The AoC Annual Conference is taking place this week.  I work for one of the Regional Support Centres at JISC and as part of the conference we are focusing on mobile learning and the benefits of using mobile technologies in the classroom.  Part of this is the concept of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), where students being their own devices into the classroom.

BYOD is a hot topic at the moment with numerous articles extolling its benefits, which range from organisations reducing their capital expenditure, to users having the option of using familiar and customisable mobile devices to support their personal learning styles.

Benefits of BYOD

There are many benefits that BYOD could potentially offer organisations and students:

• By allowing users to use their own devices rather than imposing technology upon them an organisation can make reductions in end user training
• Permitting users to use their own mobile devices provides them with an opportunity to personalise their device, which in turn allows them to access and engage with their learning in ways which meet their individual needs
• Users who are empowered to select, personalise and maintain their own devices are more likely to care for their equipment and to make technology work from them rather than dismissing it early in the adoption process.
• Learners who can use their own devices engage more with the topic area, therefore improving in learner engagement
• By adopting mobile learning and allowing users to utilise their own internet capable device, organisations can increase student satisfaction, retention and widen participation
• Flexible access means that students can access materials whenever and wherever they need to.

Considerations for your organisation

As the saying goes “there is no such thing as a free lunch” and before adopting BYOD at your organisation there are a few things to consider as these challenges or requirements will need to be met in order for you to reap the benefits:

• Interoperability between existing systems and non standard build devices. How can you make this workable?
• Existing online learning objects and other resources will be accessed from a wide range of devices, all with different web browsing capabilities, using different media players and different screen resolutions. How can you offer a seamless and consistent end user experience to all users?
• A diverse range of devices used within your organisation may increase technical support overheads. This may be an additional cost, but will the long term cost savings outweigh this?
• Increasing the number of diverse wifi-enabled devices on your network may have an adverse effect on wifi reliability and performance. How can you ensure your network can meet the requirements?
• Externally acquired devices may need to undergo safety checks to ensure they meet existing health and safety standards with your organisation. How will you arrange this?
• Equality of students – not all students can afford the latest tech, but as long as the materials are compatible on all devices, this shouldn’t be a problem. Is this something that can be investigated?
• Changes to course delivery and the way that classrooms are managed – teachers are used to not allowing devices to be switched on during lessons and some may struggle to adapt. What rules will need to be laid out for what students can and can’t use devices for?

I think from the above that is is becoming increasingly clear that when you consider the benefits and challenges of BYOD, you need to have a clear strategy.  Guidelines and expectations need to be set, as well as a degree of accountability. Organisations need to weigh up the pros and cons to ensure that BYOD works for them.

BYOD requires a change in attitude – not just from the end-user’s perspective, but also to any organisation’s IT hierarchy.

Ultimately, I believe IT is now about promoting flexibility and supporting inclusivity and this is one way of encouraging this.

Next steps with BYOD

For more advice on BYOD and how it could put your organisation at the cutting edge, talk to one of our mobile technology experts at your local JISC Regional Support Centre.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I work at Somerset College as research & library services manager and many of my colleagues may ask – ‘Is it worth creating various interactive tutorials or embedding other media with the use of digital tools for the sake of a one hour session?’

Let’s be honest here, learners rarely master research or referencing skills in a one hour library instruction session. The sheer amount of information all around them in different types and formats may even leave them more overwhelmed. Alongside this, the numerous methods of referencing information sources can turn learners to the web, (sites like Neil’s Toolbox, for example), and without the proper understanding of how citation works in real terms or what it consists of this is not always a good thing.

This has been helped at some colleges by the induction of an integrated study skills module into the curriculum; this means that librarians are delivering library instruction sessions throughout the academic year. Although, this is not the case everywhere and library staff are often heard saying that getting numerous library instruction sessions booked in for learners would ‘eat away’ at precious tutorial time with their lecturers.

I believe that there are two areas where we can teach learners how to use library materials and reference usage correctly:

• Create effective communication to enhance participation
• Support a learner-centred/interactive approach to activities enhanced by the use of technologies.

