I recently attended a Jisc Regional Support Centre Higher Education Conference and Shukie’s strong views and opinions on the use of e-technology got me thinking about how and why we end up using certain technologies for learning.

Shukie divides educators into two tribes: the standardisers and the creatives. The standardisers follow a system of hierarchy, of ‘masters’ of education. They dictate to learners not only what they should read, but now also the kind of technology they should use. He equates them to X Factor judges dictating how someone should sound and what they should look like. If we’re not careful, he thinks we will be using technology to create a one-dimensional learning experience when, as I believe, it could be used to share and grow the ‘ecology for learning’ in many new ways.

So, how do we ensure learning exploits technology and not vice versa?

Shukie believes that Prensky, internationally acclaimed speaker, writer, consultant, and innovator in the field of education and learning, didn’t get it quite right with his Digital Natives concept. Shukie’s Digital Pioneers project, carried out with undergraduates in 2012, which were all within Prensky’s grouping, did not find that learners born into a digital age had different expectations of learning.

Shukie’s project asked learners to create a learning resource using any technology, any pedagogical philosophy and any learner group to explore the potential of technologies in teaching and learning in the 21^st century. What Shukie found was that in almost every case, results were reflective of a ‘master’ teacher-at-the-front-of-a-classroom style of teaching. Only a handful of learners explored ideas that used technology to take learning to different places, both physical and online, or looked to provide learning at different times from different ‘leaders’. Shukie discovered that you can’t remove stereotypes that years of teaching from the front of the classroom create. That is still what people think education is.

His suggestion to get people away from this conception is to use a musical analogy to encourage educators to explore different approaches to the use of technology within education. This aims to avoid heading towards an ‘e-learning singularity paradigm’, where specific technologies are dictated by institutional ‘masters’ as the ‘proper’ tools for learning as a result of best practice research.

He recommends three other approaches that instead, allow learners to use technology to decide what is best for them and help link skills required directly with community and workplace needs:

Pop technology

Shukie cites the development of the small-scale COOC (community open online course) project as a better way of learning than a MOOC (massive open online course). His course is open to local communities with an interest in a subject, using online discussions to develop their own way of learning.  Unlike MOOCs, the emphasis is on localised learning opportunities based on contributions from informal enthusiasts, who have limited (if any) formal teaching experience. He believes this will generate a wider discussion and progress learning beyond the usual academic suspects.

Punk, or EduPunk

This is an approach reacting against the commercialisation of education, where accreditation is generally unimportant, and where learning is self-generated with the community deciding the content. An example is the University of British Columbia’s course “Wikipedia: WikiProject Murder Madness and Mayhem“. The course involved creating articles on Wikipedia where student and teacher became peers. In its essence, learning takes place when learners feel inspired to discuss ideas, not at appointed times and places.

The principle of ‘open’ is important to fulfil this ambition. I think knowledge should not be bound within the confines of a costly journal, but should be publicly and freely available.

Folk, or Folksonomy

An approach to create knowledge through tagging, originated by people, not experts. Again this means that the interests of a community dictate course/learning content. A basic example could be Twitter, as only popular content is tagged and circulated within the community.

Today, you may see projects that crowdsource, asking the general public for their views and opinions. This method is being used more and more to expand our knowledge of a subject area. Used within an educational community this could help inform course content, themes of interest and demand.

Is Shukie a dreamer? He does recognise that we may have to wear ties on Tuesdays and have some learning dictated to us – otherwise, as he says, ‘who would choose to learn about fire safety training?’ But he hopes that if you enter the teaching profession, it’s your choice whether you become a standardiser or a creative. His belief is that learning and teaching methods are not just there to create consistency, efficiency, fiscal sustainability or even achievement. Education is about generating another set of voices for the future.

So, in summary Essa Academy in Bolton shouldn’t put away the iPads, but make sure that those shiny screens do not outshine the minds of the people using them.

The key findings from the AoC report highlight:

‘The ability of Colleges to implement the education policy agenda, and deliver the required policy outcomes, relies… on the ability to manage the deployment of that technology in ways that best meets the specific requirements of the individual College. In particular this requires:

• Relevant and structured staff training in the use of technology across the curriculum
• A whole College approach to strategic planning in the use of technology;
• Representation on senior management team (SMT) for the development of technology strategy
• Efficient purchasing that takes into account collaborative initiatives such as shared services and migration of some services to ‘cloud’ technologies
• Technology resourcing as a core function of College business processes
• Specific funding for the development of e-learning.

Some of these findings will be of no surprise to us working within JISC’s Regional Support Centres (RSCs), who support colleges with advice and guidance on how to best use technology, as we too are finding similar issues.  We work to both advocate and support UK learning providers with how they can adopt ‘A whole College approach to strategic planning in the use of technology’. We do this through eProgress Reviews and other consultations that put technology in the context of a college’s overall business.

We recognise that if we are to fully exploit the potential of technology to help Colleges meet their strategic objectives ‘technology strategy’ must be considered at the highest level in the organisation along with Business Strategy.  We regularly support senior management to review their ‘technology strategy, offering advice and guidance based on our experience of the very best practice the sector has to offer’.  An example of such an approach can be found with Liverpool Community College.

Our network of 12 RSCs will continue to advocate and support College’s ‘Relevant and structured staff training in the use of technology across the curriculum’ by providing inspiration, support and training to those charged with providing Continuous Professional Development and supporting others to use technology effectively in delivering the curriculum.  We are supporting those developing the next generation of teachers to ensure that technology is not an afterthought but an integral part of their development.

By creating and sustaining forums and networks of collaborative practice, often using collaborative social networking tools as well as the tried and tested JISCMail supporting Colleges and other learning providers to consider and enter into collaborative initiatives, exploiting technology to share services and to get the best deal from technology and what the Cloud has to offer.  JISC and Janet themselves are, of course, trailblazing as services shared by the sector.

