Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are nothing new. In fact, Google web trends show searches for the term API have been on an increase since their records began in 2004.  However, I would argue that there are still potential benefits to universities to be wrung from this venerable technology.

The simplest definition of an API is ‘an interface to a website or software that is designed to be used by developers not by end users’. It allows developers to access the data inside the website or software and use that data in other websites or other pieces of software.

Allows an easy transfer of data around your institution and with partners
The modern university has a mind-boggling array of software, hardware and websites. They also work in an increasingly collaborative environment.  To ensure the smooth running of the university and for ease of collaboration, it is essential that data can flow between the systems that make a university tick. APIs offer a route to addressing the problem. Read some examples of how institutions have used APIs to move data between systems.

Provides automation for laborious tasks
Data sharing between systems can often be difficult and can sometimes require the manual processing of information to take it from one system and to another. APIs offer potential cost savings in the process of moving data. There will be an initial set up cost for the API, but in the long run they should offer a more efficient and more scalable option than manual data processing. This should not only provide cost savings but should also allow the exploration of new opportunities which arise when working at a greater scale.

Improves attraction and retention of students
Universities operate in an increasingly competitive environment; they need to attract students. A university’s brand is an important element in attracting students. APIs could offer opportunities to ensure a university’s brand is well represented in social media and other websites where potential students are likely to be looking. An way of using APIs to help with retention would be developing smartphone applications. These could make it easier for students to settle in to life at the university, for example the recently developed NewcastleUniversity App.

These are all big issues for universities and APIs offer the promise of big rewards. But big rewards rarely come easily. However, when thinking about APIs we are fortunate that there is a wealth of good practice in successful implementation on the web and in enterprises. The report which I have been involved in writing offers some useful case studies and examples that people can follow when implementing APIs. It also includes some practical pointers on management and planning issues that need to be taken into account if APIs are to be implemented.

So, while APIs are sometimes viewed as some kind of young web 2.0 upstart, I would argue that they are a mature technology with a long history of solving exactly the kind of challenges every university is facing. I’d love to hear how you are using APIs – please do tweet @andymcg or comment below I’d also like to hear if you think I’ve got it wrong and that APIs are in fact old hat with newer technologies emerging that can offer better ways of
addressing these problems.

Read Andy’s team blog

I know that many larger universities and colleges, and those who have found themselves in the FOI spotlight, have already invested in their own systems to help them log and track the requests they receive. However, I’m also aware that there are many more universities and colleges out there for whom the business case did not stack up. They were unable to invest in specialist software, but are now finding that their existing, largely manual, processes are struggling to keep pace.

As part of my role at Jisc infoNet I have been working to develop a possible solution to the management of these requests. I’ve helped create the Information Request Register; this is an Excel based tool which has been developed in conjunction with FOI practitioners from a number of universities. The register offers assistance to universities and colleges, allowing them to:

• Centrally coordinate requests received under different access regimes
• Manage requests with limited staff resources, therefore reducing cost
• Automatically calculate the appropriate deadline of a request response
• View ‘at-a-glance’ visual prompts as to the status of each request
• Use readymade reports which enable providers to view the current state of requests or analyse them during a given period
• Customise the system to meet their specific requirements.

Lastly, another benefit of the register is that it provides information for the annual Information Legislation and Management Survey. The survey’s results are widely accepted as the definitive source of data about the impact of information compliance legislation on the sector, but it takes considerable time and resource for people to submit their data each year. The register collects the data needed for the survey as you go. So, rather than representing a significant body of work each January all that is required is for you to copy the relevant worksheets to a new file and email it to us, and the job is done.

Now that’s what I call a win-win situation!

I hope you decide to give the InformationRequest Register a try and do let me or my colleague Teresa Tocewicz know how you get on as any feedback would be appreciated.

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Tweet Steve: @sjbailey
Tweet Teresa: @TeresaToc

There is growing demand for appropriate film and sound resources within education. Where the typical education consumer would previously have been content with text-based learning, they are now seeking to learn from the gamut of rich multi-media all around them.

For all those involved in education either as funders, producers, or practitioners, the challenge is how to harness this new media literacy, and in particular to help ensure that rich media resources can be systematically embedded in teaching and learning, as well as providing new avenues for research. Teachers are increasingly aware of the need to offer compelling and interesting resources that engage students to facilitate the high quality experience that our universities need to be able to deliver in order to remain competitive. Likewise, researchers want to engage more fully with film, television and radio to exploit the potential of resources that have been hitherto inaccessible.

