For me I see the greatest improvements in learners when they develop their own digital abilities and they are able to control their own use of technology.

As part of National Colleges Week I thought it might be useful to share with you a little about how we have not only improved our learners’ digital literacy, but how us as teachers have also benefited too.

As teachers we were keen to break down barriers and increase access to IT and digital devices.  We wanted to open up IT and not only help our students develop skills to benefit them in the future, but also to help us as educators develop new digital skills and understanding.

Having looked at some options the ‘In-folio’ project at JISC TechDis appeared to be the ideal vehicle for channeling a digital literacy project.  ‘In-folio’ is an e-portfolio developed specifically for students with learning needs; it was clear, adaptable and allowed significant flexibility in how it could be used.

For us it was important ‘in-folio’ fulfilled the needs of both our curriculum team and the students.  When we were looking at this we were also introducing online Personal Learning Plans (PLP) across the college.  In-folio allowed each learner to have their own PLP which could be a shared by the tutors, so ‘student goals’ could be identified and progress monitored during termly meetings.

The ‘in-folio’ system is now in use and over 150 student profiles are loaded onto tutor pages ready for rollout across a whole group of colleges in Wales who we have been working with.   The students each create a personal profile with photographs and update information about their hobbies and interests.  They create other tabs as their course requires and build up image collections, a ‘scrap book’ of images and photographs which they can then add to.

Another development is that our students now also work together with other colleges on a joint newsletter and create file which are uploaded to their ‘in-folio’ as evidence of their participation.

I’ve found it incredibly rewarding working together, contributing and using technology independently and creatively.  Feedback in these early stages is very positive with ease of use highlighted again and again.  This system removes barriers and allows students to own their development and develop their skills through this ownership – ultimately with some excellent results!

I hope you’ve found this helpful and if you are interested in running a similar project in your college I would suggest contacting your local JISC’s Regional Support Centre for more information.

It was the final plenary on 30 May in Old Billingsgate. I was on stage excitedly introducing the video of John Hayes MP, Minister of State for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning who was launching two new JISC TechDis services.

John Hayes couldn’t be there in person but he was so enthusiastic about the BIS/JISC TechDis partnership projects that he wanted to introduce them to the ND2012 delegates himself.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I should explain here that JISC TechDis has been working with the Department for Business Innovation & Skills (BIS) on three projects to ‘improve take up and understanding of assistive and mainstream technologies for the benefit of disabled and disadvantaged learners.’ These projects: the TechDis Voices, TechDis Toolbox and the Small Business Research Initiative were presented to the audience and explained more fully in a  video montage.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I was pleased with both films and felt they had turned out very well , and even from where I was sitting there seemed to be conversations going on immediately with delegates asking each other about the TechDis Voices.   When I talked of the other project – Toolbox -  I really wanted people  in the audience to understand how important technology can be, how liberating, how empowering and enabling it can be for people with disabilities. That’s why I asked Robin Christopherson from AbilityNet to deliver the next bit of the plenary.   TechDis works with AbilityNet on a range of accessibility issues including testing the accessibility of our website and providing us with supporting materials for topics such as our senior manager briefings.

I have known Robin a good number of years and knew he could deliver an expert overview of the Toolbox and the  stress the importance of its message to other disadvantaged users.

Robin, who has been blind from birth, talked about how technology has enabled him over the years. He explained how when he was young it was necessary to purchase specialist equipment that cost thousands of pounds. But things have changed and he now has a computer in his pocket in the form of his smartphone. Robin demonstrated how he can use voice recognition on his phone to undertake research on the internet. He showed how he uses the camera and an app to tell him if the money he is holding in his hand is a twenty, a ten or a five pound note. Many of the features that were once considered specialist are now part and parcel of everyday technologies.  Robin has also been a part of the story of Toolbox  and some of the video footage to come,  will show Robin and his skill with technology at work and so I felt it important that the topic came to life at the launch event.