Our recent investment in 32 projects in the FE and Skills sector is testament to its commitment to support ‘Specific funding for the development of e-learning’ and RSCs will be helping to disseminate the findings of these projects so the whole sector can improve and make the most of what technology, wisely deployed, has to offer.

The report also identified that the areas in which the use of technology is perceived to be the least effective are:

• Widening participation
• Reducing digital exclusion
• Engaging students with disabilities and/or learning difficulties
• Improving retention and achievement.

These findings show that although we work hard to support Colleges and other learning providers to make sure technology is more effective in these areas, we still have a lot of work to do to ensure that colleges make the most of our guidance and advice.  JISC RSCs are regularly demonstrating how a variety of technologies can be used to reach out to different communities and widen participation, and how digital exclusion can be reduced by effective procurement and the use of Open Source Software and Open content. Along with JISC TechDis, RSCs are supporting Colleges and others in ‘Engaging students with disabilities and/or learning difficulties’.

If you’d like to know more about how we can support your college or learning provider visit http://www.jiscrsc.ac.uk/

Very quickly students have to learn how to live and gain their education unaided, without the constant pressure, nagging and help that parents provide.  We instead all eventually turn to technology for help.  I can honestly say that for the last year it has been my trustworthy laptop that has raised and nurtured me.  Universities therefore have been continually developing to provide the best programming, sites and systems to make sure that we, their new ‘children’, can easily mature and thrive.

My generation is fortunate to have been raised in a century of technology, where if you don’t know how to use a laptop, mobile phone and iPod by the age of fifteen it is considered bizarre.  However, when it comes to using digital technology for University education, it is surprising as to how similar it is to when I gave a mobile to my grandmother.  As students, we are taught the basics and yet that is where most of us (like my grandmother) give up.

However, there is a whole diverse world of digital information that can ease our lives, improve our knowledge and assist us in our daily duties.  If only my granny had been able to discover the wonders of Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia, I’m sure her days would have been more fulfilling and improved much like my quality of life at University.  My point here is that after the first few months of adjusting and struggling with the new, seemingly impossible build up of work, I began to explore what the internet could really do.

Aladdin’s treasure trove of information was opened to me.  Through the University portal I could access the online library filled with free journals that I could easily search and use, which really improved the quality of my work.  No longer did I have to back up my poorly argued essays with made up and often incorrect evidence but I could research and quote known authors.

Through VLE Blackboard I could go onto modules message boards and yell at team members who weren’t pulling their weight, or view important announcements made by lecturers (that I had not listened to as they were said in the last five minutes of class).  I even found that social network sites, of which I had previously spent what seemed like my life on, were surprising me with answers to my questions that I had hash-tagged #HELP!!!

Finally University’s burden seemed to ease and I can’t stress how important the access to digital information helped this.  From timetabling being my new mum shouting at me to go to lectures; to Google being my dad, though with far more accurate answers to questions; Twitter being my new brother giving me annoying updates but often with interesting points; and my sister being the VLE giving me last minute help in my states of sudden panic.

So, with A-Levels recently revealed I wish luck to the new first year students and pass on my wisdom that as unlikely as it seems, you can survive without your family, on your own and be independent, through the help gained by exploring the digital world.

Amy is currently in her second year of studying English and Classical Literature at the University of Leeds.

I intend to give a view across the sector, pulling together changes in research and in teaching from our colleagues in the field, and showing how the ‘“Wikipedia” way’ supports those emerging trends in practice.  For example, JISC has already been involved in improving Wikipedia entries by getting academics and Wikipedians together – as you can see from this blog post by my colleague Sarah Fahmy.

easel.ly

Martin Poulter, who is organising the conference, told me: “This is the first Eduwiki conference and hopefully the first of many.  We see immense mutual benefits in working with educators and academics and really welcome the involvement of the Jisc community.”
I’m keen to widen the circle, too.  Some key questions that we’re looking at to help lead institutions through the changing scholarly process include:

How can students and researchers make best use of Wikipedia?  And importantly, how do they verify and cite their reading?
What’s different about the way people approach the scholarship on Wikipedia?
How can universities and colleges use that platform to raise the profile of their work?
How does the Wikipedia approach to openness impact on the way people are doing their research and reading online?

I’d welcome your thoughts.

image by Joseph Hart

JISC and Research Councils UK (RCUK) are announcing new coordinated work which will ease the burden on universities of reporting research outcomes.

As UK universities face increasing demands to share information with other sector bodies, it is more important than ever that their research reporting systems talk to one another, to ensure their data is accessible and can be collected and processed without duplication.

During the academic year 2012-13, JISC and RCUK will be working to ensure that systems will interoperate to maximise benefits for universities, researchers and other sector bodies. These systems include: the Research Councils’ Research Outcomes System, ResearchFish (formerly e-Val), and the forthcoming Gateway to Research – a system to be used by members of the public to access information on research funded by the Research Councils; JISC’s RepositoryNet+ and research management shared service projects; and HEFCE’s REF collection system.

One way these systems can work together is by using a single data ‘language’ or standard– such as the Common European Research Information Format, CERIF, an approach that is compatible with systems in many UK universities.

To support universities with this approach, JISC is funding a new CERIF support person to work with them to help ensure they can implement this standard consistently and fully benefit from its interoperability. Both HEFCE and the Research Councils have already been working with this post.

Universities can also share data by using a simpler option designed especially for information about research outputs – such as the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) which is used to collect the metadata of the records in the archive so that services can be built using metadata from many archives.  Other approaches like SPARQL, a query language for databases able to retrieve and manipulate data stored in Resource Description Framework (RDF) format, are also being used.

