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.

This is the compelling pitch offered to millions of prospective students from a bewildering array of start-ups and initiatives. Building on the open educational resource movement to create immersive online learning courses scalable to a global audience, and then giving them away. It seems like hardly a week goes by without another powerful announcement concerning another Massively Open Online Course (MOOC).

Examples include EdX (MIT/Harvard), MITx, Udacity (Stanford/Independent), Coursera (Princeton, Standford, Michgan, Pennsylvania), OERu (Abathasca), Khan Academy (Independent).

All share a similar business model: free content, free learning experiences, paid accreditation and additional support.  A business model that ALT-C 2010 attendees may find hauntingly familiar.

Click here to view the embedded video.

(video taken from a presentation given by Heather Price and David Kernohan from JISC,  Li Yuan and Sheila MacNeill at JISC CETIS, at the Association of Learning Technologists [ALT] conference in 2010)

Like any buzzword the term MOOC has shifted in meaning as use has expanded, from a specific set of pedagogic assumptions around networks and learning, to a term for any large online course with no initial fee.  These initial framings of the idea drew heavily on concepts around connectivism, and saw the learner as an active participant both in the design and the delivery of the course, alongside a network of peers.

My own experience with ds106 has brought home to me the power and possibilities of this “classic MOOC” model.  As a MOOC on Digital Storytelling, the course is actually taught in a number of locations to paying students, and uses the huge numbers of open participants to support, direct and encourage creativity. For me, the power has been in the community not in the course.

In the UK, the experiments of Jonathan Worth and Coventry University with open online courses around photography (for example PHONAR and PICBOD) have seen similar results.  Students on the PICBOD course spontaneously organised and ran their own well received end-of-course exhibition.

Clearly the power of this form of MOOC works, in ways related to more traditional university outreach activity, to engage and inspire people outsides of the confines of an institution.  And bringing the interested amateur into contact with the ideas and processes of academia can only be a good thing for student recruitment.

A parallel movement, which could be exemplified by Anya Kamenetz’s “DIYu” and “Edupunk’s Guide”, sees the MOOC as a replacement  rather than an enhancement for institutional study. Courses within this tradition, despite the revolutionary trappings and “Education is broken” sloganeering, tend to be far more traditional in structure. Indeed it could be argued that only the zero cost of entry separates them from millennial initiatives like Fathom and UKeU.

The learning itself tends to be more pragmatic, with a skills/mastery rather than an understanding/practice focus, and there is a clear demarcation between tutor as source of knowledge and student as consumer.

To me,  it is this revolutionary strand of MOOCs that is reinforcing the traditional model of education,  and the institutionally-based pedagogic experiments of people like Jim Groom, Jonathan Worth and Stephen Downes that are challenging it.

In February we released JISC Elevator, a beta website designed to allocate JISC funding to ideas based on votes from those working and studying in higher and further education. People could submit an idea to the site via a video pitch and if enough people voted for it JISC would consider it for funding.

We think JISC Elevator is a useful approach for a number of reasons:

• It is driven by what the sector wants. JISC projects are funded after an established review process conducted by experts. Elevator projects still benefit from this review but they also have an initial screening where a much broader range of people get to decide whether an idea is relevant to them or not.
• It establishes demand for an idea. One of the most difficult things for people who are applying for JISC funding to demonstrate is that there is a real demand for the idea they are proposing. The Elevator establishes this right from the start, if you can’t get enough people to vote for your idea then you don’t get funding.
• It supports small, practical ideas. Previous work in JISC has shown that small projects can have a big impact. Small projects also offer a chance to try out new technologies and very innovative ideas that have a higher chance of failure in a way that minimises the risk.
• It promotes ideas that benefit many institutions. To reach voting targets on Elevator ideas have to get votes from a minimum number of institutions so ideas have to appeal to people working in other departments and institutions and not just meet local needs.

In the future we are likely to use Elevator in more specific and targeted areas where small projects can be used to realise elements of the JISC strategy. It is likely that Elevator will be most useful in early stage innovation because it will allow us to support experiments with emerging technologies and practice that could benefit the sector by developing new tools, services and practices. We see this as a specific tool we can use to improve the allocation of innovation funding in certain areas. We don’t expect it to replace existing approaches.

We were very happy with how the trial went. In the 6 weeks the beta was live, we had 26 ideas and there were 2300 votes from 234 different institutions. There are more numbers and detailed analysis in the evaluation report I prepared on the trial.

Naturally as this was a trial, there were lots of things we think we might be able to improve upon. The report goes into some detail on this. We are about to embark on further development on the site to address some of these issues.