Here are some thoughts on how we can help make this happen:

• Communication is fundamental and it does create transformation, awareness about libraries and their services gets cascaded to learners via academic staff almost instantaneously.  In my experience most colleges have staff development departments or units, as they are sometimes called, that can help with organising training sessions for academics. How about thinking of a cunning title that will encourage curiosity and ultimately better attendance (we called one of ours ‘Library at Your Fingertips’)
• Another idea…… librarians ‘roving’ around with tablets (iPad, Samsung Galaxy or their equivalents) and mingling amongst learners and staff demonstrating library resources in less traditional learning environments (see University of Huddersfield’s Project 2012: The Roving Librarian)
• As for teaching materials, rather than venturing into the vastness of cyberspace in search of ready-made tutorials, it can be rather satisfying to create your own that can turn a traditional library instruction into an interactive learning experience. Such tutorials, if uploaded onto a virtual learning environment (VLE), can be particularly helpful in reaching a large number of learners 24/7. What’s more – they are also tailored to individual learning needs and their study levels. Creating an envisioned tutorial through the use of freely available Web 2.0 digital technologies can be a huge accomplishment for librarians and learners alike.  Read our full case study for more information
• At Somerset College our latest development with harnessing technologies involves the use of e-clickers. A vital feature of the TV games’ shows such as Who Wants to be a Millionaire and Jeopardy! are now mimicked during the referencing and research teaching sessions. The use of e-clickers helps to engage learners during their library instruction and results in an increased participation and competitiveness with their peers. Instant feedback provided on screen helps librarians assess learners’ understanding of the subject matter during the session.
• Involving learners in creating tutorials could improve their digital literacy development and employability skills. In doing this you could also be enhancing your own technical skills.

College libraries are always on the lookout for new emerging technologies to see how they can be utilised in improving library instruction and the learning experience. JISC RSC South West has been pivotal in helping us with researching and implementing new technologies as well as showcasing best practice in their use across the academic region. The JISC RSC South West has been key in providing that all-round continuity!

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.

As learners become more discerning about their choice of course they will make use of services such as Unistats to compare courses and the learning experiences of previous students.

From the 24 September 2012 when Unistats launch their new website these statistics will also include Key Information Sets (KIS), a breakdown of student satisfaction, graduate outcomes, learning and teaching activities, assessment methods, tuition fees and student finance, accommodation and professional accreditation.

Designing responsive curriculum and creating learning experiences that really engage students as well as building their skills for the workplace can help you attract learners. But how do you go about redesigning your curriculum; and how can technology help?

Listening to the experiences of Manchester Metropolitan University and Birmingham City University in the latest edition of JISC on Air, it is obvious that student experience has been a key factor in their new curriculum developments, but that they have also found it equally important to consider how the processes and IT systems will also need to change.

When it comes to making sure your courses are responsive to the changing needs of learners is it best to work from grass roots or do you need a top down approach where senior management take the lead?

Each university has taken a different approach to tackling curriculum change projects but both their experiences highlight that whichever direction you take, it is going to mean a major organisational change.

Birmingham City University share their experience of engaging with key stakeholders and how they have empowered staff to take ownership of the process to improve courses, providing staff with guidance in the form of ‘a rough guide to curriculum design’. This was a grass roots approach, which has led to a gradual series of changes to the curriculum over time.

In contrast Manchester Metropolitan University have been through a period of rapid change to transform curriculum through assessment. Their programme has been driven from the top by their deputy vice-chancellor for student experience. Aiming to improve student satisfaction and strengthen their position, they implemented a new virtual learning environment and new learning spaces.  The university saw how technology could enrich the curriculum because by adding online learning resources students could access them via a range of mobile devices ‘anytime, anywhere’. This suits learners who are often juggling paid employment with study, where time is precious.

What’s clear is that for both universities two factors were key to success: firstly, getting buy-in from those who would need to lead the change, either senior management or academic staff, and secondly, focusing on the student benefit to motivate staff.  To find out more about these different experiences listen to the latest edition of JISC on Air. This is available to listen to online or download from iTunes.

Listen now to the podcast now
Episode 8: Curriculum change: designing for the future (Duration: 23:29)

Subscribe via RSS

Subscribe via iTunes

Download MP3

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

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

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

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

Click here to view the embedded video.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interoperability

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

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

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

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

This post originally appeared on the JISC CETIS website

Just weeks into the New Year and already there is a new ebooks revelation that colleges and universities need to digest. January saw the launch of Apple’s new iBooks2 software which grabbed headlines (see the BBC article here) and sparked heated debate across the academic community.