JISC and Research Councils UK, repository representatives and others will make sure that universities can send information from an institutional repository to the research system using this simpler option by 2013 through a new project at UKOLN, based at the University of Bath, which will work out the schema for such an option and software for universities to use.

Astrid Wissenburg, deputy chair of the RCUK Impact Group, said: “The UK higher education and research sector has a unique opportunity to improve the ways in which research management and reporting systems interact with each other. Researchers, universities and funders have a common interest in ensuring that research outputs are visible to demonstrate the impact of UK research, using institutional and subject repositories alongside more sophisticated research information systems. In either case, it is important that these interoperate effectively with the systems operated by research funders and others.”

In my opinion, an improvement of this kind would contribute to sector efficiencies, and to the availability of accurate information to inform planning and research management, as well as to easing the reporting burden on researchers.

A consensus view seems to be emerging that we will need to support all of these approaches to interoperability over the medium term, as they offer people different benefits. However, we anticipate that universities will steadily move towards using the CERIF standard over the longer term – which is why we’re funding the important CERIF support post.

And that brings me to our recent decision in the University of Edinburgh to join our colleagues in North America and offer our own MOOCs – or massive open online courses – through the Coursera consortium.

It has been a very busy few weeks. After taking the in principle decision, there has been a tsunami of sorting the legals (you might be surprised at how much of this there is when you place your courses with another organisation, even if those courses are free!); choosing the MOOCs to develop; making sure we have enough capacity for shooting a lot of short videos in a tight timeframe; informing senior colleagues and University Court; organising publicity and responses to queries – at times it has felt over-whelming.

I must acknowledge here my academic colleagues for their enthusiastic response to our search for suitable MOOCs, and my real indebtedness to two of my staff, Sarah Gormley and Amy Woodgate, who have worked tirelessly on the big stuff and on the details.

So, why did we decide to ‘go MOOC’? My colleagues and I have been watching MOOC developments since their earliest days, aware that they offer interesting opportunities to explore new ‘educational spaces’ in which the scale goes way beyond large on-campus classes, and where assessment has to be thought about differently.

Of course, much of what we are designing is based upon experience with technology for on-campus courses and for our expanding range of fully online taught Masters programmes, and technology in our open LLL/CPD courses, but nevertheless it does have different dimensions. Over the years JISC has helped enormously, with our participation and learning from others through programmes in pedagogy, learner experience, open content etc – its easy to forget that, because so much knowledge just becomes internalised.

For me, MOOCs sit as part of current thinking in open educational practices (OER, OCW, OERu, connectivism etc) – ways to flex and bend the constraints that much of our traditional HE formats impose on us, and on our learners. Currently, we are exploring some of this in an EC project OERtest, especially routes to offer credit for OER/OCW/MOOC-based learning. Out of the MOOCs we expect to learn about different course designs, to reach learners from a much wider base than normal, and of course, there is reputational value for us too.

So, the preparedness was there – the big decisions were How?, With partners or solo?, and When (early adoptor or mainstream)? An invitation to join Coursera, extended by Daphne Koller to our Vice Chancellor Tim O’Shea (Chair of JISC Board) whilst he was on study leave in California, gave us the opportunity to answer all those questions, and we decided after some brief but intense reflection that now was the time and with peers in the US was the route.

This meant that we didn’t need to build our own infrastructure but could concentrate on the pedagogy and course construction.

We shall offer our courses *as a university* rather than from individual academic staff working without our support or formal involvement. We will quality assure all our courses to ensure appropriate quality. They will be short (5 weeks in the first instance) as we feel these learners may find sustained study at a distance hard going (as do those on taught online courses), and we will also stick to first year undergraduate level.

What did it cost, and is it sustainable? As with all online courses, the costs are front-loaded but even more so for MOOCs of this type, where the delivery cost (especially teaching) is low. We will spend effort and money on all our courses to get them to the right quality. We didn’t find that we had most of what we needed to hand to ‘re-arrange the pieces’ to form MOOCs, so we are going back to the design stage and creating new where necessary. One example is video lectures; we do have lots of 50 min video lectures but they really are not what we want to offer – we want shorter, focused segments with associated study and assessment. Ditto for assessment. So, it isn’t cheap for the typical university course to ‘go MOOC’. On the other hand, no knowledge is free and as we wish to explore this space, we feel the return will be worthwhile to us, and to those who take our MOOCs.

How will we sustain it? The model is to share with Coursera of the modest charge for the ‘certificates of completion’, and we will use that income to pay for our support for learners, offered in the light-touch form that these types of MOOC use. It should break even!

And for the future? I am cautious as to where the ‘MOOC movement’ will go. Some of the wilder speculation about ‘free online degrees’ and the ‘end of HE as we know it’ doesn’t help serious debate. Currently we know little about MOOC learners, about how to design and deliver successfully in a range of subjects, and most importantly at a range of levels (eg final year undergrad). Is the experience helpful to learners, and do they get value from their certificates of completion? Much more research is needed, and perhaps JISC might find this a useful area in which to support the UK HE community.

I can see openings where MOOCs might find a useful place in HE – enabling those in less privileged HE settings to access courses in subjects that they cannot take, individuals with weak formal qualifications who might demonstrate competences at advanced levels as part of portfolios for recognition of prior learning, as a more formal way to learn for those ‘just interested in that subject’, and for teachers in universities to pick up new ideas as to how to teach and learn online.

MOOCs won’t suit everyone, any more than on-campus courses or distance education suits everyone but extending the menu of choices is valuable. They may not be suitable for all subjects.

