JISC

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In 2006 JISC received additional capital funding from HEFCE to invest in: Networking/SuperJANET 5; Digitisation; e-learning; einfrastructure/e-research; User environments; Repositories, shared services and preservation. Enabling Innovation 2006–2009 shows how universities and colleges in England have benefited from this investment.

About JISC

JISC enables UK colleges and universities in the innovative use of digital technologies JISC invests in research and development, offering over 18 million users access to quality assured resources through our secure network. We provide expert advice, help to save money through national content licence agreements and work with colleges and universities to realise the potential of their existing technologies.

JISC provides:

• A world-class network – JANET
• Access to electronic resources
• New approaches to learning, teaching and research
• Guidance on institutional change
• Advisory and consultancy services
• Regional support for further education colleges

In 2006 JISC received additional capital funding from HEFCE to invest in:Everything we do has one aim – to maintain the UK’s position as a global leader in education and research

• Networking/SuperJANET 5
• Digitisation
• e-learning
• e-infrastructure/e-research
• User environments
• Repositories, shared services and preservation

‘Enabling Innovation 2006–2009’ shows how universities and colleges in England have benefited from this investment.

Introduction

The UK higher education sector faces huge challenges in the coming years. Changing student expectations, increased research competition and financial pressures are all pressing concerns. The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) recognises the strategic importance of technology in helping universities to adapt to the new environment of education and research. In 2006 it made a generous investment to help universities to adopt technology in areas that are of key importance to the future success of higher education – support for the changing needs of learning and teaching, keeping the UK at the forefront of research, and responding to new challenges such as employer engagement and widening participation.

JISC has an international reputation for taking the lead in making the most effective and innovative use of technology in education and research. The funding provided by HEFCE has meant that JISC has been able to engage with many more institutions and develop their capacity and capability to use technology strategically and tactically.

Widening participation, employer engagement and flexible lifelong learning are all key challenges that are facing universities, bringing changing learner expectations and requirements for extra support. Programme funding has been used to demonstrate how technology can provide a range of learners with a rich and balanced educational experience.

JISC has continued to develop its national infrastructure to make sure that it keeps pace with the growing requirements for fast, reliable access to high quality resources. By funding the JANET network we can be sure that UK researchers have the kind of network access that they need, now and in the future.

Researchers are using new technologies to help them to save time in conducting their research and to research in new ways. JISC has invested extensively to open up resources and special collections. This has led to the creation of a substantial new set of digital collections that will be used in research and education by many generations to come.

Projects funded under the JISC Capital programme are enabling institutions to innovate in the way that they support learners, teach, research, engage employers and use technology to support change. The learning from the projects is being shared with the entire sector to help the UK as a whole. This funding has enabled the sector to further develop its capacity to understand innovation and make decisions about its future strategy – to adapt in order to deliver success.

Sarah Porter, Head of Innovation, JISC

Investing across England

With the additional capital funding from HEFCE, JISC has invested in over 250 projects in educational institutions across England. These diverse and innovative initiatives support a range of HEFCE objectives, noticeably:

• Enhancing excellence in learning and teaching, widening participation and fair access
• Employer engagement and skills
• Enhancing excellence in research

Environmental sustainability

There are many incentives for educational institutions to address green issues in their use of Information and Communications Technologies. While these technologies account for around 2% of global carbon emissions, learning to use them in a more sustainable way can also play a key role in saving time, energy and money. To highlight this issue, the JISC SusteIT report outlines ways in which the intelligent use of technology can create savings of cost, energy or carbon output, and highlights a range of cost-effective measures that are already being taken in some institutions that could easily be introduced to others. Through capital investment in low carbon projects JISC has demonstrated its commitment to helping institutions support a green agenda and put sustainability at the core of all their activities.

Low Carbon ICT

A ‘show and tell’ monitoring system at the University of Oxford is helping to reduce IT-related greenhouse gas emissions by revealing how much energy each person in a department uses. The monitoring service creates a graphical representation of how many computers are switched on and the graph shows daily, weekly and monthly records over a 12-month period. Underpinning the design of the service is the notion that individuals will be motivated to reduce their own energy use if they can see that others in their group are also making an effort to reduce energy consumption. Each person can see how their actions, however minor, are helping to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and costs. It is one of the tools and techniques developed by the Low Carbon ICT project along with a simple 5-step process (estimate – research – implement – communicate – share) to help groups within universities achieve a sustained reduction in energy consumption.

If left on all the time, the University of Oxford’s physics department’s 650 computers and monitors will consume about 626,000kWh per year, which will cost about £75,000 and is equivalent to 336,000kg CO2.

If this same stock of computers and monitors is put safely and reliably into a low-power state at the end of a typical working day it will consume about 130,000kWh which will cost about £16,000 and is equivalent to 69,000kg CO2.

Location independent working

A reduction in energy costs has been an environmentally friendly result of Coventry University’s Location Independent Working project. In the pilot study 40 academics volunteered to give up their offices for three months for the opportunity to work where they choose, whether it is the library, lecture theatre or local park. The academics were provided with a kit including a smartphone, headset and webcam and other technologies to enable them to interact with their students, along with hotdesk facilities for office hours. The idea is credited with improving productivity and staff satisfaction while reducing stress and sickness absence but has also seen a knock-on effect on energy use at the university.