Of the 26 ideas, 22 reached their voting target. We then submitted these ideas to an evaluation with expert markers. Based on this evaluation we have decided to fund 6 projects – you can click on the links to see their video pitches:

1. Mobile Reflections – University of Leeds - Using mobile devices to enable students to capture videos of them reflecting on their work while out in the field
2. Interactive Visualisations – Oxford University - Developing an open source and easy to use tool to help researchers produce interactive visualisations that they can use for teaching, for investigating data and for disseminating their research
3. Classy Apps – Kingston College - Developing a guide to using apps on the ipad and iphone for teachers to engage GCSE re-sitters
4. Health CARE – City University -Developing augmented reality apps to support the learning of health care students
5. Open Access Index – Edinburgh University - Investigating the development of a score to denote how engaged an academic is with distributing research outputs via open access routes
6. Mobile app for course data – University of Central Lancashire - Developing mobile apps to enable prospective students to discover information about courses they may be interested in

There is a nice spread of projects here, they come from a range of institutions, address a variety of institutional functions and serve the needs of a number of different user groups. You can expect to see the results from these projects around the end of August.

We are in the midst of planning the next iteration of the elevator site. We see its immediate future as a platform for enabling innovation in specific areas. However in the longer term there are some more intriguing possibilities. Would it be useful to provide a version of Elevator that could be installed and used at universities, colleges and other organisations?  Can we use the Elevator to involve more students in the innovation we fund? How can we involve innovators from outside the further and higher education sector? Lots of questions and we don’t have the answers yet but we hope that by iterating our approach to Elevator we can continue to find new ways to support innovation in the sector.

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.
Recognising this, the JISC-funded DevCSI project (managed by UKOLN) was introduced to work with local developers, to understand better their potential as an under-utilised resource and to create opportunities for them to network together, sharing resources, ideas, code and solutions. With the network that DevCSI has successfully pioneered, an institution which employs a handful of developers locally gains the benefit of a sector-wide network of peers bringing different perspectives and experiences to bear in a shared context. Beyond the immediate sector, DevCSI has worked with open-source and commercial suppliers who recognise the value in the networked pool of development talent and expertise.

JISC has been consistent in maintaining that the sector needs to continue to innovate if it is to be able to meet the long-term challenges of a radically changing environment. Institutions must be careful to maintain the capacity for technical innovation – indeed a recession is the right time to invest in change and innovation in order to emerge ready to exploit the opportunities of better economic times. In the difficult period ahead, one predictable response will be to outsource some software services, seeking the cost-savings and efficiencies promised by service-delivery paradigms such as Software as a Service. But there are risks associated with outsourcing services entirely, such as the associated reduction in local understanding and expertise, and the loss of capability to adapt to meet particular local requirements.

In the DevCSI project, we are working to establish an understanding of the changing role of the local developer in this likely new landscape with its greater dependency on remote, shared services. While recognising that they have some common requirements, we should not forget that our institutions have their individual ‘flavours’ too (this is surely part of what makes higher education in the UK so attractive internationally). For shared, remote services to be truly effective in a local context, they must be tailored to the needs of the users in that context.

DevCSI is steadily gaining traction in the UK – we have worked with related organisations such as OSSWatch and The Software Sustainability Institute and have organised events at many higher and further education institutions. Our work is even being recognised internationally, and we have been recently invited to help establish a similar initiative in Australia.

Where next for DevCSI? We’ve established a nascent community of developers in the UK and can already point to evidence of the value of this, some of which (such as peer-peer training) is even measurable in pounds, shillings and pence! While maintaining and growing this, we are now considering where best to focus our resources at a sector-wide level. One issue we have identified in the sector is the lack of career options for successful developers – other than to move into less technical management roles. Many of our best developers simply move out of the sector entirely in order to progress in their careers. An idea we are starting to explore is the possible development of a new role in the sector – the Strategic Developer – a developer who has both technical and domain experience, and who can contribute to strategic planning and decision making. Establishing such a role may take time but, as technology is undoubtedly going to play an increasingly important role in the future of further and higher education, so must we ensure that the people who understand the technology stick around long enough to be able to contribute at this level.

For more information, go to the DevCSI blog. Please do email me (p.walk@ukoln.ac.uk) if you have questions about this work. My UKOLN colleague, Mahendra Mahey and I also presented on this work at the JISC Conference, 2011 (slides).

Photograph (C) Andrew Hewson http://t.co/6g3ENKP

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.