I am sure the next few months up to launch of our courses and then through first delivery will be fun, and also hard work. I am really looking forward to it, and I must continue to resist the temptation to keep checking how many thousands of people have registered interest

The EC’s position supports OA to research papers encouraging both Green and Gold routes, in line with recent proposals from the UK Research Councils. It seeks to address the sustainability issues relating to increased subscriptions as well as accelerating the benefits of digital distribution on the web.

The Communication nicely expresses some of advantages as helping to:

“accelerate innovation (faster to market = faster growth); foster collaboration and avoid duplication of effort (greater efficiency); build on previous research results (improved quality of results); involve citizens and society (improved transparency of the scientific process).”

Research data is also addressed, as you’d expect.  The EC proposes that they will implement a pilot with regard to research data deposit in a similar vein to their previous OA pilot to publications. It recommends that research data from publicly funded research is publicly accessible and re-usable. These are welcome proposals, and I think JISC can support universities in the UK in response to them.

The other communication – A Reinforced European Research Area Partnership for Excellence and Growth (pdf) – sees open access to publications and research data as essential and encourages open innovation between what they term the “knowledge triangle”, research, business and education. It’s great to see that the EC have brought together open access to research, alongside the development of research infrastructures (see their roadmap) to support world class research and facilities and collaborations with business, small and medium size enterprises  and wider society. This is a major contribution to achieving a thriving European economy, as well as sustainable research production and use. This reflects the UK department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) policies on Research and Innovation and the Strategic Vision for UK e-Infrastructure (pdfs).

As I say there have been several key policy documents in the last month or so, the Royal Society ‘Science as an Open Enterprise’, the UK Government open data white paper and the Finch report: expanding access to research publications, all of which suggest concerted movement toward a more open research environment.

So what about implementation of these policies for UK universities?

Open access

In terms of OA to articles JISC is working on practical implementation in partnership with other stakeholders:

• for example JISC Collections can support the licensing recommendations in the Finch report and the JISC development of repository services is underway via EDINA working with universities and research funders.

• In the UK transition to OA, maintaining an efficient and competitive scholarly publishing market is important. Key processes, such as peer review and academic publishing, must be sustained and evolve, and incentives will be needed to enable all stakeholders to play their part. Importantly, progress toward open access to UK published research will need to be measured. Methodologies for this purpose are being developed in the UK by the Open Access Implementation Group (OAIG).

• On behalf of OAIG, the Wellcome Trust and JISC are working to specify the role of an intermediary in enhancing the management of ‘gold’ article processing charges (APC’s); this is seen as a key role in the transition. Recently the OAIG report Going for Gold? shows economic modelling of OA adoption: it looks at both Green and Gold and finds that with worldwide Gold OA, all universities would see savings if article processing charges were at the current average levels.

Open data and software

The Royal Society report makes the case for open inquiry being at the centre of scientific enterprise; it calls for data to be “intelligently open” – more on that later.  Open data and software are themes in the EC communications, and in the UK we’re seeing policies from research funders and universities on these issues.

Last week the Software Sustainability Institute hosted a workshop at OR12 in Edinburgh where the early plans for a software repository for NERC research was discussed. In order to replicate and access data for research often the software used for related simulations and analysis have to re-usable too, this issue is now gaining serious attention.

• The EC Riding the Wave report called for a collaborative data infrastructure. The Knowledge Exchange report (pdf) gives a good overview of actions that are underway to realise this in the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and Demark and the JISC led European project, Sim4RDM, is working with European partners to develop shared policies and practice. Global coordination, from the US, to Europe to Australia is under active discussion with the proposal of an international Data Web Forum where essential interoperability issues will be addressed to help develop a sustainable data infrastructure.

• The JISC Digital Curation Centre and research data management programme are providing practical solutions to the deposit and re-use of research data, for example they support the use of data management plans for universities to implement research council requirements.

The building blocks of a more open research environment are here, but I would say the “intelligently open” phrase from the Royal Society report is important, it’s about the right data being shared in a usable way and accessible to researchers, business and the public.

So yes, stakeholders (universities, researchers, funders, publishers and infrastructure providers) must work together to develop policies, technical tools, infrastructure and capacity to enable the ‘intelligently open’ research that we see promised.

I welcome the EC positions, but what do they mean to you?

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.

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.

Flickr: peterkaminski

Is your institution adapting and responding to the fast changing marketplace as quickly as it might?

Changing demographics, government policies and shifts in economic pressure are all taking their toll on education organisations and now, as the UK seeks to strengthen its world-class reputation in teaching, learning and research, leaders in our universities and colleges need to ensure they maintain their competitive advantage.

To keep pace with the challenges, institutions need to be flexible and adapt quickly to change, so that every member of staff understands, identifies with, and contributes to, the vision, mission and values of the whole organisation.

Much of the potential in university and college people and processes can be lost through ineffective use of ICT, especially in communication and information sharing.

However, much can be gained by ensuring ICT is completely integrated and aligned with the institutional strategic planning, decision-making and delivery of business goals and that every resource, person and process is pulling its weight.

Studies undertaken by JISC in partnership with Nottingham University have shown that institutions differ widely in the maturity of their strategic ICT use and in the way ICT adds value strategically or operationally.

I recently watched a JISC webinar that introduced a new Strategic Information and Communications Technology (S-ICT) toolkit and it seems to me that it could add real value in measuring the strategic ICT maturity for an organisation, ie how well ICT is integrated into the institutional strategy and how well it is able to deliver maximum value and agility in reaching business goals.

Listening to the webinar as someone with a general interest in the subject rather than as an ICT specialist, I found the case study from Lucy Nelson at University of Central Lancashire really highlighted the instant impact S-ICT could have on an institution, showing the business benefits from a practical viewpoint.