As I sat on the stage with the other keynotes in the TechDis slot;  Robert Mullins of Raspberry Pi fame and Saul Nasse – controller of BBC  Learning, I was aware of the hush in the room.   Robin finished his speech speaking eloquently and emotionally about how without technology he would not have been able to complete his studies and earn his degree. Without his degree he would not have been able to get meaningful employment with AbilityNet. If he had not had employment he would not have moved to Warwick where he met his wife and ultimately, without the help of technology he would not be the father of two gorgeous children.

It was very moving and I was not the only one with tears in my eyes.

After Robin’s slot he (plus guide dog Tenby)  and I sat on the stage together and I explained to him what I was watching – ie  that many people were actually mopping their eyes, and at the end of the session when one of the  photographers   came on stage – I thought for a group picture  – instead he grabbed me by the arm and almost hugged me and then shook Robin’s hand (nearly shaking it off) saying how we, but in particular  Robin had changed his outlook on life  and that he had phoned his friend (another photographer) saying – in tears as he spoke   – how he could not do his job without his sight and he had never valued it so much.

Robin and I took great delight in then talking to him of the many blind photographers we knew and I mentioned the work of another good friend of TechDis, Artur Ortega (ex Yahoo) who set up the Blind Photography Yahoo Groups -  – but that is a whole other story.

That evening the Digital Leader’s dinner took place and I lost count of the people who came up to me and congratulated TechDis and AbilityNet for walking the walk and talking the talk and in most cases moving them to tears.

For those of us who saw Blackboard’s aggressive acquisition of commercial competitors WebCT and Angel, and have seen the patent litigation they unleashed against Desire 2 Learn, the idea of Blackboard pledging to be a good open source citizen may seem a bit … unsettling, if not 1984ish.

But it has been clear for a while that Blackboard’s old strategy of ‘owning the market’ just wasn’t going to work. Whatever the unique features are that Blackboard has over Moodle and Sakai, they aren’t enough to convince every institution to pay for the license. Choosing between VLEs is largely about price and service, not functionality. Even for those Blackboard institutions where price and service are not an issue, many departments persist with some other VLE, for all sorts of not entirely functional reasons .

In other words, the VLE had become a commodity. Everyone needs one, they are fairly predictable in their functionality, and there is not that much between them, much as I’ve outlined in the past.

So it seems Blackboard have wisely decided to switch focus from charging for IP to becoming a provider of learning tool services. As Blackboard’s George Kroner noted, “It does kinda feel like @Blackboard is becoming a services company a la IBM under Gerstner.”

And just as IBM has become quite a champion of Open Source Software, there is no reason to believe that Blackboard will be any different. If only because the projects will not go away, whatever Blackboard does with the support companies they have just taken over. Besides, ‘open’ matters to the education sector.

Interoperability

Blackboard had already abandoned extreme lock-in by investing quite a bit in open interoperability standards, mostly through the IMS specifications. That is, users of the latest versions of Blackboard can get their data, content and external tool connections out more easily than in the past- it’s no longer as much of a reason to stick with them.

Providing services across the vast majority of VLEs (outside of continental Europe at least) means that Blackboard has even more of an incentive to make interoperability work across them all. Dr Chuck Severance’s appointment also strongly hints at that.

This might need a bit of watching. Even though the very different codebases, and a vested interest in openness, means that Blackboard sponsored interoperability solutions – whether arrived at through IMS or not – are likely to be applicable to other tools, this is not guaranteed. There might be a temptation to cut corners to make things work quickly between just Blackboard Learn, Angel, Moodle 1.9/2.x and Sakai 2.x.

On the other hand, the more pressing interoperability problems are not so much between the commodified VLEs anymore, they are between VLEs and external learning tools and administrative systems. And making that work may just have become much easier.

This post originally appeared on the JISC CETIS website

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.

Quietly underpinning the technology of the iBooks software is ePub.  ePub is the ‘defacto’ ebook standard, with the latest version of ePub3 supporting complex layouts and rich media and interactivity for eTextbooks and professional and scientific publications.