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

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

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

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

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

Podcast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With the uncertainties of a new funding model to deal with, it is becoming harder than ever to convince institutional managers to support nice-to-have projects. Everything needs to be justified, both on a balance sheet and within a wider battle for hearts and minds. But the way in which open educational resources (OER) allow institutions to meet their strategic goals alongside making the world a better place means that it is moving from being nice-to-have to becoming an essential component of academic practice.

More than 10 years on from the formal establishment of the OpenCourseWare project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the casual observer could be forgiven for assuming that the case for OER (materials suitable for learning and teaching, made available for reuse under an open licence) had been made and accepted. MIT, alongside many other institutions, both great and small, and including Nottingham, Oxford, University College Falmouth and the Open University in the UK, is currently supporting the ongoing release of resources with their own funds. The likes of YouTube and iTunes are establishing themselves as platforms for the discovery of learning material, and institutions are beginning to see open resources as a major component of their student recruitment strategies. But it can often feel, as Javiera Atenas described last week, as if we are going round the same discussions without building on what already has been discovered.

To try and condense some of the vast amount that has been learnt about the benefits of OER releases in the past 10 years, the Higher Education Academy and JISC have developed an InfoKit. This now includes materials specifically aimed at advocacy to senior institutional staff, talking about business models for openness and making arguments around institutional ethos, alongside sound evidence-based advice about every aspect of getting to a stage where releasing materials openly online is as natural as creating them. We also have an interactive tool – how open are you – which uses your responses to make a recommendation concerning how much openness your institution is ready for.

Jorum, the UK’s national learning repository, is refocusing itself around OER, introducing new features and tools to aid the deposit and discovery of resources. It is now as easy, – and increasingly, as expected – to deposit in Jorum as it is to upload to Youtube, WordPress or Twitter.

There are parallels between OER releases and the ways in which universities and colleges have begun to make more intelligent and active use of social media. For example, in following major political stories readers, bloggers and professional journalists are increasingly making use of sites such as British Politics and Society at LSE, Nottingham University’s Ballots & Bullets and the University of Oxford’s Politics in Spires to understand the background and meaning of news stories, drawing on the passion and expertise of academic specialists to further their own understanding. Strictly speaking, only the last of these is available under an open licence allowing for reuse, but all of these bloggers expect to be retweeted, quoted, referenced and their work drawn upon. It’s the point of blogging, and in many ways the point of academic practice.

One theme emerging from the research around OER is the idea of open academic practice – it comes out strongly from our ongoing evaluation and synthesis of the UKOER programme, and from other linked research such as a recent Oxford University study into the practicalities of academic reuse. Open academic practice draws a link between OER, open access to research outputs and research data, and the general practice of “professing” (in the late-medieval sense) a subject, by what we now call a “public intellectual”. By seeing OER as a component of what is traditionally expected of academia, rather than as a new imposition, we are arguing from a much stronger foundation based on what many in the sector see as their primary motivation – to explain to people the importance and relevance of the subject specialisms they have devoted many years to understanding.

Evidence is increasingly being identified that students, both traditional, and wider open learners, are getting a lot of benefit from openly available materials. From on-campus students having access to a range of supporting materials (as reported by Steve Carson at MIT), to prospective students using OER to think more clearly about subject and institution choices, there are a range of benefits that can be accessed. A recent literature review highlighted these issues, but also alerts us to gaps in our understanding where further research would help improve our understanding.

JISC and the Academy have recently supported a range of new projects (under UKOER phase 3, details to be announced soon), investigating ways in which we can use the approaches and affordances of OER to meet other key societal goals. Goals such as supporting alternate forms of delivery, making meaningful links with employers and publishers, working across sectors even preserving subject areas and teaching approaches that would otherwise be lost.

The world of OER may not be as new and as ground breaking as it was 10 years ago but for such a radical idea to survive for 10 years, and to become almost mainstream in the process, is an incredible achievement of which the global OER community, and in particular those working in the UK, should be proud.