We are therefore excited about the possibilities that the development of a Research Education Space (RES) will offer to address these needs. During 2013, we will be working on the first phase of creating RES which aims to deliver a sustainable digital content collection for post August 1989 BBC broadcast media assets using the ERA licences and the BUFVC’s Box of Broadcasts (BoB) service. More specifically we aim to:

Provide unique, rich and valuable assets to research and educational users.

The audio-visual archives of the BBC contain a wealth of material gathered since it was founded in 1922 but much remains largely inaccessible, held on film or videotape. RES will start to ‘open up’ one of the most influential archives in the world for use within UK education and research.

Establish Principles for making assets and catalogues available to research and educational users

We are only at the beginning of the process of unlocking archives for academic use, but we see our collaboration with the BBC and the BUFVC as crucial to bringing together expertise in this area and enhancing joint understanding. The project will pay dividends for education and research in the longer term by providing more cost effective ways to provide access to high quality and highly demanded archival content.

Develop a Platform for digitised assets which allows easy access and reliable delivery

For us and our customers, RES will contribute to a balanced Jisc portfolio of investment as not only will it greatly enhance the availability of video/ audio resources (being the only dedicated source of BBC broadcasts for education potentially dating back to August 1989), but also begin to create a sustainable infrastructure through the existing BUFVC’s ‘Box of Broadcasts – BoB’ (an off-air recording and media archive service).

Create Propositions to demonstrate the use of these assets within a range of contexts

BoB’s popularity and user-baser is already impressive – in 2012 alone, it streamed some 320 programmes per hour from 50+ channels, with 35k-40k unique users per month at 45 institutions (8 colleges, 37 universities). However, RES will also help us to learn more about current and potential content usage in education and research through academic engagement and case study development. This will help us present the content better in order to gain maximum exposure and use.

RES has the potential to both enhance and energise the academy’s relationship with one of the dominant media of the 20^th century- film, television and radio- by creating new opportunities for research and teaching and encouraging use across many different disciplines. We have some way to go until the first results of our work to develop RES become available in the autumn of 2013 but we’re looking forward to the journey and keeping you posted.

As we put the team together to create RES and our plans develop, I and colleagues look forward to keeping you up-to-date on our progress. If in the meantime you’d like to know more, please do email me at s.fahmy@jisc.ac.uk

An overview of the BBC’s Digital Public Space vision can be read in the Guardian here.

Find out more about BUFVC’s BoB National: http://bobnational.net

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.

Image courtesy of Isra Alonso on Flickr

With a very competitive business market and unemployability at high levels for young people, I believe it is important that we try to maximise educational opportunities and match learners’ skills with business needs as best as possible.

We need to ensure learners have the best possible chance of securing a job in the current marketplace and to do this I feel that the further education sector needs to develop a more holistic approach to employer engagement.  In my understanding the key to doing this successfully lies in the following steps:

1. Market analysis
2. Identifying course need
3. Implementing course design
4. Presentation and delivery of the course
5. Gathering feedback to inform future needs and requirements.

Employer engagement is an important part of this, as colleges can’t even begin to understand, never mind match, the needs of businesses without an open channel of communication.  To help maintain these relationships colleges need to build relationships with local businesses, and ensure the right systems are available for course cataloguing, promotion, bookings, and of course staff training and customer service.

I think it would be good to approach businesses on the basis of “no point in complaining that further education colleges can’t provide what you’re looking for if you don’t let them know what it is you’re looking for!”

The benefits of this approach for colleges would be a raised profile within the local community and hopefully with more targeted courses a rise in learner uptake. For learners, I would hope they would improve the chances of securing a job and have an increase in opportunity to participate in work experience placements during their training.

Well after I’ve got that off my chest, the question is what would the successful process of matching students and course development with employer needs look like?  I think it would mean cultural change within colleges, resulting in a new approach to employer responsiveness; equally it would be important to see employers responding to the challenge.

I believe much of this could be accomplished through the development of a single skills economy platform, but it would require concerted effort to get employers, learners and learning providers singing from the same hymn sheet. I work at Trainagain and we have recently been working with JISC to create a ‘Skills Dashboard’, which I think may be one of the possible solutions. It provides concise information on what courses are being offered where, and the type of courses people are searching for.