Supporting institutions and academics in taking advantage of these new technologies saw JISC fund the creation of a thinktank to explore the potential of ePub for the academic community.  JISC, the members of the thinktank and Edina at the University of Edinburgh, undertook a study on ePub and the current ebook landscape.

Digital Monographs: Technical landscape exemplars and Recommendations peers beneath the eye-catching headlines and provides an important message for institutions and how they increasingly adapt their teaching and support services to an online, interactive and digital future.

Importantly, the report identifies areas where ePub3 can help institutions, students and researchers confront some of the problems they currently face. For example, students face a continued rise in the costs associated with buying print text books.  Researchers too find that they have to adjust to an increasingly open mandate from funders and institutions.

Listen to a podcast about this with JISC programme manager Ben Showers:

Podcast

EPub provides opportunities for institutions to answer critical problems such as those above and others:

• Academics and researchers can publish their work cheaply and easily, benefitting students as well as researchers who may be outside an academic institution;
• It is easily readable on multiple devices (from phones to tablets and desktop) and can be accessed from popular platforms;
• It provides a clean copy of text or data for quoting – essential for the scholarly process;
• ePub3 realises the potential for highly interactive and rich academic content,
• It has no legal restrictions or patents preventing its open use,

The report also provides a picture of the current ebook landscape and the impact that ebooks and mobile access are having on the support institutions provide to their students and academics. In particular there is a lot of talk about student expectations; but scholars’ expectations are changing rapidly.

As the report makes clear: The next generation of scholars will be educated in a context of increasingly-digital learning materials. Their expectations for ease of discovery, format-shifting, mobile access and multimedia exemplars will extend beyond e-textbooks used at the undergraduate level (P. 15).

Increasingly these expectations are focussing around mobile access and consumption: “…mobile devices are ubiquitous, personal and always at hand; even if they are not the locus of sustained content consumption, they are a critical adjunct” (p. 38).

JISC has been interested in the transformations taking place in scholarly publishing and communications for a number of years, most recently with its work on scholarly communications and the idea of campus-based publishing. Indeed, the availability of cheap and easy e-book publishing platforms combined with open licensing is the basis for a growth in open textbooks , often with significant public investment (for example in California).

While processes such as peer-review ensure the quality and value of scholarly outputs, ePub3 could see academia exploit a trend that’s already witnessing blockbuster authors such as JK Rowling withholding digital rights and publishing ebooks directly.

The once high barriers to such a future are being rapidly lowered with ePub and similar standards. Criticlaly, ePub reuses existing technologies wherever possible, for example, XML, XHTML, and has led to ePub being described as “a website in a box”:

Its technology stack is heavily borrowed from web technologies. This allowed a number of ebook readers to be developed quickly using web browsers as base platforms

It also means that the technologies and tools are ones familiar to many in the academic community; this is based on existing technologies, ensuring it is quickly adopted within the academy.

With open standards like ePub3 and the JISC Digital Monographs: Technical landscape exemplars and Recommendations report institutions are in a great position to start taking advantage of these technologies and providing students and their researchers with the tools enhance their learning and research and give UK institutions a cutting-edge in the competitive world of education.

Find out more about the report and its 10 recommendations for the future of ebooks in education.

Amber Thomas, programme manager at JISC, knows the issues well because she works on our open educational resources programme and gave a presentation earlier in the month (see her slides here) which outlined the benefits of content sharing and reuse.  Amber says, “Personally I welcome the provision of easy content creation tools, and the ability to create attractive usable content.”

However, she also raises concerns about the proprietary nature of Apple’s resources, adding, “What concerns me is that Apple control a ‘technology stack’ through devices, software apps, content collections and delivery platforms. I am not sure that the drivers on them to ensure interoperability will be strong enough to avoid their business model being a form of vendor lock-in.”

There are complex issues around intellectual property when it comes to sharing resources.  Amber says, “We all need to be savvy about the ownership of our content and data these days, so that we are at least aware of the trade-offs we are making, and the effect it has on our ability to share content with each other.”

If you’re concerned about these issues you might be interested to consult the advice in our infokit around the legal aspects of OER.