This blog post first appeared on the Guardian Higher Education Network on 28 October 2011.  Visit the Guardian site

In addition, the rapid growth in personal ownership of new and more powerful technologies such as mobile phones and tablet PCs, along with the pervasive use of social software is changing the way we work, socialise, communicate and collaborate.  It is only natural that students will expect to see the powerful benefits these technologies offer – technologies that are common-place in many aspects of our working lives – used to support their learning ambitions as they endeavour to balance the competing pressures of study, work, caring and social responsibilities.

So how are colleges and universities responding to these challenges and preparing for the future?JISC’s new guide on Emerging Practice in a Digital Age shows how colleges and universities are continuing to embrace innovation in use of mobile technologies, social software and virtual worlds despite constraints on public funding.  The guide shows how they are harnessing new and emerging technologies to enhance the learning experience and respond to changes in economic, social and technological circumstances in a fast-changing world.
Through the three themes of: working in partnership with students, developing students’ employability potential and preparing for the future, the guide demonstrates how considered and innovative use of technology can enhance learning. It highlights opportunities to transform practice and explore some of the benefits and challenges using written, video case studies and podcasts of expert voices from the JISC 2011 Emerging Practice symposium.
For me, key messages include the need to go beyond listening to students to working with them as co-collaborators of their own learning, the need to focus on learning design as an integral aspect of introducing new technologies, the importance of working with employers and the need to develop digital literacy skills for both staff and students.

The change in culture and shifting locus of control from institution to learner is something that David White, Co-manager, Technology Assisted Lifelong Learning (TALL), Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford highlights: “I think we need to accept that the culture has changed, that institutions don’t need to own or control that culture but they need to take advantage of it and to equip their students to engage with it in new forms of literacy. We can’t just slide across traditional forms of literacy, and I think that is where the challenge is set.”

With an emphasis on emerging practice, the guide makes the case for strong leadership at a senior level to ensure the vision and opportunities presented by these emerging technologies are realised with due consideration to the support mechanisms necessary to make their introduction successful.  The need to look ahead, embrace change and create the right culture by developing strategies that engage staff and students is something that Clare Killen, the author of the guide suggests is likely to lead to longer-lasting transformation, “in the longer term, efforts to create the right culture and to engage others in the process of change may prove to be more valuable and lead to more sustainable and responsive practice in a world of rapid change”.

For information about the JISC e-Learning programme, visit: www.jisc.ac.uk/elearningprogramme

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.

In an example from the University of Edinburgh’s School of Divinity, a virtual learning environment-based blogging tool has been used to enhance the dynamics of tutorials and seminars and to improve the consistency of students’ engagement with more challenging elements of the curriculum. Following successful trials commencing in 2005, the School of Divinity has used blogging as part of a wider blended learning strategy to develop student skills of critical thinking and reflection.

The detailed case study is a word doc you can download: Engaging learners in critical reflection – University of Edinburgh

What are the advantages?  In my experience, group blogging helps to unite a diverse body of students and makes it easier to identify individuals’ difficulties. The quality of discussion on the blogs is often high, with more competent students raising the performance of weaker students, and contributions made as part of these discussions can later become aids for revision. The time involved in monitoring blogs has not proved excessive – in fact the blogging activity may have reduced the time spent supporting students experiencing difficulties.

What’s your experience of using blogs with students? I would welcome your comments.

Find out more about JISC’s work in online learning

As Eric pointed out, being innovative can help show prospective students that the university means business when it comes to staying at the top, thereby helping to drive revenue from course fees.  It can also support widening participation by reaching out to students in non-traditional areas – as at the University of the Highlands and Islands, where technology is conquering geography and allowing students to tap into the network of over 80 different learning centres from their own homes and workplaces.  There’s no doubt that smart technology use can enhance students’ experience of university, whether that be keeping in touch with a tutor out of hours or logging on to an online learning environment -  like the University of Bristol’s online laboratory ChemLabs, which better prepares undergraduates for their real-life practical work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our parallel session at the JISC Conference 2011 was entitled Using Digital Media to Improve Teaching and Learning.