As we develop this dashboard I hope to incorporate an employer feedback loop into the process to gain an understanding of what training employers would like. I want to encourage employers to anonymously submit skills gaps information so that colleges can see the volume of demand for a particular skill and respond accordingly.  In my experience the need for this is a consistent theme from senior managers in further education, they wish to base their courses on the needs and skills required in the workplace.

The skills dashboard could create an online market place for the skills economy and offer colleges, employers and the wider community the opportunity to respond to supply and demand in a more immediate way than before.  This could make a significant difference to the way workforce development is approached.

I hope you have found my thoughts on this topic useful during National Colleges Week and please do contact me if you would like to discuss. Fingers crossed for the future.

Part of my role at JISC’s Regional Support Centre in Yorkshire & Humber has been to work in partnership with RSC colleagues and learning providers nationally, and together we have developed the Digital Literacies Organisational Review tool. This empowers you to take an approach which encompasses every department and allows you to review how digital literacies are embedded across the organisation, from strategy to practice.

Although this may sound like another job for the to-do list, the benefits of placing digital literacies at the heart of your organisation, in my opinion, far outweigh the effort.  Benefits include:

• Preparing students for the workplace by developing their digital competencies
• Improving the quality of teaching and learning by offering more flexible and engaging models of delivery
• Informing staff’s continual professional development needs to ensure that they are empowered to help learners make best use of technology
• Contributing towards a safe and responsible learning environment, minimising the risks of cyberbullying and inappropriate online behaviours
• Supporting senior managers to develop strategies focusing on digital literacies that join-up good practice across the organization, these could include and online curriculum.

At the moment we are piloting this tool.  We recently visited Solihull College and Sue McGregor, their Director of Curriculum said: “The Digital Literacy Organisational Review was thought provoking and produced some clear and immediate actions to help us move forward.”

If you would like to take part in testing the Digital Literacies Organisational Review at your organization, please don’t hesitate to contact your local RSC to discuss this further.   Alternatively, you can also find out more about how our network of Regional Support Centres can support your organisation with digital literacy by following @JISCRSCDigLit on Twitter or by visiting our website.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Digitisation breathes new life into material from the past, and turns it into a formidable asset for the individual user and an important building block of the digital economy.”[1]

Still, the way we create content online is still in its infancy, and the path from initial funding to long-term sustainability can be challenging. Despite financial investment, some undesirable outcomes have emerged:

• Project leaders return again and again to funders, because alternative revenue streams have not been developed;
• Completed projects cannot always be updated/ungraded once funded has ended;
• Content created may live in silos, be difficult to find and hosted on a variety of platforms;
• Preservation strategies are often uncertain, both for digitised and born digital content;
• Project leaders often rely heavily on the largesse of a host institution
• Some programmes or projects that cease to secure ongoing funding are obliged to stop work altogether

Add to this the challenging economic environment of the past few years and all of these issues are brought into glaringly sharp relief.

Since 2007, Ithaka S+R and the JISC-led Strategic Content Alliance have led the way in examining ways  that the academic and cultural heritage sectors are defining sustainability and helping to make sure that the digital resources will endure and provide value well beyond the term of the grant. In 2012, two years and one economic crisis later, this essential research is more important than ever to answer questions such as:

• What were the key sustainability issues to consider?
• How have project leaders made their resources valuable to users?
• How have project leaders made growth and innovation possible?
• Which sustainability models have been most successful?
• How had budget cuts and other factors affected the projects?

Answers to these questions however are never simple and the process by which projects, both current and previous, consider them are multifaceted and complex. As a first step to traversing the difficult road to sustainability, the following video lecture series has been developed with Nancy Maron (sustainability expert at Ithaka S+R) to consider how universities, museums and libraries can deal with these issues in a challenging economic environment. You may not find all the answers here, but you will certainly find out more about the questions you need to be asking and guidance on how to answer them.

Split into parts or available as full versions, the videos (under a CC-BY-NC-SA licence) allow for individuals or organisations to embed or repurpose the relevant sections for their own specific audiences. As they are in easily digestible ‘bite-size’ chunks with links to the relevant resources referenced, these should help you to think in more depth about the issues raised and to read and research at your own pace. All we ask is that you let us know how you are planning to use them and if/ how these have been useful to you.

