Image courtesy of Fremlin on Flickr

I was working late in my office the other night, at Chesterfield College when there was a knock on the door.  Without waiting for an answer in strolled a furry looking chap who put the kettle on and settled himself down at my conference table.

“Who are you?” I asked puzzled.

“I’m curriculum,” he said with a toothy smile.

“No way,” I shook my head in denial, “curriculum has been deployed and is working hard in the classroom.”

“Ahh,” he said. “That’s my little brother the 2012/13 curriculum.  I’m the 2013/14 curriculum.”  He took his cap off and showed me his pointed ears and just for a second his eyes seemed to glow with a strange yellow hue.  “I’m bigger, badder and need to be Wolf compliant.”

If you are working in further education then it is time to look at your 2013/14 curriculum with a critical eye. The implications of the Wolf review of vocational education and the corresponding changes to funding methodology are significant and will form the cornerstone of your planning cycle.  Wolf requires providers to reconsider their mainstream provision and ensure it meets local and national needs.  Also to offer substantive programmes that don’t lead to ‘cul-de-sac’ qualifications while promoting English and maths, work placement and employability.

What can you do to prepare for the changes ahead?

Chesterfield College planning for 2012/13 was subject to a good practice case study for our innovative use of technology in securing an outstanding curriculum with significant efficiencies.  This year we have to go one better and secure a Wolf compliant curriculum with additional significant efficiencies.  We are starting from the ground up to build something fresh and innovative with the technology at our disposal.  It is exciting and exhilarating to build a curriculum with the power to transform lives and we are continuing to receive great support from the East Midlands RSC and curriculum network groups which have been assisting our innovations and ‘sense checking’ our developments.

I believe the key to building a strong curriculum is in the groundwork; good preparation and teamwork are everything.

So… if you sitting comfortably, I’ve provided what I hope is some helpful advice for senior managers.  Let’s begin.

1. Audit, Audit, Audit

How does your current curriculum stack up against your shadow allocation, and what the Wolf report requires? You might be lucky, you may be better off or see no change, but I’d be prepared to bet that it is an ugly picture for some providers and that there are some worried senior management teams up and down the land.

Audit your 2012/13 provision against the funding bands in the new methodology.  How many of your learners sit just below a funding band?  What could you do to gently topple them over?  Have you planned for rolling starts throughout the year to increase your participation number?  How will you build this into the 2013/14 plan?

Top Tip – Think about which teams you’re going to need extra support from such as your management information systems (MIS) team and forewarn them that you’ll need their time.

2. Substantive Long Programmes

Are all your full time programmes substantive?  Even those little awards and certificates that you think no-one will notice?  Your programmes need to be substantive and coherent.  If you have been maximising your standard learner numbers (SLN) you now have some hard choices to make in terms of what to keep and what to remove.  The ‘perverse incentives’ to funding short courses often referred to by government always seemed to me like a fabulous opportunity to provide learners with a top notch suite of qualifications which made them more employable.  Have you looked at the implications of the loss of these qualifications of your 2013/14 staffing analysis?

Top Tip – Look at the implications of the funding methodology on staffing before your middle managers start too.  You may need to be ready to field some tough questions.

3. Labour Market Intelligence (LMI)

Are you using effective labour market intelligence to inform your curriculum choices? How do you explain all those hairdressers you are training then?  Robust LMI is now at the heart of an effective curriculum and should inform your choices about what to launch and what to retire.  You need to gather significant LMI from a variety of external and internal sources.  You can’t just roll over the same curriculum you’ve always had with annual ‘tweaks’ – it is the educational equivalent of putting go faster stripes on an Austin Allegro.  Your learners and employers deserve better than this.

Top Tip – Don’t reinvent the wheel, the Skills Sector Councils hold significant amounts of up to date LMI, use it to your advantage.

4. English and maths

What does your maths and English provision look like?  Are your functional skills success rates outstanding or crying in a corner after being beaten up by the GCSE bullies?  You need to ensure your 2013/14 curriculum has English and maths written all the way through like a stick of Skegness rock.  Ensure all learners are given the opportunity to develop their English and maths skills via comprehensive and inclusive GCSE provision, stand alone qualifications and functional skills.  If you have high proportions of learners who already have GCSEs at grade C or above then offer them the opportunity to extend their knowledge with an AS alongside their main provision.