Between our speakers we had a wide range of knowledge, skills and experience: each of our speakers was a cartographer of the digital media landscape, mapping not only the Ariel perspectives of policy and future trends but also individual bumps along the road. Rather than promoting digital media as a pedagogical ‘magic bullet’ our session focused on ways to mitigate the problems of using digital media:

- view ‘workflows’ themselves as useful tools in a similar way to open source software. Workflows can be shared, refined and recirculated amongst communities to help us learn from the experiences of others (Zak Mensah, e-learning officer at JISC Digital Media)

- support  your students as producers of digital media, a concept of importance as resources are cut and students are encouraged to take ownership of learning resources (Dr Jane Williams, director of e-learning within the University of Bristol’s Faculty of Dentistry and Medicine)

- where possible be aware that the idea of ‘attendance’  needs to develops in line with new technologies. Learners  ‘in attendance’ may be using a webcam at home or contribute to discussion via Twitter (Doug Belshaw, JISC Infonet).

In summary, our session suggested that the use of digital media really can enhance teaching, but also poses the risk of only passively engaging the learner.  No single individual or even institution in isolation could possibly ‘keep up’. Only by pooling knowledge and sharing stories of what works and what doesn’t can we use successfully integrate digital media into our teaching and learning.

Find out more at the virtual goody bag for this session.

For someone choosing to follow a conference remotely, it is rarely now a one-way communication channel. With the benefit of more sophisticated technology and social media, taking part in many conferences online can now be an immensely beneficial and interactive experience.

To help you get the most out of following JISC11 online, I have put together a list of suggestions. We realise we won’t be able to have your full attention for the whole day, with your workload and emails undoubtedly being a major cause of distraction! Nonetheless, I hope this list will help you ensure the time you do spend online with us next week is time well spent.

1. If you are tweeting, blogging or sharing photos/videos/slides/other materials related to this event, make sure that you use the event hash tag: #jisc11. Following the conference hashtag is a good way of finding and connecting with other people that are either attending in Liverpool or following online.

2. Sign up on to the JISC11 Lanyrd group – you can see who else is actually attending or tracking the conference. Another good way of finding new like-minded people to follow on Twitter.

3. Join the JISC11 LinkedIn group. It is an open group so anyone can join. This is a good way to find people that are also intending on going to the conference, make new professional connections and take part or start discussions. Try introducing yourself, your work and what you are hoping to get out of JISC11.

4. Follow the @JISCEvents Twitter account for updates and announcements live from the conference.

5. You can get to know other participants in advance of the event by following @JISCEvents/delegates, @JISCEvents/remote and @JISCEvents/speakers. Please send a tweet to @JISCEvents to tell us if you are planning to attend in person or follow the event remotely so we can add you to the relevant list.

6. Follow the @JISC Twitter account to make sure you don’t miss any official conference announcements in the run up to the conference.

7. Familiarise yourself with the live streaming interface provided by Mediasite. See how to submit questions and take part in live polls.

8. Don’t suffer in silence – we actively encourage you to let us know directly if there is something we can do to help such as turning the volume up on the live stream or retweeting a useful link.

9. There will be an Online Engagement Team (@JISCEvents) who amongst other responsibilities, will be acting as your voice at the physical conference. We want you to take part in audience Q&A too, so use your voice!

10. Tell us about your experience of following the conference online so that we can continue to make it better in the future.  Sign up to take part in post-conference feedback interviews.

If you are using different platforms to those described above to discuss this event, please let us know so that we can share links where appropriate and ensure that your views are represented.  If you have other tips or suggestions we would love to hear from hear from you. The JISC11 conference is your conference so get involved!

For a full amplification guide for JISC11 participants go to: Amplification Guidance for Participants

Those of you unable to come and see us at the JISC11 conference in Liverpool next week will no doubt be keeping one eye on what is happening throughout the day with the help of your laptop, phone or tablet. As an event organiser I love experimenting with new and interesting ways to amplify events as well as enhance the physical delegate experience.  Sometimes we get it right and sometimes we get it wrong. But this is all part of the learning curve and helps us make the ‘online’ experience of the conference better each year.

For those just dipping their toe in the event amplification waters it can be daunting. Here at JISC we have been experimenting for a few years with different ways to ‘amplify’ an event using digital technologies. I’ve come up with a top ten list of things to think about when planning the digital amplification of your event.

1.    Technology should be a means not an end.  Make sure your conference starts with what you want people to get out of it, and with your organisation’s strategy, not with the tools you want to use.

