JISC

The JISC Capital programme for HE institutions in England and Wales* is now midway through. This publication provides a summary of the interest it has generated among the academic community, and gives a sample of the development projects and initiatives funded by the programme which are already underway or nearing completion.

£89m over three years for ICT development in HE institutions*

'JANET can be a massive tool for building relationships between academics and community organisations of all kinds'
Brian Turtle, Director of the Belfast Institute and Chair, JISC Committee for NetworkingJISC’s key strategic aims seek to deliver JISC’s mission through:

• innovative and sustainable ICT infrastructure, services and practice that support institutions in meeting their mission
• promoting the development, uptake and effective use of ICT to support learning and teaching
• promoting the development, uptake and effective use of ICT to support research 
• promoting the development, uptake and effective use of ICT within institutions and in support of their management
• developing and implementing a programme to support institutions’ engagement with the wider community
• continuing to improve its own working practices

The JISC Capital Programme for ICT Development

Progress to November 2007

The programme areas of activity complement JISC’s key strategic aims (left). Since April 2006, 504 institutions or consortia of institutions from around England and Wales have bid for funding across four calls; across the first three calls 152 were funded (the fourth and latest call is currently ongoing). However, this figure belies the number of institutions actually affected by the Capital programme: one project alone, for example, is coordinating a community of practice of over 50 more institutions.

Further to the launch of the Capital programme (funding for which amounted originally to £80m), subsequent funding of £156,000 was attracted from the Scottish Funding Council, and £26,000 from the Department for Education and Learning in Northern Ireland, for specific activity.

Due to the nature of the funding process, some projects funded have necessarily started later than others, with the final round of projects (decision pending) due to begin in January 2008. Five of the more recently-started projects fall under the Institutional Exemplars strand, aimed at seeking solutions to specific institution-wide problems and building knowledge, experience and best practice which can be shared across institutions; projects funded cover a breadth of areas including e-assessment, access management, social repositories, green computing and ICT-enhanced flexible working.

Development across all programmes and initiatives is closely related to JISC’s emerging work in informing and encouraging institutions in their own Business and Community Engagement outreach activity.

* Funding is available to all English and Welsh HEIs, as well as English FECs teaching over 400 FTE students. Funding for Northern Irish and Scottish HEIs is restricted to specific areas of activity.

SuperJANET5

The latest version of the SuperJANET enhanced communications network for UK education and research establishments was successfully completed and launched in late 2006. Funded by JISC, and operated and developed by JANET (UK), SuperJANET5 provides the high speed network (at 40gb, four times greater than that originally planned) to support more than 18 million users including research institutes, universities, FE and primary and secondary schools. The development of SuperJANET5 is crucial for the future of HE and FE in maintaining and building on high speed networks, and therefore enabling communication speeds, which are the envy of the world.

 
Working with the Community

A substantial part of Capital funding is going towards working directly with and through communities, in some cases in completely new ways. This has taken various forms, whether establishing a community (Emerge), surveying a community (the Identity Project), building and sustaining a community (e-Uptake) or reaching out to a new community (ASSERT). In all cases however, giving communities the chance to input and fundamentally shape future activity has been a common feature. The Users and Innovation: Personalising Technologies programme has been particularly community-led; and a key feature of the e-Infrastructure programme is to extend the community reach and take-up of the technologies developed within both e-infrastructure and the wider e-Research strand.

Emerge

A consortium led by Oxford Brookes University and the University of Essex, the Emerge team brought together a community around the key themes of the Users and Innovation Programme, providing both online and face-to-face opportunities to collaborate. The programme has followed a new model in its evolution, taking its foundations right back to the grass roots and basing its planning for development activity around user needs, with more than 50 institutions engaged with emergent technologies and social software. This community is shortly to end its initial phase of community-building, and a range of projects, many of which arise from partnerships of institutions forged from within the community over the past nine months, will be announced in December.

ASSERT

The Automatic Summarisation for Systematic Reviews using Text Mining (ASSERT) project, based at the National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM), and involving the National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) and the Evidence for Policy and Practice Information Centre (EPPI), is a continuation of NaCTeM’s work, historically more scientifically based, into the social science community. The project is two-pronged: firstly in developing an exemplar summarisation service and related tools specifically for the social science community; and secondly in providing support for a number of community projects related to text mining.