Enhancing excellence in research

Opening up access to resources for research is at the heart of JISC’s pioneering work in e-infrastructure, and digitisation is leading the way in opening up educational resources through:

• Unlocking hard-to-access material
• Preserving fragile resources
• Creating a critical mass of digital content
• Bringing together scattered resources
• Opening up new areas for research
• Supporting repositories and preservation
• Developing a National e-Infrastructure

Case studies

VERA

The Roman town of Silchester in Hampshire has been welcomed into the 21st century by the Virtual Environments for Research in Archaeology (VERA) project. Archaeologists on the site have been trialling the use of handheld technologies, in the form of digital pens and wireless memo pads, to record data on-site. The aim is to provide archaeologists with a means to share their research and results before, during and after excavation and speed up the time from dig to published research. In order to do this, VERA has created advanced computer-based tools for data acquisition and management, as well as producing a standards compliant web portal with integrated tools for the user community.

See the project website

See the project videos 

Encouraging the uptake of e-research

Three projects (Engage, e-Uptake and EIUS) investigated barriers to the uptake of e-research tools and techniques by researchers, and identified how best to promote better uptake. The main barriers were identified as:

• e-Infrastructure seen by current and potential users as complex and challenging
• Potential users are unaware of benefits and how to take the first steps
• Support services often fail to provide access to the right information and advice

Solutions were identified as:

• Closer collaboration between support services and users for a better understanding of user requirements and what’s possible
• Better integration between service providers and support services
• Creation of a social infrastructure around the technical infrastructure, coordinated nationally but grounded in a local presence that makes it pervasive and accessible

See findings from the projects 

Archival Sound Recordings

Archival Sound Recordings provides free online access to selections of spoken word, music and environmental sounds from the British Library Sound Archive, one of the world’s treasure houses of audio heritage. The groundbreaking service features many rare, unpublished or out-of-print recordings, including classical, world and folk music, oral histories, radio programmes, wildlife vocalisations and sounds of the natural and industrial worlds. Over 2,000 of the recordings are available to the public online while staff and students in education institutions can also log in and play or
download recordings to cut, transcribe, embed and otherwise repurpose for academic use.

See the project website

National Grid Service (NGS)

Jointly funded with the EPSRC, the NGS is enabling researchers to improve their productivity and to undertake innovative research. For example, Radiotherapy is a critically important tool in the treatment of cancer. To get the most effective treatment possible, it’s necessary to simulate the interactions between the radiation and the tumour. A radiotherapy treatment consists of approximately 100 trillion interactions, and as a consequence, the full simulation requires a huge amount of computer time. Previously, such simulations were run on a PC over several days. Access to the NGS has enabled researchers to reduce calculation times by a factor of ten, meaning that answers are now available in hours rather than days.

See the website

The Depot

Repositories have been identified by UK and European bodies as vital to a research infrastructure that is able to make research and other outputs visible and accessible. The Depot is a national repository based at EDINA in the University of Edinburgh that enables all UK researchers to deposit their academic papers and other outputs under terms of Open Access, including those whose institution does not yet have a repository. The service, with its simple message and advice to ‘put it in the Depot’, represents an important step in the development of a scholarly communications environment for UK education and research.

Networks that work

SuperJANET 5 now provides the 40Gb high speed computer to support more than 18 million users including research institutes, universities, further education, primary and secondary schools. The development of SuperJANET 5 is crucial for the future of education in maintaining and building on high speed networks, enabling communication speeds that are the envy of the world.

This achievement was recognised in January 2008 when JANET won the Shared Services category of the eGovernment awards, followed in April by a Government Computing Award for Innovation.

The JANET Lightpath service was launched in November 2007 to meet the growing needs of the UK research communities. The service provides segregation of research traffic from normal JANET service traffic and enables the UK’s research communities to transmit large volumes of data and delay-sensitive data across the network.

It has been joined by JANET Aurora, a high quality fibre network that provides a platform for Photonics and Optical Systems research. With approximately 350km of dedicated fibre, this is amongst the largest test-beds for optical networking research in Europe and enables a wide range of projects that hitherto have been impossible on existing research network infrastructures.

Internationally, JANET is playing a part in the research taking place in Cern, Switzerland with the Large Hadron Collider. When work resumes on the ‘big bang’ project, JANET will help to transmit worldwide the 5Gb per second of data that will be pumped out of the site.

Widening participation, employer engagement and flexible lifelong learning

Wider participation in education in the UK means that an increasingly diverse range of learners need to be supported in their path through education, from employees on day release schemes to part-time and distance learners. Lifelong learning brings diverse experiences, skills and needs to the education system and adds value to employers and society. It also presents a variety of challenges to educational institutions, which must recognise and accredit prior learning and experience, support remote learners, assess performance and professional development and manage mutually beneficial partnerships with employers. JISC helps organisations address these challenges through technology.