Doug Belshaw, of JISC Infonet, echoes Ambers concerns.  Doug is a practising teacher and  former Director of e-Learning and he welcomes Apple’s new software.

He says, “Yes, it involves significant vendor lock-in, but so long as you go into it with your eyes open there’s potential for really engaging, contextualised content to be produced by both teachers and learners.”

Doug points out as others have done, that “where Apple leads others tend to follow.”  His hope for the future?  “We’ll end up with equally shiny, but more open, versions of iBooks Author.”  That remains to be seen – but it wouldn’t be the first time that Apple’s announcements act as a catalyst.

Which leaves the final say to JISC programme manager and OER expert David Kernohan, who is a staunch supporter of the move.  He agrees with David Riley who blogs about it here that “the announcement is an outright win for advocates of affordability and open textbooks.”

David explains, “iBooks looks like an attempt to prove that the idea of a text book (the single, codified, unmodifiable, static source of information) is still pedagogically and technologically valid.”

However he does have concerns about using the web effectively for learning and is concerned whether we are simply replicating analogue artefacts.

He concludes, “The question should not be how cheap textbooks should be, or how shiny, but whether we need them at all.”

If you’re new to ebooks, you can learn more by joining in the JISC Advance webinar on ‘getting started with ebooks’ http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/surgery

What do you think about the Apple iBooks?  Have you used any in your classes?  We’d be interested to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

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.

Technology can drive income from business, too. I’m aware that the vast majority of the work that goes on between universities and their business and community partners is heavily dependent on virtual collaboration through email, telephone or web tools and resources.  Last year a JISC project at the University of Glamorgan developed a ‘listening zone’ for feedback, ideas and partner-making, and acted as a marketplace for business referrals and contacts.  Building an online community takes time but can be a valuable way to add value to what’s happening every day between local entrepreneurs and academics.

Now that higher education is entering an unregulated market, we’re bound to see increased competition between universities.  But shared services can achieve cost savings by providing economies of scale. The recent upgrade of JANET, the UK’s education and research network, will save £63.2 million over its five years of operation.  We’ve also seen the success of the Bloomsbury Colleges group in London which was set up in 2004 to collaborate together in academic administrative matters to avoid unnecessary duplication of effort while maintaining the colleges’ independence.

In addition to sharing these strategic approaches, we need to get better at learning from one another about which technology works, and where.  Risks taken by individual institutions need not be repeated.  For instance, JISC has investigated the possibilities for an academic cloud specifically for researchers – and decided that at the moment, the arguments are not persuasive.  You can read the report from 2010. There are countless examples of good technology use available across the sector and it’s encouraging to see groups like the enterprise architecture practice group for strategists coming together on a regular basis to ask how we can discover from each other.

I sometimes feel that the word ‘technology’ sounds expensive.  You can estimate how much your ICT equipment is costing your university and the environment using the JISC carbon footprinting tool. But the simplest technology can have a really big impact.  We’re all aware, for example, of the potential for energy saving light bulbs to help us cut our bills at home, and the same principle can be applied to green ICT on an institution-wide scale. JISC funded a project at Cardiff University to make better use of storage solutions for files that aren’t being accessed every day.  It’s simple technology but when put into full production at Cardiff, it is anticipated that this will save 10kW of energy (approx 51 tonnes of CO2) per year, which at current prices is around £10,000 per annum.  A green agenda can also help you make better use of space on campus by strategically outsourcing ICT functions using cloud computing, resulting in lower cooling costs and new space that used to be taken up with servers.

Having said that, there’s no doubt that investing in new ICT facilities can be costly.  As universities try to prioritise, what should they do if buying a new system becomes unavoidable? JISC ProcureWeb is a shared service which enables institutions to save money through efficient procurement and was estimated to have saved the sector £1,350,000 in 2008/09. You can read JISC’s advice on getting the best price for any new equipment you’re consider on the JISC Infonet contract negotiation infokit I’d also encourage universities to ensure that they’re not paying more than they have to for their existing services.  For example, there’s a searchable list of all the free and discounted licensed digital resources available through JISC at the content website.  In 2009/10 alone, JISC Collections saved UK colleges and universities over £50m on subscription costs.