She also gave a clear picture of the huge scope of the toolkit – its ability to quickly pinpoint gaps in understanding and in areas such as communication and engagement.

S-ICT produces a results profile, which gives ratings on operational, strategic and transformational levels, then assists leaders in using ICT to support decision making and planning and engage staff in working together more effectively and productively for the benefit of the organisation as a whole.

Part of the challenge of making decisions is having a clear and truthful picture of how your organisation is performing, its strengths and areas for development. It was really interesting to see how the case studies were being proactive, turning strategy into action and responding to the challenges of growth, diversification and mergers.

S-ICT developers have taken into account the unique qualities of every institution acknowledging that each department needs to be aware of attributes and values that set them apart in order to be able to positively contribute to the organisation as a whole. This versatile toolkit also has the scope to focus down on a particular faculty as well as a particular need or ambition.

S-ICT is available for downloading here.

Watch the webinar recording.

This was the question that JISC set out to answer by funding 9 experimental projects to analyse and exploit activity data to provide new services to researchers and students or to improve existing services. These projects covered recommendation services for library and repository content, access grid usage patterns, analysing data for student retention, virtual learning environment usage data, the link between student attainment and library usage and the possibility of taking a user centered approach to activity data.

The simple answer is yes, there are lots of ways that working with activity data could be useful. But there are many technical, legal, skills and policy issues that need to be addressed in order to do so. To enable others to learn from the experience of these projects and to copy the technical and legal solutions they developed we have produced a site that summarises all that was learned in the programme. The site is live now. It provides a high level overview of what activity data is, why it is useful and how it can be exploited and also contains detailed recipes for anyone who wants to start the process of exploiting activity data at their institution. You can also read more about the projects that made up the programme.

The site was produced by Sero Consulting working with Tom Franklin and Mark van Harmelen.

One interesting question about activity data is should it be made openly available? There are plenty of challenging issues here to do with anonymisation, compliance with data protection and ensuring that the users are appropriately informed and it is what they want. But there are also benefits to open data. A good illustration of what can happen with open activity data is the Book Galaxy app below that uses the library circulation data released as part of the JISC Mosaic project to provide an innovative interface for exploring the relationship between books. The activity data guide includes resources that address the question of open data and links to open data released by some of the projects.

Here’s the Book Galaxy – move your mouse around the galaxy to see the titles. Blue dots are books, yellow dots are courses. If nothing is appearing, you might not have Java installed. Download Java

It seems to me that there is likely to be appetite for further innovation with activity data as it offers the potential for more efficient institutional services and new functionality that can enrich the research and learning experience. Both of which are important drivers in the current climate. We will be funding further work on 4 of the 9 projects to explore whether they can develop further answers or produce useful services. There is also a programme of projects on Business Intelligence managed by my colleague Myles Danson, these projects are building solutions for storing and analysing data about the business critical operations within universities. You can read an overview of the projects on the JISC website and there is a useful JISC Infonet Infokit on the topic of business intelligence. Within JISC we are also starting to think about the bigger picture of business intelligence for universities and what we can do to help universities exploit emerging opportunities so look out for future work in this area.

Find out more about this work and that of the digital infrastructure team on their blog.

• Recommendation 1 – the need to take steps to enhance the transparency of costs of operational activities within higher education in order to help demonstrate where and how value for money is being delivered.

We’ve developed two tools that can help here. Firstly, the JISC IT Service Costing Toolkit that was funded under the JISC Flexible Service Delivery programme is designed to help universities calculate the cost of their current IT infrastructure and future investments. It can also help managers make the case for alternative service models by allowing you to weigh up investments in new infrastructure versus shared services or hosted services. The toolkit is now used by Oxford University Computing Service in order to provide a sound method for costing their legacy IT Service provision

Under the Digital Preservation programme the JISC Impact Calculator was funded and is available at JISC Infonet. This allows HEIs to baseline and forecast the quantitative impact (including costs) of investing in new ICT solutions. Although the impact calculator’s genesis is in information management it can be applied more widely.

• Recommendation 3 – The report also helps to articulate the sophisticated approach that needs to be taken to the adoption of shared services; that is that shared services are more effective if work is done on streamlining processes prior to implementing changes to shared services.

Within a number of shared services that JISC has worked with the sector on, we’ve examined processes to define where these can be better supported and streamlined. For example JISC has worked with SCONUL as a precursor to taking forward a shared electronic resource management support service on the examination of processes within university libraries. After significant prior work JISC Collections is now managing the establishment of a shared service to support the management of electronic library resources in colleges and universities.

If you’re looking for examples of how other universities and colleges have handled changes to their service delivery, JISC’s Flexible Service Delivery Programme supported the production of some “Process and Service Improvement” case studies. These case studies demonstrate how that with mapping and costing legacy service provision, HEIs can plan for change across a range of business and academic areas.

• Recommendation 10: Developing and implementing new ICT systems and facilities can play an important role in reducing energy costs and lowering carbon emissions, with energy savings from more efficient ICT solutions (including outsourcing)

Through our investments in greening ICT JISC has developed a wealth of knowledge in this area, and this agenda is being further explored with European infrastructure partners through the e-Infranet project.

It is pleasing to see the report note that JISC’s work adds value by developing shared practice, and of course in particular by providing shared services. On page 44 of the report the role of JISC Collections, innovation programmes and other services are noted in terms of offering value for money.

As is highlighted on page 55, JISC is working with HEFCE on the development of University Modernisation Fund (UMF) cloud services, for example the development of a shared cloud brokerage service for universities via Janet. Recommendation 11 mentions the need for procurement expertise and JISC Advance is already taking forward plans, also via UMF, to establish a service to help universities procure the best value administrative systems. The businesses cases for these activities clearly show that they will help drive efficiencies in universities.