I think that we can help developers in universities become even more effective. Dev8D is not a one off event but it is part of a strategic programme of work called the Developer Community in Support of Innovation (devCSI) that has been put in place to support developers and through them, their institutions. The main benefits are:

• to provide training for developers – we calculated that last year’s dev8D delivered £85,000 worth of training to those who attended;
• enable developers to collaborate and share experience in solving problems and addressing issues that many institutions have;
• provide developers with new contacts who can help them with the work they do at their institutions;
• work in partnership with JISC services like OSSWatch and with other relevant initiatives like the mashed libraries events and the Software Sustainability Institute.

Developers working at universities are responsible for a type of local innovation that is crucial to universities in meeting the challenges they face. This can be day to day tweaking of systems to meet demand or it can be looming strategic imperatives such as student satisfaction. There are many ways in which this local innovation benefits institutions but I’d like to highlight three in particular:

• Ensuring that institutional systems work smoothly together saves money by reducing duplication of effort. In many cases this requires the intervention of a local developer to ensure that software that has been bought is integrated with existing systems.
• The needs of students and staff differ between institutions and between departments. Developers in institutions react to these needs and customise software systems or build new ones to ensure those needs are met. This allows the institution to be agile in responding to user needs and to ensure students and staff have a satisfactory experience.
• Developers allow universities to be agile in reacting to and benefiting from the new technology developments that can help them improve services to students and staff. An example of this is Huddersfield University’s work with the information about student and researcher behaviour stored in library systems. In a lot of cases, this information is not used to its full potential. Dave Pattern, the Library Systems Manager at Huddersfield University started analysing Huddersfield’s data because he was interested in it and he made it openly available so that others could see what he had done. Dave’s work attracted the interest of many people in university libraries and was promoted and developed further as part of the Mosaic project. This included the production of some prototype applications built on Huddersfield’s data as part of the Mosaic project.  Recently JISC have funded Huddersfield to work with 8 other libraries to investigate the link between library use and student attainment and to experiment with tailoring library provision based on this data

Paul Walk, Deputy Director of UKOLN, elaborates on the value of developers to universities in his fantastic blog post on responsive innovation. I believe that funding projects like devCSI and events like dev8D gives developers the opportunity to come together, share best practice,  as well as create and distribute solutions from which the whole of UK education can benefit.

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.

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.

Equally, costs of publishing and travel can be significantly reduced by open access journals, such as the 2m pages of text provided by the Wellcome Trust’s Medical Journal Backfiles digitisation.

The University of Oxford’s Great War Archive not only gathered and digitised the general public’s material evidence from World War One but enabled new communities and expertise to be developed outside the campus walls.

And projects such as Freeze Frame collection of polar photographs, or the Old Weather resource for transcribing weather reports in Naval logbooks, not only provide new data for educators and learners around the world, but also allow for a greater appreciation of the nation’s ‘prize jewels’ within its cultural and educational collections.

Much of the argument is laid out in a new JISC report written by Simon Tanner of King’s College London. Inspiring Research, Inspiring Scholarship is available as a pdf document from the JISC website.

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.

So with the erasing of boundaries comes a new geographically spread industry which can’t always find places to communicate.  And for those citizen photographers outside the profession who contribute to the news, it can be hard to find space to contribute.  So OPEN-i, one of the JISC projects run by the University of the Arts, London, is creating a ‘virtual community’ of photojournalists. This community space links photographers, agencies, publications and educational institutions in a virtual network. Its aim is to provide somewhere members can discuss the issues facing the industry as well as debating and discussing the future of news in the crazy world of web 2.0. To take an example, a recent discussion focused on how the earthquake in Haiti was reported and the ethics surrounding this.

With feedback from some of its 850+ members like – “[it’s] changing the face of photojournalism and photojournalism education” (Professor of Photojournalism at a US University), and “it has introduced me to new people with different perspectives…to expand my thinking. Problems, solutions, people, ideas and processes are all opened up for wide discussion – OPEN-i is a terrific resource” (Director of a commercial photo agency) – it’s clear this initiative is having a positive impact on a wide range of people from all walks of life.

Of course, photojournalism is just one example of a profession whose work is inside and outside academia, professional and amateur, UK and international. As the cult of the knowledgeable amateur grows, we need to find new ways to bring expertise together, and digital technology can help us do that in a way that physical spaces can’t.  Pictures are no less remarkable for being caught by ordinary people, so our educational and professional resources on photography and other subjects need to be open to hobbyists and interested parties as well as experts.  Only then will we be truly embracing a world of lifelong learning.