2.    Before you do anything check the broadband and wi-fi capabilities at the venue. There is nothing worse, than putting in all that hard work to amplify the conference and the wifi letting you down on the day and none of your delegates being able to get online or worse still your live streaming cuts out.

3.    Have a plan. Creating a proper plan for why, to who, what, how and when you are amplifying is essential. Ensuring that everyone involved in implementing the plan has seen it and signed it off is also important.

4.    Find your audience, and go to them.  If you are targeting students, use Facebook; if it’s staff you want to attract, try setting up a Linked In profile.  It’s easier and more effective than trying to attract them to a new online community.

5.    Live streaming plenary sessions is an excellent way of allowing online followers to participate in the conference highlights and an easy way to build the online element.

6.    Use social media to help start conversations. For example: set up and use a memorable Twitter hashtag early on (e.g. #jisc11). Use Lanyrd to promote the event to Twitter users. Creating a LinkedIn or Facebook group audience can help delegates and online followers alike network, make new connections and start their own conversations.

7.    Consider having a dedicated microblogger to tweet live as the event unfolds.  This will also ensure that you have succinct notes of the event as a record and the microblogger can act as the physical voice of people following online at the actual event eg. during Q&A sessions.

8.    Inform your speakers.  Make sure you tell all your speakers/presenters/facilitators about any amplification plans so they are prepared and more crucially get their permission – some of them might have sensitive information in their presentations that they may not want broadcast.

9.    Consider accessibility.  Deaf and disabled people should not have to fight for their access needs to be met.  Check out JISC Techdis’ accessibility guide.

10.  Find a home for the conference outputs.  After the event, collect the materials and online conversations together for people to access after the event and put them in a logical place on  your website – then add to them and ask people to comment on what would be useful next time.  Let the life of the conference extend beyond the day itself.

There’s still time to sign up for this year’s conference – booking deadline is Friday 4 March 2011.

Last month, Tim Marshall’s blog post suggested five ways in which universities and colleges could respond to a changing landscape, the fifth of which was “Seeing over the Horizon”. Whilst confidently predicting the future of UK higher and further education over the next decade would tax the prognostic powers of Faith Popcorn, it is possible to identify at least four drivers of change.

1. Demographic changes.

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

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

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

2. Increasing international competition for academics and students

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

3. Increasing domestic competition from private universities

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

4. Disaggregated degrees

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

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

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

How can JISC help?

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

“A renewed spirit of innovation and collaboration.”

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

However journalist Anne Mroz, writing in the Times Higher Education magazine, cautions that:

“Any broadening of provision and innovation in delivering it is welcome. But online distance learning needs careful handling. Problems will arise if courses grow out of financial and political pressures rather than considered educational strategy.”

HEFCE, on behalf of the government, will shortly be publishing the final report of an Online Learning Task Force examining precisely this area of opportunity. The taskforce, chaired by Lynne Brindley of the British Library, has seen evidence from across the sector – including the TALL report cited above and a fascinating study by the National Union of Students.

The Online Learning Task Force has a difficult remit. How do you capture the full experience of university, with all the personal growth and development that this entails, via a web browser? Is it simply a cheaper way to get more students through the system? Who is looking for online learning, and what do they want? Are Kaplan right that technology is the only possible future for higher education?

Ahead of the report, we discuss the issues with  David White who led on the TALL report, Richard Hall e-Learning co-ordinator at De Montfort University, and staff and students from the University of Leicester, as part of the latest JISC On Air radio show. The show explores many of the issues around the questions raised above.

Listen now
Episode 2: Online Distance Learning (Duration: 24:04)

Subscribe via RSS

Subscribe via iTunes

Download MP3

Find out more about this programme

The recommendations reflected some good practice ideas and raised some serious issues. The report undertook a literature review, surveys and focus groups.  In the context of the Building Capacity programme, which embeds the outputs from JISC innovation projects, it is clear that some of the report’s assertions have been closed off from the reality of the immense amount of work undertaken by institutions. This could be for several reasons:

• The community responsible for moving the technology enhanced learning agenda forward have not been fully engaged in communicating with those (students and staff) on the outside of that community or fully transparent in their discussions.
• Universities have already moved beyond the remit of the report, almost to a post-digital state, where ICT is becoming ‘transparent’ and moving toward the ubiquity the reports calls for.
• The report did not engage with the full activities within universities, such as the ‘e-learning’ teams, staff development programmes etc.