You can find out more about how JISC can help you in the reducing costs area of our website – which focuses on how we can help support your institution with strategic thinking, background documents, practical advice and downloadable resources on all the topics I’ve mentioned in this post.   By wisely investing in technology, I believe a university can save costs, generate revenue and share the burden of spending – but I also don’t want us to lose the innovative spark that keeps UK plc at the forefront of research globally.  We must continue to take calculated risks with technology if we want to support our students and researchers with their bright ideas and ensure that our universities attract people who are themselves forward looking and innovative.

This blog post first appeared on the Guardian Higher Education Network on 18 April 2011.  Visit the Guardian site

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.

1. Demographic changes.

As any fan of Freakonomics will tell you, the impact of demography can be easy to miss but difficult to overstate. Universities and colleges will face demographic concerns on two fronts.

a) A declining number of young people. The graph below shows how steep this decline will be over the next decade. What it doesn’t show are the regional variations. The Office of National Statistics age cohort information indicates that the East and West Midlands face a drop of double the national average. Interestingly, this decline is mirrored across the EU as a whole.

b) The retirement of baby boomer academics. The next decade will also see large numbers of the academic workforce retire not just in the UK but all over the western world. In 2007/8 UUK estimated that 21% of UK academics were aged over 55.

2. Increasing international competition for academics and students

At the moment the UK HE sector is widely regarded as being the second best in the world. We currently have 17 universities in the top 100 league table (Shanghai and FT). Both the BRIC countries and sovereign wealth fund countries (Norway, UAE etc), however, are investing heavily in their respective HE infrastructures. Because of this investment, UK universities are likely to find themselves facing increasing competition for students and staff both domestically and internationally. A key concern may be avoiding the situation facing South African Higher Education, where they are able to train but not retain their academic staff.

3. Increasing domestic competition from private universities

Further competition is likely to arrive in the form of an expanded private sector in UK HE. The UK has traditionally had the smallest private HE sector of the OECD countries. The recent granting of university college status to BPP and the changes to funding proposed in the Browne review will open up the UK domestic marketplace to major international providers such as the University of Phoenix and Laureate who have over a million students enrolled between them.

4. Disaggregated degrees

Due to demographic changes and funding changes to part time study, the next decade is likely to see further disaggregation of the traditional model of undergraduate study (three years, full time, face to face). Many UK universities will instead provide flexible learning frameworks in which students compile degree credits over longer (or shorter) periods through combinations of:

• Continuing professional development
• Accreditation of Prior Experiential Learning (APEL)
• Work based learning (WBL)
• Blended-learning
• Informal learning

Such flexible learning frameworks will require new processes, systems and approaches to ensure the quality of the student experience. Implementing these successfully will be difficult as they represent a moving target not only for individual students but also for institutions and the sector as whole. Genuine granularity of learning would provide a larger marketplace for those institutions who are best positioned to share systems, processes, information and even students. This same approach could also alleviate the problems associated by baby boomer retirement by matching the opportunities for flexible teaching with the needs of flexible learning.

How can JISC help?

Whilst we can’t do much about demographic changes or increased levels of competition, we can help institutions to develop the flexible systems and processes necessary to adapt to these changes. As can be seen from the links above, we have already funded work in many of these areas and are well positioned to provide advice and guidance to institutions looking to become more agile. As a body serving the whole sector, however, we are able to make the case that sometimes competition is not enough on its own. Tim Marshall suggested that one of the keys for success in the new landscape would be:

“A renewed spirit of innovation and collaboration.”

Innovation and collaboration are both part of the cultural DNA of universities. Collaborative innovation through the pooling of risk is central to JISC’s mission. Institutions which deal most effectively with the factors above are likely to be those who co-operate most efficiently. At JISC we aim to initiate and facilitate the dialogue that underpins collaboration for all UK institutions, private and public, to promote the collaborative advantage of the sector as a whole.