Top tip – Don’t assume because learners have grade C or above you don’t have a responsibility to stretch them further.

5. Work placements

Under Wolf more learners than ever will be required to undertake work placements.  How are you going to plan for this, especially with hard to engage sectors, such as construction?  Are your work placement protocols and systems ready for significant growth?  You need to ensure your local environment has sufficient opportunities for placements and plan accordingly.  Nothing will annoy employers more than multiple departments calling to secure work placements with zero coordination between them.

Top Tip – Use your customer relationship management tool wisely.

And my final piece of advice would be to highlight the best defence against the big bad Wolf.  Don’t build a curriculum made of straw!

Find out how your local RSC could help you.

Read the Wolf report.

See our case study.

Read our blog on embedding digital literacy into your curriculum.

Advice and guidance on how to keep your curriculum relevant at a time of rapid change.

Image courtesy of Fremlin on Flickr.

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.

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.

During the past two year I have been working  on the Transforming Curriculum Delivery through Technology Programme which funded 15 projects based in universities and colleges  with the aim of enhancing curriculum design and delivery through innovative uses of technology.

This work has focused on some of the key challenges that universities and colleges all face such as: improving  motivation, achievement and retention;  managing large cohorts; supporting remote and distance learners; engaging learners with feedback; ensuring ongoing responsiveness to stakeholder needs and delivering resource efficiencies which enhance rather than reduce the quality of the learning experience. By exploring new, creative and flexible models of delivering curriculum we have learned more about how and where technology can  add value and even transform the way in which the curriculum is delivered in different contexts.

We’ve found, for example, that students’ learning can benefit from efficient, integrated systems. At Lewisham college, for example, students on the new 14-19 diploma course are no longer dealing with printouts but getting instant access to their timetables, attendance and punctuality records through the college’s new learning portal.  The result is more motivated students who are more in control of their own progress, as student Sherrane Scott highlighted, “I use [the portal] for many things. The main use for me is to check my work in the courses section of the site. I use it because it is useful and convenient. It is also set out in a clear and understandable way.“

If you are interested in finding out more about this project, and the other work in the programme and want to understand more about the potential of technology-enhanced curricula on , our new guide Transforming curriculum delivery through technology: Stories of challenge, benefit and change is now available. This guide provides an overview of the outcomes from the programme and offers some insights into the ways in which institutions and individual curriculum areas can make use of technology to respond more robustly to the demands of a changing world. Copies can be downloaded or ordered from www.jisc.ac.uk/curriculumdeliveryguide (allow 2 weeks for delivery). For further information about the work of the projects and access to all our programme-related resources, please see the Design Studio. A recording of a presentation I gave recently providing an overview of the programme and its achievements, is also available.

Accompanying the guide, our latest radio show in the ‘JISC On Air’ series looks at how technology can deliver curriculum changeand  includes interviews with representatives from projects involved in the programme whodiscuss the impact achieved in two very different contexts and disciplines.

This statement is revealing of wider issues institutions face in today’s times of financial constraints: how do we know if a digital resource is having an impact on its target audience? How do we reach and speak to scholars, teachers and students to measure their satisfaction? What metrics should be adopted in the context of digitised scholarly material? How much does a digital resource tell about the institution that created it? And above all, has the investment paid back? These are not easy things to assess and often impact just takes time to materialise.

In order to support content creators, resources managers and information professionals within institutions in the task of assessing the usage and impact of their digital resources, JISC has supported the development of the Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources (TIDSR), by the Oxford Internet Institute (OII).

The toolkit, first developed in 2009 and recently updated, provides a framework for conducting this kind of analysis and offers guidance on a range of qualitative and quantitative methodologies that can be used such as webometrics, content analysis, surveys and focus groups. The TIDSR was used by projects in the JISC Impact and embedding of digitised resources programme, of which the Old Bailey was one, to conduct an analysis of their collections, identify where resources were working well and what could be done to improve them and better embed their content within teaching and research.