JISC welcomes the report and UUK’s leadership in undertaking this work. We look forward to seeing UUK’s plans on implementation, and in particular working with UUK on recommendation number 6, where an ‘efficiency hub’ is proposed to promote relevant services to the sector and to share good practice and innovative developments.

Before I go I have to acknowledge that colleagues Craig Wentworth, Alex Hawker, John Chapman, Neil Grindley and others helped provide information to UUK to show examples of how the sector is working on achieving change and efficiency.

This is part two of a two-part series in response to the UUK report – you can read Rachel’s first blog post commenting on the overall direction of the report here.

I think the report gives a really useful overview of the terrain and sets out the evidence that shows how the university sector is already addressing the agenda but also states how the higher education sector might start to better address efficiency into the future. The report’s  findings are set out against a backdrop of the reduction in the amount of public funding directed at the learning and teaching grant in England alongside the drive across the UK for better value for money.

I was fortunate enough to be involved in the Sub Group that UUK established with representatives from relevant sector agencies and organisations. The Sub Group helped to identify issues and highlight relevant activities for the UK Efficiency and Modernisation Task Group, which was chaired by Professor Ian Diamond, and UUK, to take into account in their deliberations and research.  There’s an overview of the task group’s work here (PDF).  When the work began there was, as you’d expect, quite a focus on shared services, but quite quickly a richer picture emerged of activities that needed to be addressed in order for the sector to move further forward.

As the report states the UK university sector is already pretty effective in its contribution to the economy. As calculated a few years ago, it contributes £59 billion of output to the UK economy, and generates £5.3 billion of export earnings annually.  But UUK recognises the need to do more.  The report shone a light on a wealth of good work already underway, which is heartening.  It states that  perhaps the biggest hurdles to overcome in becoming more efficient lies in the fragmentation of good practice and that there is need for more coordination around solutions and sharing of good practice required.  In his foreword Professor Diamond says,“The sector has been remarkably good at hiding this progress… it will be important that [the many good examples of efficiency are] promoted more widely.”

So key issues that the report says need to be addressed include: further transparency around costs; sharing of good practice and solutions; streamlining internal processes prior to any shared service identification and implementation; further coordination of higher education procurement at a national level and improved frameworks for benchmarking so it can be used as way to drive efficiency.

The report places efficiency in a strategic context and a long-term view of a diverse sector. This takes us to that often mentioned tension around collaboration and competition; this is something that I think the sector already handles in a number of areas and I think the recommendations that UUK set out are a good basis for understanding where efficiencies and collaboration can take place in order to allow for difference and competition to flourish where it makes sense.

So in short this is a useful report, one that looks more broadly than JISC’s mission, but shows how JISC can be part of a more effective and efficient sector through partnership with other agencies, UUK and universities.  I look forward in anticipation to the follow up to the report.

On Monday I’ll share with you the specifics of how we believe JISC can help organisations respond to UUK’s recommendations.  We’d be interested to hear what people think of the recommendations and how JISC can respond. 

This is the first post in a two-part series responding to the UUK report on efficiency and effectiveness in higher education. 

Read Rachel’s second blog post commenting on specific recommendations on Monday.

Discuss the issues raised here on the Guardian Higher Education Network online today at 2pm where the topic of discussion is “Do universities need to become more efficient?”

How universities and researchers manage the issues around research data varies massively – and of course will depend on the type of data they hold – whether sound recordings of bird songs, text mining results from Shakespeare’s plays, thousands of measurements provided by space probes, hours of rare film recordings, DNA sequences or qualitative data from psychological research interviews.

JISC is live streaming its conference next Tuesday 13 September around research integrity – specifically on the importance of good research data management.  Our aim is to bring together the current thinking on effective practice and give senior staff and researchers an opportunity to debate the thornier issues, like whose responsibility this is and how to manage freedom of information requests.

We welcome your input: submit your questions via twitter by using #jiscres11 and we’ll put them to our panel.  You can also watch the keynote speakers live on Tuesday, who alongside me include:

• Professor David Baker, deputy chair of JISC
• Professor Dave De Roure, professor of e-research, Oxford University e-Research Centre and national strategic director of Digital Social Research
• Professor Sir Tim O’Shea, principal and vice chancellor of University of Edinburgh and chair of JISC
• Professor Kevin Schürer, pro vice chancellor (Research and Enterprise), University of Leicester

During the conference you will:

• Learn why research data management matters and who should be responsible for research data management in your organisation
• Read recommended reports and resources as they are referred to by the speakers
• Understand from case studies what success might look like
• Watch key experts describe the routes to successful data management
• Participate on Twitter and ask questions of the speakers using #jiscres11

It’s the kind of discussion we think could be helpful to professionals in the UK and internationally so if you know people who you think would be interested I’d really value you sending this information on.

There’s no need to register – simply add a date in your diary for 10am on 13 September 2011 and join us online here.

Watch a video about how JISC can support your research reputation:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Visit JISC’s Youtube channel to watch similar videos on research efficiency and collaboration

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.

When we started creating a search environment to look at multiple databases in one we were given the oddest, but most precious piece of advice: ‘lose the search box’. The stunned looks around the project team’s faces said it all… isn’t searching about, well, searching?

At the BUFVC we offer access to many different types of datasets, from listings of practically everything that was broadcast on British TV and radio since 2001, to newsreels produced throughout the 20th century. In the United Kingdom there is no audiovisual equivalent for the British Library legal deposit. We therefore work hard to fill that information gap and find ways for education institutions to gain access to audiovisual content.

When we thought of ‘federating’ most of our data (searching it all at once) we thought it would be easy. And it was. We know our data well and could map it quickly.  But that wasn’t the real challenge. It was by looking at how users interacted with the developing system that we learnt the key lessons. If you are searching our 13 million records there are two difficult steps: what to type in that search box and how to then get rid of all the stuff you don’t want.

