JISC

Over 600 delegates are gathering at the Birmingham ICC this morning for the JISC annual conference to hear a range of speakers give presentations about JISC’s work, attend workshops and demonstrations and visit the more than 50 stands in the exhibition hall. Keynote speeches will be delivered by Professor David Eastwood, CEO of HEFCE, and Tom Loosemore, project director of BBC 2.0.

Professor Sir Ron Cooke, Chairman of JISC, will welcome delegates and outline some of the achievements of the last year, such as the launch of SuperJANET5, the creation of JISC Collections as a mutual trading company and the establishment of the UK Access Management Federation.  

Looking forward to future challenges, Sir Ron will introduce JISC’s newly updated three-year strategy, which reaffirms JISC’s commitment to the support of further and higher education but which includes for the first time a new strand to support institutions’ engagement with business and the community.

Among the topics for discussion during the day are repositories, the e-Framework initiative, knowledge transfer from education to industry, virtual research environments (VREs), the impact of governance legislation and digital preservation. 

In addition, a number of announcements will be made today, including:

• The results of JISC’s continuing collaboration with Universities UK and GuildHE on the HE sector’s compliance with information governance legislation. Results of a new survey released today reveal that the sector is continuing to meet its obligations under Freedom of Information and other governance legislation.

• The launch of the third of JISC’s highly successful and extremely popular e-learning guides - Effective Practice with e-Assessment. This one looks at institutional practice in e-assessment, using case studies and offering insights into what could be on the horizon in ten years’ time.

• The launch of the Users and Innovation programme. Central to the new programme is a Community of Practice, involving more than 50 institutions, which will allow m ore than 150 practitioners to share their thinking and collaborate on innovation to enrich the learning experience of students.

• The launch of an ‘infokit’ on learning spaces. The eagerly-awaited Planning and designing technology-rich learning spaces, produced by JISC infoNet, is richly illustrated with case studies and images of buildings across the sector and includes a virtual tour around an imaginary campus.

• The purchase in perpetuity of the Institution of Civil Engineers virtual library, a resource which would cost each institution £12,000 but which, thanks to this JISC Collections agreement, will now be freely available.

Regular updates (presentations and session commentaries) from the conference will be available during the day at: JISC Conference