Please follow the links below to view the videos most relevant to your sector:

Sustaining Digital Resources for Universities

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sustaining Digital Resource for Museums

Sustaining Digital Resources for Libraries

Mark Walport speaks. Photo courtesy of Torsten Reimer

“It’s a complete no-brainer,” said Sir Mark Walport. The director of the Wellcome Trust was responding to JISC’s Digital Infrastructure Directions report into the value and benefits of text and data mining, which recommends that the UK should create a copyright exception for text and data mining for non-commercial research. “It is critical that we enable researchers to maximise the value of publicly funded published outputs. We need to just get on and do it,” he urged.

It was a view endorsed by his fellow experts on the panel, and the majority of audience, who had heard one of the report’s authors explain the rationale behind the study and the key findings within it at an event last night at the Wellcome Trust.

Dr Diane McDonald explained that JISC had commissioned the report because of the need for empirical evidence on the subject – the UK government has stated that policy changes should be based on solid evidence – and that she and co-author Ursula Kelly had used the UK Treasury’s own best practice guidelines to evaluate the research.

The context is that the academic world faces a data deluge. There are 1.5m academic publications every year and two new articles are uploaded to UK PubMed Central every minute of the day.  No human researcher could hope to be able to examine the torrent of data in their field, make sense of it and turn it into new knowledge – but computers can. However, while there are some pockets of data mining within UK higher education, concentrated within the biomedical sciences, the entry and transaction costs to this new form of research are, in the main, so high as to be off-putting.

Panel session. Photo courtesy of Torsten Reimer

The availability of material for mining is limited – most text mining in the UK is based on open access publications – and researchers face legal uncertainty as they negotiate a maze of licensing agreements. In addition, there are inaccessible information silos where different corpora of articles come in different formats with different standards and different metadata, making it extremely difficult to search across them. There is also low awareness among both researchers and publishers of the potential for text mining.

Yet, the benefits of lowering the barriers to such forms of research could be significant, not only for UK higher education but also for its economy and for society as a whole.

Professor Martin Hall, vice-chancellor of the University of Salford, offered an example of how data-mined information could have a real impact on public health. For example, these tools could be used to create a cholesterol map of greater Manchester which would allow public health officials to focus efforts where it counts and make a significant intervention.

Professor Douglas Kell, chief executive of the BBSRC, meanwhile, pointed to research in his own field and the move towards a more inductive, data-driven model where the research begins with the data and finds a hypothesis that fits rather than vice versa. “Integrative biology requires the use and thus access to data and literature that one did not create itself. Without this, biological research will be stalled,” he said.

It was a point picked up by audience member Philip Ditchfield of GlaxoSmithKline. “There are about 7,000 diseases out there and we can cure about 1% as an industry at the moment.  We’re all patients at the end of the day and we need to discover medicines. That’s the priority,” he commented. “We’re a very compliant industry and we want to work with publishers, not undermine their intellectual property. Publishers often say you can mine our content – you just have to ask us. That’s very easy to say and very hard to achieve. It is like in the early days of motor cars when you were allowed to  drive down the road but you had to have a man with a red flag running in front of you.”

Removing this red flag, at least for non-commercial research, in the form of a copyright exception to support text mining and analytics, as proposed by Hargreaves is the key recommendation of the report.

Find out more about the report

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.

What strikes me about the post is that is latches on to some recent synthesis work on digital humanities, extracting some of its findings and treating them as an ideology to be critiqued.

This implies there is a coherent philosophy to the digital humanities. A set of founding ideas, an essential ideology, that will either determine its success or failure.

The trouble is that the Digital Humanities is not reducible to a manifesto. Rather it is the evolving set of humanistic traditions and practices about investigation, analysis, critique, communication and publication that are coming under pressure in the Internet age. The whole practice of scholarship is evolving / being revolutionised (delete to taste) because of the digital realm.

All scholars are affected by this. Are there really any scholars who don’t use emails, mailing lists, JSTOR, digitised resources, Google Search, electronic journals, Wikipedia? Are there really any scholars who’ve not worried about peer review, or taken advantage of open access?

No, of course not. Although they might pretend that this is all mere convenience and doesn’t help come them closer to the ‘explanation of aesthetic works’?