The answer to the first dilemma – how to stop users worrying about the empty search box – was to make it less important. We needed to make sure that whatever the exact search term, users should be able to make interesting discoveries even if the results were not the best. To do this we created relationships between our records based on semantics. This means that users will see suggestions for searches and records that may take them in different (but related) journeys.

The second dilemma is all about filtering. The search results page became our control centre, allowing users to filter results, tweak searches, see the suggestions for related searches and use a variety of additional tools. All this makes for a busy page but after many rounds of user testing we think our designer hit the right balance between complexity and elegance. Some of these features include:
•    Human-friendly filters such as identifying results by availability (‘can I see it online, do I need to order it from someone?), media type (moving image, audio, documents), genre or collection
•    A comprehensive history function that keeps track of viewed records, searches and tweaks to searches and the ability to mark and cite or export records in a variety of standards

When reflecting back on the project, I remember mostly the sense of fun, the permission we gave ourselves to think creatively, and our exciting user testing rounds. Developers and users don’t often mix but with good moderation these sessions proved magical. These are three elements I would urge anyone to replicate in future projects.

We are not alone in this development; sites that enable discovery and aggregate results from multiple collections are increasing in number – Edina’s JISC Media Hub is well worth a visit. We hope to have created something which rewards users with new connections through discovery. Work will only be completed in September and there are many plans beyond that. In the meantime if you are looking for moving image and sound, be it television or radio, newsreels or commercially available programmes for education pay a visit to our beta site and give us your feedback. If you are reading this from a UK higher or further education institution, please remember to login to access all areas.

The open-source based software and interface will be released as a package under an Open Source licence later this year. This project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and led by Royal Holloway, University of London.

Luis Carrasqueiro is Chief Executive, British Universities Film & Video Council
luis@bufvc.ac.uk

Why all this interest now? One reason might be the overwhelming evidence that open access is a desirable destination for all kinds of reasons.  A joint report was released last month from JISC, RIN, Publishing Research Consortium, RLUK and the Wellcome Trust, which showed clearly that moves toward open access were supported by an analysis of the costs, benefits and risks in scholarly communication.  A recent Danish study of SMEs showed that most of them struggle to access findings from publicly funded research, which surely inhibits innovation.  JISC, on behalf of the UK Open Access Implementation Group, is commissioning three further studies to discover how open access can support the work of the private, public and third sectors, and these studies will report over the next six months or so.

But there are other reasons why open access is gaining a lot of attention from governments.  We have known for some time that the knowledge economy depends on the application of codified, technical knowledge.  As David Cameron and Barack Obama pointed out this week  “science and higher education are the foundation stones of their two nations’ 21st century economies”.

Most readers will know that JISC has been an advocate of open access for some time but that does not mean we have taken an uncritical stance.  Now that the direction of travel is established and widely accepted, there are some tricky practical challenges to overcome.  For example:

• Open access is likely to look different, and emerge at different speeds in different disciplines.  In some disciplines such as the life sciences, there are major, innovative publishers such as the Public Library of Science, and repositories such as UK PubMedCentral supported by research funders.  In other disciplines, such as chemistry, open access is not yet growing fast.
• The transition to open access will need to be co-ordinated to ensure the continuity and rigour of the peer review system.  Again, the Public Library of Science is leading the way here, exploiting the opportunities of digital technologies while preserving academic rigour.  JISC’s new programme in campus-based publishing is exploring an alternative approach that has had success in other countries already.
• The institutional repository infrastructure, while mature and reasonably comprehensive, is not yet as joined-up as it needs to be.  JISC will be commissioning work in this area during 2011-12, and will be working with international initiatives such as the European OpenAIRE project.

Open access publishing faces a number of specific challenges, which could be summarised under the following six headings:

a)      Funding outputs from research that is not grant-supported.  This is a real challenge, and one that is likely to fall mainly to universities, who might want to act collectively to address it, as in the COPE scheme in the US.  Some publishers offer waivers, which is helpful.

b)      Funding outputs produced after the end of the grant.  This can be addressed by changing the ways in which grants are administered, for example by making it clearer and more straightforward for indirect costs to be used in this way.

c)      Complexity of funding arrangements from an author’s perspective.  Here, I think funders, universities and publishers do simply need a way to sit down together and develop a better set of arrangements.  There may be lessons from the approach taken by the Wellcome Trust, especially if research grant funding becomes more concentrated.

d)      Need for transparency in costing, especially for hybrid journals.  There seems to be no consensus that these are a way to transition to open access.

e)      Absolute cost.  Recent research shows that the average article processing charge needs to be under £2000 for the cost-benefits to work for the UK.  It seems likely that the PLoS-One publishing model, now widely emulated, must be a large part of the answer.  In the medium term, this needs to be combined with agreements on the wider sharing of usage statistics and citation data , and review services such as the Faculty of 1000, to open up a market in services to help readers navigate the literature.

f)       Distribution of costs / benefits among the sector.  Will research intensive universities have to pay more?  This is not necessarily the case, if arrangements are in place to ensure that research papers from grant-funded research are supported via those grants.  However, this will require close monitoring and perhaps collective action, and JISC Collections may well have a role in seeing a way through this.

We are working towards making open access in the UK both good for the research community and good for UK plc.

JISC Podcast:
How you can build a business case for open access policy

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 rewards for better research information management are significant. By taking the friction out of reporting, universities can make genuine efficiency savings both of cash and time. Businesses and other potential partners can find out more about current research and can seek and find the researcher with the expertise they need. Researchers spend less time duplicating information in different systems, freeing them to get on with their real business: research.

