JISC

Since 2000 the FE community has benefited from the coordinated and strategic approach to Information and Communications Technology (ICT) provided by JISC’s support of the sector through LSC funding in England. It is an engagement that has brought, amongst other things, network connectivity to all FE colleges in the country, the benefits of the advice and guidance provided by the Regional Support Centres (RSCs) and other JISC-funded services, the institutional embedding of managed learning environments (MLEs) and the take-up of a range of high-quality e-resources.

Regional Support Centres

The JISC RSCs - nine in England, corresponding to each of the English Regions, two in Scotland and one each in Wales and Northern Ireland - have for six years provided the first point of access to advice and guidance for the post-16 community across a range of areas, including network connectivity, e-learning and curriculum support. Their work has been a significant factor in developing that community’s now-mature engagement with e-learning and its use of ICT.

Two recent reports have highlighted the significant contribution made by the RSCs and their strategic importance to their communities. The first, commissioned jointly by the LSC and the DfES, looked at post-16 e-learning support services across England and spoke in highly favourable terms of the RSCs’ ‘practical help across a range of key areas, including staff development, supporting development of organisational strategy and independent technical advice’. Confirming the results of other surveys, it found that ‘JISC RSC services were frequently cited, unprompted, as the most useful service available’.

The second report, an independent review of the RSCs undertaken on behalf of JISC, found that ‘the group of services [the RSCs] provide, centred upon their mission of supporting the development of e-learning capacity, are not available from other sources,’ and that ‘the light touch management of the RSCs by JISC has allowed them to flourish as regional agencies’.

This increasingly central role as the only established regionally based teams supporting improvements in the quality of learning and teaching is captured in the new RSC mission of ‘stimulating and supporting innovation in learning’, a mission which reflects the growing mainstreaming of e-learning and its embedding in institutional practice. In support of this mission the sector will in future see an increased emphasis on the part of the RSCs on supporting senior managers in colleges to effect strategic, institution-wide change through the harnessing of new technologies.

This emphasis is also reflected in the strategic partnerships the RSCs continue to build, partnerships which will ensure that English FE colleges are well placed to benefit from developments at the regional and national levels in post-16 education. These developments include the emerging agendas of the Quality Improvement Agency (QIA) and the Learning and Skills Network (LSN), in particular the latter’s Subject Learning Coach Networks and e-Learning Professional Development Framework, as well as significant elements in the recently published Post-16 White Paper.

With skills, training and staff development at the forefront of national initiatives, additional LSC funding has enabled RSC Southeast to support the roll-out of the ITQ (Information Technology Qualification) and the ‘e-skills passport’ to all regional FE and (ACL) Adult and Community Learning providers; this is an important development, and an example of the RSCs’ evolving role.

The regional dimension is an important element of the DfES’s e-strategy and, in support of this, the RSCs are well placed to ensure that each region reaps the benefits of wider Government initiatives. In addition, while the remit of the RSCs has grown in the last three years to include support for Specialist Colleges and ACL, it is likely to grow still further in the future to include work based learning providers.

The RSCs have been central to JISC’s engagement with the post-16 education community since 2000 and JISC remains committed to their continued development and to ensuring that they consolidate still further their central position in e-learning support for that community.

Advisory services

JISC’s advisory services provide a suite of services providing advice, support and guidance to colleges on a range of issues relating to the use of ICT. They work closely with the RSCs to ensure that best practice is cascaded to colleges, delivering economies of scale in the provision of coherent and high-quality services.

TechDIS has been instrumental in ensuring that institutions have up-to-date guidance on accessibility issues (crucial for institutional efforts to widen access to disadvantaged groups), in the deployment and use of assistive technologies and in supporting the compliance of the FE and Specialist Colleges communities with disability legislation.

The JISC Plagiarism Advisory Service began addressing the issue of plagiarism before it became the subject of intense media scrutiny, and provides the FE community with tools and support services that are now established as highly regarded assets.

The successful adoption and use of MLEs by colleges owed much to JISC infoNet’s work in synthesising a great deal of complex research and development in this area into a range of practical, highly usable resources. These resources, like more recent ones on records management, supporting lifelong learning, Freedom of Information Act compliance and change management, adopt a characteristic ‘layered’ approach, one targeted at different levels of institutional management, containing step-by-step guides, toolkits, templates, case studies, and so on. This holistic approach demonstrates a commitment to supporting institutions in reaching ‘e-maturity’ in terms of their policies, practices, business flows and organisational cultures.