Here are some comments on specific recommendations in the report:

All institutions should have an ICT strategy that is revised every three years and students should be actively engaged in the process of developing that strategy.

The report does not differentiate between ICT and e-learning strategies. In the case of the former almost all institutions have a well established ICT strategy that is examined on a regular basis by the senior management team.  The risk in adopting the recommendation as it stands is that the sector goes back to thinking about, and equating, learning with, for example, computers. The learning and teaching strategy should be distinct from the ICT strategy, where the ICT strategy is influenced and driven by the learning and teaching strategy (and other strategies such as research) and not the other way around.

University faculties should appoint Senior Fellows responsible for new technologies and integrating them into teaching and learning.

This approach was tried, and to a large extent succeeded, in FE colleges with the BECTA programme of Information and Learning Technology (ILT) Champions. In many universities similar approaches have been implemented, however, they often do not focus on sole teaching methods such as use of ICT but take a much broader view. The emphasis for teaching fellows does, and should, remain on encouraging appropriate teaching methods rather than a push for a specific product or format.

ICT usage and learning should be embedded into the design of new programmes through the validation process.

Like the previous recommendation, this seems to generalise, and I would ask is this appropriate for all programmes? We run the risk of shoehorning technology practices that do little or nothing, or even worse, damage the learning experience when we insist on embedding some practices over others.

Periodic reviews should assess the extent to which virtual learning environments and ICT are used to enhance learning.

This is one of the recommendations that stands out as something that should be delivered if it is not already. In fairness this is possibly already in place in institutions, and certainly in the Building Capacity projects’ institutions that I’ve spoken to they have been doing it for several years as part of their quality processes.

Institutions should consider ways of making university administration more accessible through technology, including e-submission of assessments, registration and course choices.

This is an area that can not only help deliver higher student satisfaction, but can also improve the experience, effectiveness and efficiency of staff. Many JISC programmes are working in this space and there are high gains to be made. Where universities are doing this well, the researchers working on this study may not even have been aware of these invisible efficiencies.

ICT skills should be integrated into Professional Standards Framework, in institutional promotional criteria and also selection for teaching awards.

The report seems to focus on training staff rather than placing precedence on enhancing the digital literacy of all staff in institutions. The bigger issue is what programmes are compulsory for other staff; it is currently only new lecturers that are required to go through the programmes and there is no requirement for continuing professional development once they have been accredited.

The report is important, reads well and raises many issues that the sector should look at, especially with regard to students’ perceptions. But, as the recommendations stand they are pushing us back to when technology was, in places, driving learning and teaching. In visiting institutions where we have projects, I see in most cases that senior management teams are building strategies that put learning and teaching (and research) at the forefront and then create the ICT strategy to service them. In some cases the technology may not be visible, as it moves into common usage, a post-digital environment potentially. The challenge arising from this report is not how to use more technology, nor how to integrate it into practice. The challenge is articulating our existing practice in ways that act as both an exemplar to students (and support their own digital literacy), and enhance our practice by sharing the exemplary work that is already there.

Lord Browne’s recommendations this week remind us that the majority of students (or their parents) will be stumping up an increasing amount for a place at university. It is no surprise then that they want to be 100% sure that their education will be worth the money.

Those of us in the business of delivering and supporting higher education want to enrol students who are well prepared – if students know what they are letting themselves in for they’re more likely to flourish and stay the course.

This is easier said than done. Typically, course publicity, application, selection and enrolment generate an overwhelming amount of information. The trick is making sense of it all.

In the first of a new series of online ‘radio’ programmes – JISC on Air – we explore how digital technologies are helping universities to share reliable and consistent course information and support new students throughout the recruitment process.

Listen now
Episode 1: Successful Student Recruitment (Duration: 18:22)

Subscribe via RSS

Subscribe via iTunes

Download MP3

More information on this programme: http://jisconair.jiscinvolve.org

Photo by Tom Wills: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomwills/5036718688/in/set-72157625060586946/