The case studies drawn from the experience of the projects are available in the toolkit and are a useful starting point for beginners in the field. They also provided fertile ground for the programme’s final report, “Splashes and Ripples: Synthesising the Evidence on the Impacts of Digital Resources” (PDF), by Eric Meyer. The report begins to sketch a picture, based on evidence rather than anecdotes, of how digitised resources in the humanities are currently being used and provides a set of recommendations to content creators on how to go about maximising the impact of their resource such as:

[quote from report]

1.     Remember in advance that you will want to contact your users. A number of projects had a difficult time finding users to survey or interview, but users are a key resource that you will want to approach from time to time.

2.     Use the media to your advantage. One of the undeniable advantages that arts and humanities resources have in the United Kingdom is that there is considerable public interest in these topics. […] The Old Bailey Proceedings Online project has benefitted from inclusion in popular BBC programmes (see page 11).

3.     The media and the public are influenced by numbers and metrics. Being able to demonstrate your impact numerically can be a means of convincing others to visit your resource, and thus increase the resource’s future impact. For instance, the amount of traffic and size of iTunesU featured prominently in early press reports (see page 21).

4.     Make your resource easy to find. This can involve a number of strategies, including search engine optimization (SEO), partnerships with more prominent related sources (see page 31), links in related sites, and inclusion in Wikipedia and other sources. A Vision of Britain through Time has been the most proactive resource in this regard, (see page 28),

5.     Give your resource an unambiguous name and acronym/initialism, both to increase the likelihood that your resource turns up at the top of relevant searches, and to make measuring mentions of your resource result in as few false positives as possible.

6.     Create quick wins for new visitors to your collection. By finding things that they can quickly learn, do, see, or contribute, you can increase the stickiness of your site, and increase the likelihood that your resources will be used. Oxford University’s podcasts, for instance, are easy to immediately access and hear (see page 23).

7.     Leverage your wins. Using the most popular aspects of your resource to attract people to other parts of the collection via features such as suggested links and recommendations for further information can increase the time spent with your collection.

8.     Adopt Cool URLs as persistent, consistent, human-readable, and citable links to digital resources. The British History Online collection has used this method to increase the readability of its links (see page 39).

9.     Provide the ability to export citations directly to reference management software such as Zotero and EndNote.

10.     APIs are the future. Linked data, apps, and other ways that enable researchers to access and combine the data in your resource will increase its utility.

I would like to consider one area affected by the financial challenges: digital content collections development. I would like to share with you some ways in which the JISC-led Strategic Content Alliance can help you evaluate the financial standing of those important resources. As early as 2008, the Alliance commissioned Ithaka to address different aspects of the sustainability issue. Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources presented a framework for thinking about the mindsets and cultural factors needed to create sustainable resources and included a high-level survey of different revenue models that support digital content. In 2009 we commissioned the Ithaka  Sustaining Digital Resources: An On-the-Ground View of Projects Today. It took this approach a step further, examining in detail 12 digital content collections to understand how their leaders define and work towards sustainability, and drawing out the lessons other project leaders might apply to their own work. This included real figures giving the costs and income streams. Additional and supportive international research was also published in the Blue Ribbon on Sustaining Digital Preservation and Access in 2010.

As colleges and universities face increasingly tough choices on what to stop, start and continue in terms of provision of a range of activities to support their core missions, we have revisited and updated the twelve case studies. This will  show how their costs and income streams have been affected by the economic downturn and present the lessons learnt to help colleges and universities considering their options. It will contain real world examples of what is and isn’t working in terms of new emergent business models for digital content and collections. The preliminary findings will be showcased at JISC meeting rooms at Brettenham House in London on 17 March. Further information, including the registration details will be made available via the JISC website and Strategic Content Alliance blog shortly.

Just as we have considered how a college or university might weather the economic storm, we have thought about how funders might adopt good practice in developing their policies and practices in the future to help sustain their investments over the long term. So in 2010 we commissioned Ithaka to undertake research on how funders in Europe and North American are approaching the issues surrounding sustainability and taking the “best in class” practices develop a “tool-kit”. This will be published in April 2011. We hope that this research will support UK universities by allowing funders to identify good investments to help sustain not just digital content collections agencies such as JISC enhance its tactical and strategic approaches to help develop and sustain not just digital content collections, but other mission critical activities that are vital to UK college and university competitiveness globally.