Set up some ten years ago, Netskills provides training courses in a wide range of technical and organisational issues. Since then the Netskills’ user community has grown beyond colleges and universities to include Specialist Colleges and ACL where its partnership with NIACE (National Institute of Adult Continuing Education) is a particularly important one.

TASI, the Technical Advisory Service for Images, provides advice and guidance on the creation of digital images, their use in learning and teaching and the management of large-scale digitisation projects. Their extensive range of national workshops are increasingly well-attended by members of the FE community.

With the IT revolution of the past ten years has come a raft of legislation affecting a wide range of colleges’ activities. This legislation includes data protection, Freedom of Information, disability and accessibility, cyber-crime, human rights, security, intellectual property and much else. In the form of publications, events, bulletins, webcasts and a helpdesk, JISC Legal provides support and guidance to colleges, enabling them to keep up to date with changes in technology-related legislation and in ensuring compliance with the same.

Network services

The JANET network, provided on behalf of JISC by UKERNA (United Kingdom Education and Research Networking Association), is the foundation stone upon which English colleges have engaged with ICT since 2000. Providing secure, high-speed bandwidth connectivity to all post-16 education institutions in the country, it constitutes the spine of a National Education Network across all education sectors, from schools to FE, HE and research. English colleges therefore benefit from being part of a national, integrated and strategic approach to the development of the network.
The next-generation network, SuperJANET5, is currently being installed and English colleges will receive subsidiary benefits from this upgrade to the JANET ‘backbone’.

Two major reviews of the JANET network are currently underway: one that will consider the question of how the entitlements of institutions connected to the network are determined, and the other that is looking at UKERNA’s relationship with the Regional Network Operators (RNOs), which currently manage the majority of the ‘last mile’ network connections between the backbone and institutions.
It is expected that these reviews will result in improvements to the connectivity that colleges receive and greater consistency across the English regions.

The provision of high-speed bandwidth connectivity by itself is not enough, however, as institutions need support and guidance in making the most of that connectivity and in ensuring security for their users and their systems. UKERNA has developed a wide range of free advice and support services to answer the needs of institutions in these areas. These include JANET–CERT which deals with security, the Bandwidth Management Advisory Service, the Video Conferencing Advisory Service, webmail, mail filtering and hosting services, amongst others. Such services provide good examples of the efficiency gains made possible by national approaches to institutional challenges. Not only do they build on the considerable expertise developed over two decades, in this instance by UKERNA, but they provide national services, free at the point of use, that would otherwise cost institutions considerable sums of money in commercially available services and support.

Since 2000 the FE community has benefited from its use of the Athens authentication service, developed through JISC funding from 1997 onwards, and now used by almost all colleges in England. Giving users secure and authenticated access to a range of resources, Athens will continue to be funded by JISC and made available to FE until 2008.

JISC – along with Becta – is also investing in the development of next-generation access management systems and to this end is funding the UK Access Management Federation, hosted by UKERNA, which all FE colleges will be invited to join. The Federation, which will be formally launched in early 2007, will enable FE colleges to implement new technologies allowing users to access a range of resources from their single, institutional login ID and password.

In addition to reducing the numbers of IDs users have to remember, federated access management offers a number of other advantages, including the support of more complex and dynamic collaborations in e-learning, simultaneous access to internal and external e-resources and compliance with international standards.

By collaborating with Becta and liaising with the NHS about a coordinated approach to access management across all sectors, JISC is addressing the national e-strategies that emphasise the importance of links between sectors.
To support this important and far-reaching transition, JISC has funded a range of early adopter projects – including a number in FE colleges – as well as a Middleware Assisted Take-Up (MATU) service, which has begun its programme of national events, dissemination of case studies and other resources to the FE community.

Content services and data centres

The FE community has benefited enormously from an engagement with high-quality online resources for learning, teaching and research, and JISC services have provided the foundation for that engagement.
National data centres EDINA and MIMAS have for ten years provided networked access to a large and growing library of data, information and research resources. Their specialist expertise in the hosting and provision of online materials has been responsible for the community’s growing use of a wide array of data types, including online video, sound and geo-spatial resources, something that continues in increasingly sophisticated ways.