Enhancing learner progression through personalised learning environments

Enhancing Learner Progression through Personalised Learning Environments (ELP2) used Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis, social networking and texting to engage hard-to-reach learners in a variety of contexts, from formal, accredited learning to informal support and community building. Through 22 rich case studies the project showed that less formal, more personalised online services, particularly social networking sites, such as NING, and multimedia digital storytelling, helped to reduce some of the barriers to widening participation. Students valued the opportunity to develop their IT skills and, with the social network, the immediate access to other students and teachers, the chance to see a quick summary of the latest online activities to enable catch up, the easy identification of friends and establishment of groups, and the ability to share multimedia resources with each other.

See the project website

KASTANET

Kingston Access to Science Teaching Across New and Emerging Technologies (KASTANET) is a collaborative project run by Kingston College in conjunction with Kingston University. The KASTANET project introduced mobile services, such as texting and podcasts to support learners making the transition to BSc science courses at the university from the foundation year at the college. The text service was used as a way to ‘get students back into study’ and help them with their learning programme while the podcasts focused on the ‘progression route’ to the university.

See the project website

Tri-Party eAssessment and Personalised Learning

Engineering students employed by Rolls Royce and studying at Derby College were the pilot group in this project. The aim was to create a tool whereby work-based learners, local employers and training providers could assess each of the students’ online learning.While online learning technologies are now commonly available within further education institutions, uptake by teaching staff and the opportunities to meet learner and employer needs via the technology have not yet become mainstream. This three-way project, through open source software, provides the further and higher education community with a better understanding of how the technology can meet these needs and how they might be used.

See the project website

MyPlan

Personal Planning for Learning throughout Life (MyPlan) brought together stakeholders from a broad range of organisations committed to providing lifelong learning opportunities. It aimed to develop new tools and techniques to support learning pathways throughout life. A key element was the integration of a game-based application into MyPlan to allow learners to role-play different learning and career progression. This gave them a better understanding of the possible implications and consequences of different career decisions and educational choices. A personal space for lifelong learners like this goes beyond many of the learning environments currently in use, which only provide learners with resources and learning management tools that relate to their studies at a single institution.

See the project website

Enhancing the learning experience

There has been a profound shift in the way that learners are working. JISC-funded research has shown that learners lead complex lives and require sophisticated technology-based strategies. Personal technologies play a central role, and control and choice are of increasing importance to learners. JISC is exploring and supporting today’s digital learners and their diverse experiences of learning.

Open Habitat

The Open Habitat project set out to explore how Multi User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) such as Second Life can be used in higher education as a means to encourage students to make creative online collaboration an integrated part of their learning. The project was student-centred, exploring effective uses of MUVEs for teaching and learning. The core of Open Habitat activity centred on a series of pilot teaching sessions with both art and design and philosophy students and was designed to take advantage of the particular potential of MUVE platforms. This diversity of teaching styles, goals, student ‘types’ and aspirations across the two disciplines allowed those involved in the Open Habitat project to experience and analyse a significant cross section of activity in MUVEs. The outcomes of the project are shared in an online magazine, which contains a variety of material representing the piloting activities, together with reflections on good practice and the role that teaching in MUVEs can play in other forms of teaching and learning practice.

See the project website

Faroes

The Faroes project has devised the Language Box, a community repository for language teachers to share their teaching resources. The aim was to create a repository that teachers can incorporate into their everyday practice, with a user-friendly interface that follows Web 2.0 best practice. The Language Box represents a radical rethink of teaching and learning repository design in that it is designed as a living space, where teachers and lecturers can keep and manage documents as they work on and use them.

See the project

Enhancing excellence in learning and teaching

With technology increasing its role in the learners’ experience, JISC is also working to enhance excellence not just in learning but in teaching too. From easy-to-use online resources through to open source software, JISC is investing in everyday solutions to support the needs of academic staff.

First World War Poetry Digital Archive

The First World War Poetry Digital Archive brings together dispersed and unseen primary source material from the major poets of the Great War: Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas, Robert Graves, Vera Brittain and David Jones with material from Edmund Blunden, Ivor Gurney and Siegfried Sassoon to follow. It includes their poetry manuscripts, service records, war diaries and correspondence sent while they were on active service.

The material is copyright cleared for educational use, and the site also features a range of educational resources, including tutorials, podcasts and resource packs. There is also video and audio from the Imperial War Museum, and personal tales of the war from the general public in the Great War Archive.

See the project website

WebPA

WebPA is an open source online peer assessment tool that enables every team member to recognise individual contributions to group work. A common criticism of assessed group work is that each student receives the same team mark, regardless of individual performance. By using WebPA to peer assess group work, each student receives an adjusted mark. Developed within the context of a Virtual Learning Environment, it is a fully documented web service and is freely available for use by the UK higher education sector. The project benefits students by allowing access to valuable forms of assessment outside the campus, and is of particular use to non-traditional groups of students at home or in the workplace. The project’s value has been recognised by the IMS Learning Impact Awards where it won the bronze award.

See the project website