JISC

Over 600 delegates gathered yesterday in Birmingham for JISC’s annual conference to hear Professor Sir Ron Cooke, Chairman of JISC, announce details of JISC’s plans for the coming year, including plans for the investment of some £80m in capital spending over the coming two years to support UK education and research.

Sir Ron Cooke also announced that JISC’s strategy was soon to be updated to take account of the changing needs of JISC’s users, rising expectations for international collaboration, and the need for JISC to support so-called ‘third stream’ activities – the contribution of higher education institutions to wider economic goals through knowledge transfer. Calling on delegates to inform JISC how it might do this most effectively, Sir Ron emphasised JISC’s collaborative and collegiate outlook, as well as its contribution to national e-learning and research strategies, which continue to strongly inform JISC’s work.

Liz Beaty, HEFCE's Director of Learning and Teaching, spoke of the ways in which network communications are ‘opening up the world’, creating workplace and leisure environments more suited to support learning, and a world in which the campus is becoming ‘semi-permeable’. This, she claimed, is changing the nature of learning and teaching. The challenge, she continued, is to harness technology to support objectives such as widening participation and increased access to the benefits of the new learning technologies.

Speaking of HEFCE’s e-learning strategy published last year, a strategy being implemented through partnership between the Higher Education Academy and JISC, Liz Beaty said that the criteria for the success of the strategy would include the level of access to ICT available to all students, the skills acquired by staff, the development of subject communities and the support of lifelong learning. Calling on institutions to meet the new challenges, she said it was ‘our responsibility what the future brings, our responsibility how we use our energies to support students.’ JISC, she concluded, had a crucial role to play in ensuring that institutional practice was fully integrated with national policy.

In another keynote speech, Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the US Coalition of Networked Information (CNI), continued the theme of how technology is changing the nature of learning, teaching and research. The ubiquity of network access is allowing communities to develop across disciplinary, institutional and sometimes national barriers, supporting collaborative environments and changing the nature of scholarship.While it is recognised that the demands of data-led research have already changed the ways in which science is undertaken, a comparable revolution is now taking place within the humanities, Dr Lynch claimed. There are challenges in all this, he continued. Education institutions need, in particular, to become aware of their roles and responsibilities as ‘memory organisations’, and look to the ways in which they can effectively curate and preserve the digital resources they are creating and whose long-term availability they need to ensure.

The conference also marked the launch of the new JISC publication on Learning Spaces, which offers advice to senior managers in colleges and universities on new thinking in the design of technology-rich learning spaces, as well as the start of the period of transition to the next-generation access management system based on Shibboleth technology which has been endorsed by JISC.

It was plans for the capital programme, however, which formed the centrepiece of Sir Ron Cooke's speech, in which he announced that a call for proposals will be issued in April calling on institutions to bid for projects worth nearly £10m in the first tranche of funds under the capital programme. The funds, awarded by HEFCE, will, he claimed, significantly enhance the UK’s digital infrastructure and bring a wide range of benefits to the higher education and research sectors.

Among the plans for the next two years to be announced were:

Repositories a £14m programme to establish a network of digital repositories; national structures to develop the Information Environment supporting repositories, including cross-searching facilities across federated repositories; matching funding to support institutions in developing a critical mass of content; establishment of a national support service for the development of repositories.

Network almost £28m of extra funding to support the transition to the next-generation SuperJANET5 network; further development of the UK’s optical network for research communities – UKLight – and its integration into SuperJANET5.

Digitisation a further £6m investment in the digitisation of important scholarly resources; in collaboration with partners, the development of national digitisation and e-content strategies.

e-Learning an £11.5m programme to support, with the Higher Education Academy, the implementation of national e-learning strategies, including the establishing of a national e-learning advisory centre for the HE community; projects to explore the potential of e-learning, particularly e-portfolios, e-assessment; and personal learning environments, with a focus on their use to support lifelong learning.

e-Infrastructure a further £10m to continue development of the national e-infrastructure in support of the research community and of the DTi’s ‘Science and Innovation Investment Framework 2004 -2014’ and to ensure the UK's position in the forefront of world research.

User Environments a £6.75m investment in the development of User Environments to support researchers in globally distributed research teams in all disciplines; the integration of personal environments, social software, and mobile and wireless technologies to provide a more coherent and personalised information environment; the exploration of new and emerging technologies to ease the administrative and management burdens of those engaged in teaching and research.

The initial call for proposals under these programmes will be issued on April 28th, with a town meeting held on the 10th May. Among the areas of activity covered in this call will be: regional pilots to explore the use of ICT to support lifelong learning; projects, tools and services to support HE institutions develop repositories, as well as projects to support the national e-infrastructure. For the digitisation strand of the programme, a call will be issued on the 8th April with a town meeting on the 21st April.

Further information

Conference website 
Shibboleth 
Learning spaces 

or contact Philip Pothen 

Further reports from the JISC conference will be available in the coming days, as will further details of JISC’s capital programme.