on at present. Our recent study into online learning , delivered by the technology assisted lifelong learning centre (TALL) at the University of Oxford, identified more than 2,600 courses already being delivered online in the UK, and worldwide the area is seen as having huge potential for growth.
First Browne, then the Comprehensive Spending Review, 
and with more reviews and uncertainty to come it’s easy to feel like the distraught lover in L’Âme Immortelle’s song – “life will never be the same again.” While this is de facto true it is certainly not the end!
Higher education and research have been well funded over the past decade but are now moving into a new phase which will require a renewed spirit of innovation and collaboration.
This report to the Higher Education Funding Council for England by the National Union of Students had the remit to ‘gain a broad overview of the level of demand from students – new and potential – for online learning provision in UK higher education institutions and students’ perceptions of that learning.’ In their conclusions there are several issues at play that could, while superficially giving online learning and the ‘technology experience’ a boost, also hark back to technology enhanced learning as it was several years or even a decade ago.
At a time of unprecedented budget cuts, what role do digital technologies play in securing a future for research? That was the key question posed by JISC’s ‘Future of research?’ held at the Congress Centre in London last month. The headline answer to emerge was: by facilitating collaborations and by enabling more efficient and effective research.
Is the physical experience of holding a book or other paper-based object really the most valued aspect of library provision these days? And are researchers only able to cope with the world of information if their access to resources is limited to what the library can afford to provide? In a THES-sponsored debate held at the British Library last week, as part of their ‘Growing Knowledge’ exhibition, Mary Beard give a highly entertaining and deliberately controversial perspective on what she values in the academic library – and although she acknowledged the value of the digital resource, her personal view was that the paper artifact and the pre-selection process of library collections’ policies are both crucial to the future academic environment. Read more
Since Google embarked on its scanning of major world book libraries, there has been the assumption that there is little more to do in the field of digitisation.
Yet this is far from the truth. Opinions vary, but it is probably fair to say that more than 95% of the world books, magazines, newspapers, videos, films, documents still lay hidden in archives and libraries, inaccessible in digital form.
And there are numerous benefits to continue with the work of digitising all this content – it’s more than making it convenient for the learner to access something from the comfort of their own home or office.
So, for example, research is radically changed by the availability of millions of new documents, as shown by resources like the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, which is changing the face of the study of history of London.
Today, another round of UCAS applications gets underway with the first of the application deadlines. Meanwhile, new students are settling into universities up and down the country. But how many of them will have embarked upon the right course?
Lord Browne’s recommendations this week remind us that the majority of students (or their parents) will be stumping up an increasing amount for a place at university. It is no surprise then that they want to be 100% sure that their education will be worth the money.
Those of us in the business of delivering and supporting higher education want to enrol students who are well prepared – if students know what they are letting themselves in for they’re more likely to flourish and stay the course.
I have only been something approximating a regular blogger for about three years now and so I rather casually thought that blogging must be, oh, perhaps six or seven years old. But the term ‘weblog’ seems to have been coined by Jorn Barger at the end of 1997 and the noun and verb ‘blog’ surfaced in 1999 by Peter Merholz. So blogs in something like their current form have been around for well over ten years.
New politics, fragile economy, ageing student market, a society rapidly absorbing new technologies. Any one of these presents challenges to our sector, but together these form the complex reality of our working lives.
So what? How can we respond to these pressures? What’s going to help us cope? Better still, how can we succeed?
At JISC we’re thinking about big, but already we know we need to do more with less and we want to help the sector to become agile. It’s a challenging time in education, but it’s also a tremendously energising period.
It’s amazing how our collective memory of many events has been shaped by images taken by ordinary people – like mobile phone footage of political protests in oppressive regimes or tragic pictures of national disasters.
The exponential rise of social media has created a new landscape of interaction and collaboration where the boundaries between professional practice, citizen journalism, the subject and the audience are blurring.
Welcome to the new JISC blog!
Every week JISC’s people will be sharing their thoughts on a range of topics on technology, education, strategy and the issues that affect our sector – but that’s only half the conversation, so we ask for your voice to join the debate.
This area on the JISC Involve blog is a test area before the blog goes live on the JISC homepage early in the new term, so please do share your feedback on your first impressions.
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