The data centres’ current portfolio includes National Learning Network (NLN) materials, satellite resources, census data, and a wide range of ‘resource discovery tools’ including Intute (formerly the RDN – Resource Discovery Network), whose catalogue contains 110,000 external web resources for use in learning, teaching and research. Intute is heavily used in FE, as is its suite of some 70 subject-based training tutorials, including 13 specifically for FE and five for the ACL sector.

Also hosted by MIMAS is Jorum, JISC’s national online repository for learning and teaching materials. Jorum was launched in January 2006 and provides a means by which institutions and individuals can access, share and adapt teaching resources for use in the classroom. The repository already contains more than 1000 learning resources in a wide range of subject areas. Institutions register for the User and Contributor services and so far nearly a third of English colleges have already done so for the Jorum User service, with 17 colleges actively adding resources to Jorum through the Contributor service. These figures are very encouraging for such a recent and highly innovative development, suggesting that Jorum has an important role in encouraging the FE community to embrace new and innovative ways of using online resources.

e-Resources

Access to e-resources is an important aspect of any institution’s engagement with ICT and to ensure that the FE community is able to subscribe to the best available resources at much lower rates than would otherwise be possible, JISC negotiates with publishers to licence high-quality online resources that support learning and teaching in further education.
The JISC collection of resources includes full-text materials, e-books, image banks, maps, learning resources and moving images. With JISC not only negotiating for these resources, but also in some cases subsidising the subscription fees – sometimes by as much as 50% – the savings to English colleges and the sector as a whole of the national provision of these e-resources amounts to nearly £6 million per annum.

However, a key challenge for the sector is student and staff engagement with online resources. So JISC ensures that the licensing arrangements for these resources include special terms and conditions that make them especially attractive to FE, including 24/7 access, ‘unlimited concurrency’ (any number of users are able to use them at the same time), the permission for teachers to cut and paste materials to use in their own teaching materials, incorporation into virtual learning environments, and many more.

Many resources are not available commercially and are put together specifically for FE through JISC agreements. One example is InfoTrac OneFile, which contains more than 8000 fully searchable newspapers and journals covering all subjects and which is subscribed to by around two thirds of all English colleges.
Another example is the Education Image Gallery, a collection of 50,000 digital images from the world-famous Hulton Getty Archive, created through special agreement. Colleges previously needed to pay for each image requested from the archive, which cost them in the region of £250. The creation of the Education Image Gallery means that colleges now have access to all 50,000 images for around the same cost as one image would previously have cost them.

Many important resources are made available to the FE community free of charge. An example is the Gale Virtual Reference Library, a core library of fully searchable e-books. Over half of all English colleges now subscribe to this resource, which JISC bought outright for the FE community.
Most publishers are reluctant to develop online resources to support specialist vocational teaching in FE because they see the market as too limited and too poorly resourced. However, JISC tackled this by partnering with hairdressing professionals to create a unique online resource – Hairdressing Training – that supports the teaching and learning of hairdressing at NVQ level 2. A recent DfES evaluation study praised the resource for having made a ‘significant contribution to raising the profile of e-learning in the hairdressing curriculum.’
As a result of this successful venture, it seems likely that this model of provision could be extended to other vocational areas of study. Discussions have taken place with a number of commercial publishers who now want to work with JISC to produce similar e-resources.

From August 2006 JISC’s e-resources activities will be undertaken through a limited company, called JISC Collections. The new level of LSC funding will re-establish these activities as part of the services JISC offers to the English post-16 sector and will moreover allow colleges to become members of the company at no extra cost, be represented on its Board and to play a full part, once again, in ensuring that the FE community is able to access the resources it needs. Communications are being sent to all colleges informing them of these changes and the actions required.
Without JISC the FE market is unattractive to the commercial online publishing sector. Many find the cost of sales to colleges on an individual basis too high to be worthwhile. JISC’s position and leverage as a national negotiator with publishers has proved to be vital in securing significant savings for the further education sector and, perhaps more importantly, ensuring that the sector is able to benefit from the highest quality e-resources to support its learning and teaching.

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