JISC

JISC today announced the successful bids under the latest round of funding of its capital programme. Representing an investment of nearly £4m, the 45 projects are being funded under the Enterprise Architecture, Users and Innovation, e-Infrastructure and e-learning strands of the programme.

Among the projects being funded under the Users and Innovation strand are a range of small-scale pilot projects exploring next-generation and social networking technologies such as social tagging, ‘microblogging’, Second Life and other virtual reality environments in a range of contexts and subject areas. Nine large scale demonstrators have also been funded which will investigate innovative collaborative practices, often in distributed contexts, and using multimedia resources, immersive environments and other technologies.The aim of the projects is to unite scholarly collections, explore innovative approaches to digitisation and match expertise in one country with collections to be digitised in the other.

e-Learning projects are being funded under a call made last year for proposals relating to the re-use of learning content. Nineteen projects will investigate the repurposing of online content in courses and modules in subjects as diverse as Mathematics, Advertising,  Statistics, English Literature, Hospitality and Biology, and at a variety of levels, from Undergraduate Level 1 to postgraduate and in a range of contexts.

In addition, four universities are the recipients of funding under each of the Enterprise Architecture and e-Infrastructure strands of the programme.

Also awarded funding under the capital programme are five digitisation projects under a transatlantic collaboration between JISC and the US’s National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The aim of the projects is to unite scholarly collections split between the two countries, explore innovative approaches to digitisation and match expertise in one country with collections to be digitised in the other. An earlier announcement gives further details of these projects.

For further information on all projects, please go to: www.jisc.ac.uk/capital

The capital programme is additional funding of £90 million awarded to JISC over three years to enhance the network infrastructure (SuperJANET 5), to digitise key resources for the academic community, and to support the development of e-learning, e-infrastructure, virtual research environments, users and innovation, and repositories and preservation. Funding for SuperJANET 5 has been provided by all JISC's funding partners, while the remaining activities have been funded by the Higher Education Funding Councils for England and Wales (HEFCE and HEFCW).