Image courtesy of Isra Alonso on Flickr

With a very competitive business market and unemployability at high levels for young people, I believe it is important that we try to maximise educational opportunities and match learners’ skills with business needs as best as possible.

We need to ensure learners have the best possible chance of securing a job in the current marketplace and to do this I feel that the further education sector needs to develop a more holistic approach to employer engagement.  In my understanding the key to doing this successfully lies in the following steps:

1. Market analysis
2. Identifying course need
3. Implementing course design
4. Presentation and delivery of the course
5. Gathering feedback to inform future needs and requirements.

Employer engagement is an important part of this, as colleges can’t even begin to understand, never mind match, the needs of businesses without an open channel of communication.  To help maintain these relationships colleges need to build relationships with local businesses, and ensure the right systems are available for course cataloguing, promotion, bookings, and of course staff training and customer service.

I think it would be good to approach businesses on the basis of “no point in complaining that further education colleges can’t provide what you’re looking for if you don’t let them know what it is you’re looking for!”

The benefits of this approach for colleges would be a raised profile within the local community and hopefully with more targeted courses a rise in learner uptake. For learners, I would hope they would improve the chances of securing a job and have an increase in opportunity to participate in work experience placements during their training.

Well after I’ve got that off my chest, the question is what would the successful process of matching students and course development with employer needs look like?  I think it would mean cultural change within colleges, resulting in a new approach to employer responsiveness; equally it would be important to see employers responding to the challenge.

I believe much of this could be accomplished through the development of a single skills economy platform, but it would require concerted effort to get employers, learners and learning providers singing from the same hymn sheet. I work at Trainagain and we have recently been working with JISC to create a ‘Skills Dashboard’, which I think may be one of the possible solutions. It provides concise information on what courses are being offered where, and the type of courses people are searching for.

As we develop this dashboard I hope to incorporate an employer feedback loop into the process to gain an understanding of what training employers would like. I want to encourage employers to anonymously submit skills gaps information so that colleges can see the volume of demand for a particular skill and respond accordingly.  In my experience the need for this is a consistent theme from senior managers in further education, they wish to base their courses on the needs and skills required in the workplace.

The skills dashboard could create an online market place for the skills economy and offer colleges, employers and the wider community the opportunity to respond to supply and demand in a more immediate way than before.  This could make a significant difference to the way workforce development is approached.

I hope you have found my thoughts on this topic useful during National Colleges Week and please do contact me if you would like to discuss. Fingers crossed for the future.

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.

It also includes podcasts with eminent historians and veterans including the writer and broadcaster Ian Hislop talking about his grandfather’s experience in action and why he is so ‘obsessed’ with the First World War.  The Serving Soldier collection might also interest you as a way of finding out about the lives of soldiers from 1899 to 1918, a period which spans the Second Boer War, Younghusband Expedition and World War One.

But now it’s time to commemorate the 2014 anniversary.  Higher and further education has a  unique part to play in the WW1 commemoration because it can offer an academic appraisal and reappraisal of themes, events and perceptions.  To help people in education who are studying the period, we are promoting a joined-up approach across many different organisations that currently hold audiovisual, images, text based works and film relating to the First World War. JISC wants to explore how providing this in a more seamless way could help those working in education and research to access the resources. So as a result we’re planning two activities:

• JISC WW1 Discovery programme- to aggregate digital content such as films from a range of digital collections and find new and innovative ways of presenting this content for the benefit of education and research on WW1.

• JISC WW1 OER project- to create innovative Open Educational Resources around WW1 relevant across disciplines for embedding in teaching and learning using a range of content pertaining to WW1 in the UK and internationally, ready for release in March 2012

JISC’s overriding goal for both activities is to work for researchers, teachers and students to produce digital content and resources that are comprehensive, open and sustainable, but that answer differing, specific needs within higher and further education.  The plans are underpinned by a common strategic ‘direction of travel’ which is outlined most clearly in the JISC Statement of Intent.

I look forward to updating you further as these projects progress.

To find out more about what’s planned visit the blog.

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.

It is also a ‘beta’ service, i.e. it uses new technology that is still in its development cycle. The site might sometimes fail or give unexpected results. Again, you can help us to improve it by reporting any bugs.

JISC Mobile was developed for us by ILRT at the University of Bristol, based upon their Mobile Campus Assistant software. The software was initially developed via a JISC-funded Rapid Innovation project and is being further developed in the MyMobileBristol project under the JISC Business and Community Engagement programme.

The application harvests content from a number of external sources (in our case, RSS feeds from the JISC website) and converts them into RDF for storage in a database. This RDF Store is then queried via a RESTful interface that outputs the content in mobile-optimised HTML. The benefit of this approach is that we are not having to create and maintain content separately for the mobile website. It uses existing data that only needs to be managed in one place.

JISC Mobile has extended the functionality of Mobile Campus Assistant. One of the main challenges was the developers needed to build code to identify and transform data structures within the source RSS so they are optimised for mobile. For example, tables are linearised in the mobile version as multi-column tables do not work on a small screen and we took the decision to remove all images to increase the performance of the pages, especially over 3G (and slower) networks. As with Mobile Campus Assistant, the code developed in this project is open source and is available on Github.

Some interesting issues arose as a result of working within the limitations that mobile imposes. For example, the importance of microcopy came to the fore. We needed to change the ‘Supporting Your Institution’ section on the main website to ‘Institutional Support’ on the mobile version because the former label would not fit on a small screen. It’s a less than ideal compromise as it subtly changes the meaning, from an active to a passive mode. Unless we want to maintain 2 separate versions of our content (and we don’t have the resources for that), this illustrates the need for content strategists to consider the mobile experience from the outset, from the length of headings to the use of data structures within pages. As the demand for mobile access to the web is increasing rapidly (and will overtake desktop access in a matter of years), our content needs to get in shape; snappier, leaner and more flexible.

JISC Mobile is available at http://m.jisc.ac.uk/. We’d love to hear your comments and please report any bugs. There is a feedback page on the site itself or email us at web@jisc.ac.uk. If you blog or tweet about it, please mark your posts with #jiscweb so we can find them.

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.