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.

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.

As the budget reductions kick in we will all be faced with seemingly impossible tasks. However, situations often appear impossible only because our natural instinct is to assume that the way in which we have acted in the past is right for the future. If we focus on the benefits that our communities require and not the features we think they like, the future may not be so impossible after all. An outcome-based approach combined with free and adventurous thinking surely underpins successful performance in a challenging world. The solution to achieving this is likely not so much to be ‘out there’ in the latest management tome but rather within our own experience. If our own understanding based on experience is harnessed in an innovative way then this could offer the key – organised common sense still has great value and this approach is enshrined in the five factors.

1. Know your business – This sounds obvious but how many of us, when asked what we do, tell them exactly that … what we do! What the enquirer really wants to know is not what we actually do but what we contribute – in management speak, our value proposition. At JANET our occupation is not so much the 1s, 0s, routers, applications or any other technical solution but rather may be described as the way we enable the UK to continue to have a world class research and education community. I recall once doing an exercise where we had to come up with a 15 second sound bite that could be extracted from a one minute answer. It was quite challenging to construct a few words which encapsulated a complex business: however, it did help focus on what was important and what wasn’t. I commend this exercise to you in a quiet moment.

2. Know your numbers – Many people in our organisations instinctively prefer to leave the numbers to the accountants, particularly in a system which has been substantially grant funded and based on annual cash flow profiles. When the going gets tough it is crucial to know the precise nature of the finances. The ‘know your numbers’ factor really seems to resonate with colleagues engaged in the business of research and educational information technology. When the budgets are cut it is essential to know your total cost of ownership, otherwise it is highly unlikely that you will be able to adapt and flex effectively without damaging the quality of provision to those who use the services. It may be a little frightening at first but once the shock is over it will focus thinking on which is really important.

3. Strive to be trusted – Any sales person worth their salt has the ambition to become a ‘trusted advisor’ to their customer. In the new, lean, mean world we will be required increasingly to both collaborate and compete – a sensitive relationship but one which has no chance of success if there is no trust. Our prime pursuit must be to establish trust based on honesty and integrity, even when we disagree – this is an effective and pragmatic route to success.

4. Empower the team – No one person can do it all, however able or driven they may be. Successful leadership is about drawing out the best from all the team but this doesn’t happen by magic. Just as in sport, a good team last year may not necessarily be a good one this year. The game may have changed, circumstances altered or players moved on. As we seek to achieve results in a changing world, team members will be asked to do challenging things. In such circumstances it is important that the team are equipped to complete the task, both as a team and as individuals. Failing to train and empower the team proactively leads to organisational dysfunction and thus failure to achieve targets.

5. See over the horizon – If this could be done 100% accurately we’d have few problems. Just because this is challenging, however, it doesn’t mean giving up. In a fast changing political, economic, societal and technical environment it is essential to explore the likely scenarios that are just over the horizon. The legendary ice hockey player Wayne Gretzky said, “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.” We must all seek to be where the action is going to be tomorrow and not just where it is today.

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.

Whether or not evolution or evolution of strategy is required depends entirely upon your organisational situation. Nevertheless it helps to know where you’re headed. Common sense (and Kotter) tells us that strength of vision is a vital element of change. JISC’s vision is one of easy and widespread access to information and resources, anytime, anywhere; a vision with technology and information management at the heart of research and education.

So how does that help? Well, now more than ever, we believe that technology offers a genuine opportunity to transform not only the delivery of higher education and research undertaking, but also education institutions themselves. Crucially we argue that it’s not so much exploration of technological challenges that is required, rather a greater understanding of the potential of technology. Simply put: knowing what’s possible.

That’s why we are leading and contributing to a series of events throughout 2010, to stimulate debate and provide a platform for exchanging ideas on the future of the higher education sector.  And further, through this blog we will champion the role technology plays to enable education institutions to achieve their missions through these uncertain, but fascinating times.