In order to make the exchange and management of research information easier and more efficient, JISC has joined with the research councils, HEFCE, HESA, ARMA, UCISA and a number of universities, projects and companies to form the Research Information Management Group (RIMG).

The group has played a successful role in helping the sector to respond to a rapidly evolving environment. It has made the technical and business case for the adoption of a common research information standard, pointed the way to greater harmonisation of systems across the sector and created an opportunity for all the members of the group to come together behind a strategic vision.

JISC has taken forward a suite of projects which build on this vision. They have addressed many of the practical issues of improving research information management, from supporting researchers in their daily work to sharing large volumes of information between research partners and REF reporting. JISC infoNet has added its own research and case studies to the experience of these projects, built on the work of the RIMG and created a Research Information Management infoKit.

The infoKit is designed to provide senior managers with the key information they need to build better policies. It provides those tasked with procuring and evaluating systems with solid advice and gives staff who wish to implement better management and technical systems the benefit of a lot of hands-on experience.

But for me what is enjoyable about this work is that is it constantly evolving. The infoKit will be updated and adapted as the RIMG develops its vision and JISC projects create new tools and resources. It is already a valuable resource, but it will repay a fresh look now and again, as it grows and more value is added. Improved research information management strengthens all the partners in the world of research and JISC, by partnering with the RIMG and developing the infoKit is helping the UK to realise those benefits.

If you’re interested in our work in research information management find out more.

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Universities are facing such fundamental challenges, rare the senior manager who isn’t taking a closer look at the efficiency of their operations. But having invested in management, technology and systems integration for a number of years, JISC is well placed to offer support.

This week, JISC presented  at BUFDG’s annual conference, emphasising the need to integrate business systems to inform decision making and help reduce costs. At JISC we are realistic about the effort and expertise required to enable the sector to cope with current challenges and opportunities. Our approach is to create useful, useable and used resources to help with these processes. A JISC pilot at the University of Nottingham, for example, showed that the introduction of a new system to manage student case records would recoup the initial investment costs during its third year of implementation and would thereafter save the university a little over £4,500 per annum.

It’s not all about spending money to save money. We also recently funded a further education college in Hertfordshire to investigate whether operating certain finance functions and activities through a shared service might be practical. In fact, it did not result in a shared or outsourced ICT service, but the review, re-design and streamlining of key finance admin processes resulted in efficiency savings of £120k through a reduction in headcount within six months.  See a full list of this and related pilots here.

If you’re particularly interested and want to learn more about systems integration, JISC has funded a growing number of UK universities to explore and exploit approaches in ‘Enterprise Architecture’. With senior management support, the Enterprise Architectures approach enables consistency between business processes and all aspect of the technology architecture – information, applications, services, data, infrastructure and security.

Indeed there are already a significant number of UK universities exploring and exploiting a range of JISC’s management toolkits to positive effect. And that’s why you might take a closer look at some of the JISC resources readily available to support your decision making.

Our business intelligence infokit helps you understand your institutional environment and target limited resources to better effect.

JISC resources on administrative systems can help you take a strategic approach to improving existing systems through to planning new integrated information technology systems.

Our strategic scenario planning tool guides you through flexible long term plans.

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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.

JISC works closely with the Leadership Foundation because we’re committed to encouraging a greater understanding in the potential of technology within higher education.  Our pairing also brings many rewards, not least because good partners bring fresh perspectives and challenge us to raise our game too.

Internationalisation and JISC might not be a combination you would naturally look for but if you’re developing institutional approaches on internationalisation, JISC  has a number of freely available, resources which could ease the way to success.

We may speak lightly of ‘tech savvy leaders’ and ‘business savvy techies’, but this is a significant issue.

Sure, it’s an all too convenient conclusion, but the truth is that it took a partner, here the Leadership Foundation, to bring a fresh perspective to some existing JISC resources. I hope you find some use in what we’ve uncovered.

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.

Some of the keynote speakers reflect on the issues of the day in our just-released video ‘Research in a climate of cuts’. For Professor Martin Hall, speaker on efficiency and effectiveness and vice chancellor of the University of Salford, it’s essential to ‘continue to make the change towards a networked world where we can do things differently’. Professor Dame Julia Goodfellow, speaker on reputation and vice chancellor of the University of Kent reflects that digital technologies ‘are embedded in everything we [researchers] do and are absolutely essential’. For Professor Rick Trainor, vice chancellor of King’s College London who introduced the programme, JISC has a central role to play in the ‘efficient mobilisation of information’ which is key to research.

You can see Professor David Baker’s summing up of the day on the conference microsite. His points include:

1. Collaboration is needed between institutions, as well as research groups: UK institutions need to pay particular attention to their counterparts in the rapidly emerging economies. Competition can spur collaboration, or be its enemy, so a useful question to ask when contemplating a new partnership is ‘what’s in it for me?’ A pilot project can help establish whether the collaboration is likely to be fruitful.
2. Institutions can help researchers increase their efficiency and effectiveness by providing them with the IT services and support they need. Many institutions are now employing research facilitators to support researchers and interpret their requirements for centralised IT services. Commodity services should be centralised, but some IT should be left to researchers themselves to support. Institutions also need to pay increasing attention to good research data management which enables research data to be shared and reused: Freedom of Information requests for research data are easier to process when the data are well managed.
3. Open Access to research results can help increase efficiency and effectiveness, but researchers still have concerns about changing well-established methods. Institutions and JISC should address these concerns. Digital technologies can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of arts and humanities research just as much as in the sciences and technology. IT can substantially increase the search element of research leaving researchers more time for analysis.

Research in a Climate of Cuts (4:30)

Alternative Version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8_yZqW9ltM

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.