But the ‘convenience’ of the digital can drive their work in different directions; a radical reduction in the hours spent travelling to libraries and browsing through print archives changes the research process.

And as the tools created by digital humanities projects grow in their scope and functionality – projects in 3D scanning, data mining, textual analysis, crowdsourcing – these too will change research practices.

I don’t disagree with Fish that we need to measure the contribution of digital tools to scholarship, but this should be with the aim of refining these tools, not just throwing them all away.

Arguing against the Digital Humanities is a little like arguing the Internet itself. It’s there, and it surrounds you. It won’t go away.

This post originally appeared on the JISC digitisation blog here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In short, the University of Lincoln undertook a four month project for JISC called ‘Linking You’, which surveyed 40 different websites across the .ac.uk domain – ten from each university group – and compared the similarities between the URLs (location addresses) of those websites. The project found there was a lot of inconsistency in the representation of information for graduates and undergraduates. However, there were also good conventions that have emerged across the sector and out of all this, the ‘Linking You’ project proposed a common set of URL syntaxes that could be used in principle across multiple corporate institutional websites:

http://lncn.eu/toolkit/model

Before you get upset and think that we are suggesting you change your current URL structures, you should know that we are NOT suggesting anything of the sort! Rather we are suggesting that via a transparent mapping exercise (using 303 or 301 redirects) you can mint all the suggested URLs that the ‘Linking You’ project proposes and then link them to the actual URLs that have grown up as part of your organic system. For example,

If you use: http://foo.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/courses

You could follow the ‘linking you’ recommendations and mint a new URL that points to the above URL using HTTP code 303 or 301 to:

http://foo.ac.uk/courses/

In short, you’re just mapping what we hope will become a common URI structure (the compact sequence of characters that identifies an abstract or physical resource) to your current link architecture, which means you can continue to change and add more links to your architecture as the organisation changes and you would just continue to redirect the ‘common’ link as recommend by ‘linking you’ to the underlying link. This process need not affect the design or apparent structure of your website.

So why should you mint the suggested set of ‘linking you’ URLs for your institution? We recognise this work of minting and maintaining the redirects would be ‘yet another thing to deal with’ across your complex and growing .ac.uk websites, however we think there is potential value both in time savings and value add we could all communally benefit from in considering these URL conventions.

Below we list ten reasons that we think will result if we can get multiple institutions to start adopting this syntax and vocabulary:

1. Better search engine optimisation: As a sector we can go to Google and say, “Hi we are the University sector and we think you should give priority to these URLs when people are searching for things like courses.”

2. robot.txt: If a group of Universities started adopting these URL syntaxes, we could save time and money by generating a common robot.txt for all of us so to use so we don’t have to each write a robot.tx file, this would also make doing analytics across the sector enhanced as we could understand patters of clicking across all .ac.uk websites.

3. A simple mapping tool: An apache mod_rewrite (or IIS, nginx, etc. equivalent) tool that will do most of this work for you that could be written once and support many!

4. Improve discovery: Clear human-readable URLs are now integral to browser search and lookup technology and becoming essential if you want to enable ease by a student experiencing your website.

5. Predictable, consistent, aggregations: It will be easier to build tools on behalf of the entire sector because people will know where to go for the data. See the below reasons (no. 6, 7, 8 ) for immediate experimentation JISC is already undertaking and just think what else could be leveraged if we could bring our data together:

6. A course catalogue: As many of you know JISC is actively encouraging universities to create XCRI feeds for their courses. If everyone producing an XCRI feed put it at the following URL foo.ac.uk/courses/xcri we’d lay the groundwork for persistent, structured course data that developers (many of them students) could use to build new and engaging apps and websites that we could all benefit from.

7. A news feed: If we all knew where all the corporate news feeds were e.g. http://foo.ac.uk/news/rss we could create a University News App where the sector could have their news published on demand, let alone text mining goodness and other filters for highlight key news developments across all higher and further education institutions.

8. A sector wide directory: Common information such as institutional policies, contact information, news, about, events, etc. could be aggregated into a searchable directory; useful to both the public and higher education institution data geeks.

9. Know your assets: Your .ac.uk addresses can be understood as your ‘virtual real estate’. Adopting a well-formed, widely understood and persistent ‘portfolio’ of core web addresses will help web managers manage these increasingly valuable assets.

