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.

Image courtesy of Fremlin on Flickr

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

“Who are you?” I asked puzzled.

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

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

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

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

What can you do to prepare for the changes ahead?

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

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

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

1. Audit, Audit, Audit

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

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

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

2. Substantive Long Programmes

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

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

3. Labour Market Intelligence (LMI)

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

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

4. English and maths

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

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

5. Work placements

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

Top Tip – Use your customer relationship management tool wisely.

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

Find out how your local RSC could help you.

Read the Wolf report.

See our case study.

Read our blog on embedding digital literacy into your curriculum.

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

Image courtesy of Fremlin on Flickr.

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!

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.

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

image from BPSUSF on Flickr

We heard this week that too many young people lack the social skills needed to get their first job.  The report by the Work Foundation (PDF) doesn’t explicitly mention digital literacy, but perhaps it should. With an estimated 90% of UK jobs requiring some level of IT competency, the notion of digital literacy – those capabilities that equip an individual for living, learning and working in a digital society – is becoming a key requirement for employability.

But will they really make graduates more employable? Why are digital literacies important to institutions and students? Is this something new or the same old skills agenda just repackaged again?

These issues and more are explored in a two part series of JISC on Air radio programmes that looks at how institutions have recognised the strategic importance of digital literacies of all staff and students working in a digital world.

In the sixth episode we are exploring how universities and colleges can help teaching staff, researchers, support and administrative staff to develop their digital literacies – those capabilities which prepare an individual for living, learning and working in a digital society.

One trend I’ve noticed is that when it comes to ‘keeping up’ with their tech-savvy students, institutions are realising that this is no longer a race they can win.  Instead they are looking for approaches that allow them to continue to meet the needs and expectations of learners in the 21^st century.

These issues are explored in a two part series of the JISC on Air radio programme that looks at how institutions have recognised the strategic importance of digital literacies for staff and students working in a digital world.

Find out more about how JISC is investing in the area on our website.

Watch videos showing how different institutions are implementing digital literacies at a strategic level with our funding

To follow the ongoing developments of the JISC funded Developing Digital Literacies projects visit the Netvibes page which collates all the project blog postings and subscribe to the Developing Digital Literacies programme blog for up to date information about the developments in the programme

Join our digital literacy mailing list to contribute to discussions around digital literacy and how it affects your institution.

JISC On Air Podcast Episode 7: Developing digital literacies for working in a digital world
(Duration: 15:48)

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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.

“So there I was, with a 100 page screenplay that seemed so close to being finished; but I just couldn’t seem to do it. Something just wasn’t working; or it hadn’t turned out how I’d envisaged it. But I couldn’t figure out what to do to fix it.

Then I came across the Screenwriting Unit by Jane Pugh at the OpenSpace Project, hosted by the University College Falmouth, UK…  I listened to the second unit (“The Principles of Screenwriting”) and it was a revelation! Suddenly knew what was wrong with my screenplay, and why it wasn’t working for me!”

Ed from Notes on Video: A blog about video equipment and video production

Quotes like the one above made University College Falmouth’s journey into open education a rewarding experience. Rewarding , however, doesn’t do the experience suitable justice. It’s something fundamentally intangible. We gave without expectation and what this institution gained is something quite profound. We hoped our pilot project would inspire. That it achieved this objective turned out to be as humbling as it was exciting…and transformative.

UCF’s geographical isolation presents challenges in building tangible networks nationally, much less internationally. Our non-STEM subject portfolio also presents challenges within Higher Education. “openSpace”, our HEFCE-funded and JISC managed creative subject open education repository, has proven to be an excellent bridge and an effective calling card. This bespoke repository allows UCF to share its expertise, knowledge and pedagogic approaches in an organic and transparent manner.

The success of openSpace has had a direct impact on UCF, resulting in:
· A new institutional Intellectual Property Rights policy
· An interest in open education from other UCF courses
· The widening of technology applications in teaching, learning and innovative approaches to teaching practice
· Discussions around a paid assessment model and certificate model – a sustainable UCF open education model
· A positive impact on applications to UCF’s MA Professional Writing course.

“But what’s so special about this [Screenwriting] course is it gives long distance learners an opportunity to learn and gain peer feedback on work. This is a pioneering new scheme and well worth a look.” – Helen Murphy, Step2InspireTV

The secret of success is straightforward. We took our open educational resources (OERs) to the people rather than trying to entice them to come to us. We uploaded our OERs on established, familiar and popular online platforms: Facebook, YouTube, Podomatic, Scribd and Twitter. People felt free to engage with the OERs, experiment with them, play with them….and then follow the links to the relevant courses on openSpace.

We also made our OERs, and our open education courses, easy to find online. The use of standard search engine optimisation best practice and meta tagging protocols ensured the OERs and courses appear at the top of search engine results against common search phrases.

The respected film makers’ website filmmakeriq.com and Celtx, the all-in-one open source media pre-production system, found the YouTube hosted Screenwriting OERs and featured them on their respective blogs. Their Tweets about the free screenwriting course resulted in a flurry of re-tweets and postings to Facebook, Digg and other leading social networking sites.

The result of these word of mouth online coverage was 1,000 people a day accessing the course in the two days following Celtx and Film Makers IQ’s first Tweets. That number rose to 1,700 people a day as social network users continued to spread the word. While they are no longer viral, these OERs remain widely accessed and commented upon. As late as November 2001, they were referenced in the Guardian Careers Blog post Live Q&A: Thinking about a career in screenwriting? by OER user Michelle Goode

The project used Podomatic to host a variety of screenwriting lectures, which have been popular internationally.

Our OERs were always geared towards and pitched to the general public. Comparatively speaking, there are few global institutions with similar degrees. Our OERs were always going to have an appeal to a specific and discrete audience within Higher Education. Understanding who our primary audience was informed our approach to online dissemination and promotion.

Other OER related activity at Falmouth includes the IPR for Educational Environments (IPR4EE) project supported within phase 3 of the UKOER programme, and the new Blogging for Educational Environments project,  funded solely by UCF.

Is open education a transformative process? Absolutely. Through means both predictable and unpredictable. Open education influences institutions, academics and the general public. Has the journey been an easy and straightforward one? No. Has it been rewarding? Most definitely. It continues to enlighten and inform us as UCF plans the release of further OER courses.

Further reading: You can read more about how other institutions have reaped the benefits of open practice in a series of case studies, and find out more about the work of our current crop of OER projects.

For a deeper analysis of Open Educational Practice, the UKOER Evaluation and Synthesis project have produced an online briefing paper.

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.

Image from The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, University of Oxford www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit © The Imperial War Museum

The legacy of World War One in terms of social, economic and political global change cannot be overstated; it changed the individual’s view of society and their place within it with far-reaching effects into their future and our past. In the words of H.G. Wells: ‘This is the end and the beginning of an age’.

To mark this event in international history is therefore a key priority for custodians of heritage and educators alike.

We’ve already made considerable efforts to preserve online the memories and writings of those active during the First World War.  The popular Great War Poetry Archive was funded by JISC to digitise precious documents relating to the poetry of the Great War – including Wilfred Owen’s original notes for the well known poem Dulce et Decorum Est.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First, a question: how much are resources re-used? The Value of Reuse report pictures our knowledge of re-use as an iceberg where much use is invisible.

That suggests that a better question might be: why so little visible reuse of educational resources? I think it stems from how we measure re-use. The e-learning world has been so focused on repurposing that we are expecting to see the content being copied/changed. But reading is use too. Interestingly, there is a strange discomfort with talking about tracking/measuring the use of open content, which I’ve started to explore. Perhaps it stems from an anxiety that measurement means metrics, and that metrics are at odds with the “long tail” nature of academic work. But I have a lot still to understand about how to provide meaningful evidence of digital impact that supports individual and institutional drivers.  So perhaps the right question to ask is around what reuse might look like in different contexts.

To encourage reuse, we need to be clear on what might motivate people to share their resources. Attention is reward, as is intrinsic motivation. People who share blog posts, tweets, slides, images on the web know it is rewarding in its own right.

Should that translate into official recognition by the employer of the academic? I guess there are different ways of carrying out the role of an academic. We see that variation in openness in the research process: different attitudes in different discipline areas and different points in their career, and probably different personalities. So I agree that no-one should be forced. It should be choice, and at the moment, most institutional reward structures are neutral on OER: the reward is individual and social.

However, the HE sector is changing. Maybe academics do need to do more of their thinking in the open. Researchers are being encouraged to think about impact and engagement. Then there are the economic and ethical arguments for open access for research, which are perhaps starting to raise expectations about opening up other academic outputs.

My biggest interest at the moment is how technology can support the changes in practice of the early majority, which I think is happening, even if it’s off the radar. Making use visible is important, connecting content and people. Of course to make use of this, as others have commented, we need to support digital literacies.

We’d love feedback on how services like Jorum and innovation programmes like the joint HEAcademy/JISC OER Programme can help keep moving open academic practices forward. And if you’re new to the concept, visit the OER Infokit to get started.

You can participate in the discussion on the oer-discuss list which we run with the UK OU: please join in!

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.

There are a number of reasons why students drop-out of education due to issues such as financial pressures, difficulties with their home lives, dissatisfaction with their course or problems with assessment.
Therefore I think it is no surprise then that there has been a renewed emphasis on ensuring that student perspectives are actively sought on their educational experiences and expectations.

This is evident in initiatives such as the recently published HEFCE/NUS report on Students perspectives of technology, the Committee of Inquiry into the Changing Student Experience, and the learner experiences research JISC has been undertaking in this area.

I see, more than ever, effective engagement, contact and communication are vital to students completing their courses and digital technologies play an ever increasing role in support of this.

Digital technologies can have a positive impact on student retention by helping institutions:
enhance curricula
ensure quality
match educational experiences with everyday life
assess learning more effectively and deliver learning experiences that meet with or exceed student expectations.

A good example of the improvement in student retention is clearly shown in our work with making the new diploma a success project at Lewisham College – making. We worked with the college on the development of a learner portal to support staff and to provide students with access to online tools from different locations, resulted in an increase in retention on their Higher Diploma in IT from 62% to 92% over the full 2 years of the study.

In the latest edition of our radio show JISC on Air we are exploring how digital technologies are helping universities and colleges to better meet students’ requirements and improve retention. In addition, we have expert input from Stephen Jackson, Director of Reviews for the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) and Alex Bols Head of Education and Quality for the National Union of Students (NUS) who discuss how the appropriate use of technology can support learners with their studies and lead to improved retention.

In this show, Kim Catcheside speaks with Richard Francis, Head of e-learning at Oxford Brookes University and Ellen Lessner, e-Learning Coordinator at Abingdon and Witney College about how their institutions are better preparing their learners for their experience of learning with technology. Both institutions participated in the JISC Supporting Learners in a Digital Age (SLIDA) study and their case studies are available here.

Kim also speaks with Helen Beetham, co-author of the JISC-funded Learning Literacies in a Digital Age (LLiDA) study and recent Review of Digital Literacies, about what support students require to make more effective use of technology for their learning.

Listen now
Episode 3: Student retention (Duration: 18.17)

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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)

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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.