10. Cool URLs: Simple, stable, manageable URLs make sense. They are recommended by the worldwide web consortium or W3C, to make web managers’ lives easier and keep users happy, too.

Those are some of the reasons we can think of and we think there are many more if even a little imagination is implied. We’re convinced that if we all worked together as university web managers we could achieve more than the sum of our parts by producing this URL structure for each institution.

What kind of idea do you think you could achieve by adopting the ‘Linking You’ toolkit? We’re thinking of funding a several short projects to review and standardise the toolkit, put it into practice and then write up your case study for the sector on how it worked for you and what value you see in doing this work. Are you interested? What are your thoughts on all of this?

Prompted by a recent JISC mobile infrastructure for libraries funding call, I wanted to outline some of the challenges for institutions, and in particular academic libraries, in coming to terms with ‘mobile’:

Re-conceptualisation of services

Hardly a day passes where we’re not confronted by yet another paradigm breaking technology or event.  Yet, mobile offers organisations, and academic libraries in particular, an opportunity to re-conceptualise services,. Not just taking existing services and relationships to make them accessible on mobile devices but how new services can be built specifically with the mobile device in mind.

Mobile helps to refocus the potential inherent in the physical space, services, systems and collections of the library, and to transform relationships away from purely service delivery to a more social context.  The librarian and library become facilitator and enabler: providing personalised information at the right time and in the right place.

Changing our relationship to space

Mobile services and devices force a reconsideration of concepts like ‘library’ and more interestingly ‘digital library’.  There is an obvious impact on the physical nature of the library, but one that has yet to be fully thought through: the re-prioritisation of space, with a move away from the physical and static (books, desktops, desks) to the mobile, interactive and social.  A library in your pocket.

For a long time the ‘library’ has transgressed beyond the physical boundaries of the buildings within an institution.  But the digital library hasn’t, in general, had a fundamental impact on the design, focus or existence of those buildings.  Mobile, it might be argued, will necessitate the re-examination of physical space.

Similarly, the digital space of the library will need re-examining.  There is no longer a separation between the physical and the digital; rather the two bleed into each other and the boundaries between the two are constantly exceeded.  What does the inherent functionality of the device bring to the discoverability and accessibility of content and services? Augmented reality (where a view of the physical environment is modified by a computer) and near field communication (transactions at a touch: such as barcodes and QR codes) are just two examples of how mobile is challenging the user’s relationship to information and services.

Changing institutional support strategy
The implications for institutions supporting hardware and software that is not owned or managed by the university or its library has huge implications.  Mobile devices are owned by and managed by the user.  How do institutions manage the support expectations of users who have a problem with their personal device?  What role will libraries or departments play in the loaning of devices to ensure equality of access?

This change requires a radically different support policy; the intensely personal and one-to-one nature of most mobile devices has significant ramifications.

Legal implications
The implications of confidentiality and privacy lurk in the background of any discussion around the institutional management of mobile hardware and software.  A major challenge for institutions is the confidentiality and privacy of the user.  The implications of data breaches and privacy make institutionally owned and managed devices less attractive; it is difficult to loan such hyper-personalised hardware and software.

Recent policy briefings from organisations such as Educause in the US on Data Privacy Legislation and the EU’s exploration of data breach rules highlight the significance of these challenges.

Not waving, but drowning
In a field as rapidly evolving as mobile, not having a clear focus and direction is likely to result in mobile provision being caught in a maelstrom of new developments and competing devices.  To realise the potential and ensure sustainability it is essential that institutional investment is ‘built upon a commonly-understood foundation and within the scope of a wider digital strategy’ (Mobile and Wireless Technologies Review).

The implementation of mobile services currently suffer from a fractured and ad hoc roll-out  within many academic institutions.  While there will undoubtedly be pockets of excellence across universities and within departments, there is rarely a coherent institutional strategy when it comes to mobile.

New opportunities…
The potential of mobile devices to transform and enhance the student experience has been demonstrated by innovative projects such as Bristol’s Mobile Campus Assistant and Edinburgh’s Walking through Time.

But I think it is now time to fully realise the opportunities that mobile offers to institutions, and ensure that these innovations are embedded in institutional strategies and services.  The mobile infrastructure for libraries funding call is an occasion to realise those opportunities and to put ideas into action.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keep in touch with JISC, sign up for our strategic alert for senior managers.

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.

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

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

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

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