'The (Emerge) community is founded on the notion of collaboration and is a great opportunity for e-learning innovators to share their thinking'
Bob Rotheram, Leeds Metropolitan University

 e-Uptake

Today’s researchers across all disciplines have a broad e-infrastructure to make their research work easier: online collaborative environments, distributed computing and data resources, advanced analytical tools, as well as support and training. However, take-up remains inconsistent, and understanding why this is so is key to further roll-out of technologies. The newly-funded e-Uptake project, led by the National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) in partnership with the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) and the Arts and Humanities e-Social Science Centre (AHeSSC), is working with other partners and projects to investigate where the issues lie, with a view to offering recommendations for the future to service providers and technology developers and ultimately, encourage more people to use the e-infrastructure available. Using desk-based research and systematic synthesis of current work being undertaken, the project will map the adoption of e-infrastructure across different research fields and investigate similarities and differences in uptake between them, while engaging with research communities through workshops, training events and presentations.

The Identity Project

Currently, HE and FE institutions face a challenging access management environment, with multiple user names and passwords commonplace. The Identity Project, led by Cardiff University and the London School of Economics (LSE), has conducted a nationwide study into the current practice and future needs of UK academic institutions with regard to their Identity Management provision, including areas such as Shibboleth installations, library access, NHS involvement, virtual organisations and the Grid. Based on a survey of all HE institutions in the UK as well as ten in-depth institutional audits, the study offers a picture of the extent of institutions’ readiness to manage issues of identity and enables JISC to set priorities for future activity in this area, while supporting institutions in participating in the UK Access Management Federation. This landmark study has attracted significant interest from international and domestic groups including the Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association (TERENA), the Russell Universities Group IT Directors Forum (RUGIT) and the University Colleges and Information Systems Association (UCISA).

Collaboration

Developing virtual collaborative platforms in learning, teaching and research, and enabling a greater spread of electronic content across all fields of education, has formed a substantial area of Capital funding. Both the Virtual Research Environments (VRE) and Digitisation programmes build on successful phase 1programmes.

The Strategic Content Alliance

The Strategic Content Alliance is a new UK cross-sector collaboration to nurture the development of a UK Content Framework by spring 2009. Funded by JISC, together with the BBC, Becta, the British Library, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA), the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) and the NHS Library for Health, the Alliance welcomes collaboration through three tiers of membership: core sponsors, aligned organisations and UK ‘home nations’ forums. Focussing on ten specific areas ranging from audience analysis and modelling to business models and sustainability, the Alliance also emphasises the importance of international collaboration, given that issues surrounding content are felt globally, and joint funded activity with Ithaka on business models is already underway. From 2009, the UK Content Framework will help in the updating and developing of guidelines, principles, standards and tools to facilitiate the public sector’s effective production and deployment of content, supported by real world exemplars and pilots.

Academy/JISC Collaboration

Under Capital funding, JISC is working in partnership with the Higher Education Academy in an initiative to help make information and resources in e-learning more accessible to institutions. Working closely with subject centres, JISC services and teams in both organisations, the Collaboration is supported by a team which strives to enhance communication in a number of ways: to institutions through existing relations, events, use of new technologies and improved access to resources; and by offering strategic advice and guidance for future directions in e-learning.

myExperiment

Among a number of VRE2 projects being funded to extend their phase 1development into the wider community sits the new project myExperiment, a ‘mySpace for scientists’. Based at the University of Southampton in collaboration with the University of Manchester, myExperiment is an individually-tailored platform for sharing and discussing experiments and workflows within the scientific community; where it differs from other VREs is in its far closer connection to Web 2.0 and social networking websites such as MySpace and YouTube than to the traditional portals of Grid computing, taking the VRE concept to a whole new generation of scientists. Initial pilot myExperiment portals focus on the specific areas of Chemistry, Bioinformatics, Astronomy, and, in future, Social Science.

Content

'We are delighted to be a part of this important project… Ovid is looking forward to seeing its e-books used in such far-reaching and innovative ways'
Robert Kimberley, Ovid Publishing

Digitised Collections

The Digitisation programme sets out to make previously hidden collections accessible, facilitate public/private sector collaboration, and promote the adoption of standards-compliant digitisation, interoperability and preservation. The range of collections being funded is broad, and includes Welsh Journals Online, based at the National Library of Wales, to digitise up to 90 journals published from 1900 onwards to create 600,000 pages of searchable text freely available to the general public. With approximately 40% of content in the Welsh language, this forms the single largest corpus of Welsh material on the Web and is a major step in the Library’s intention to digitise its entire printed collection. Another project, Archival Sound Recording 2 at the British Library, builds on its set-up phase under phase 1 funding to add over 4,000 hours of audio content, ranging from classical repertoire to interviews with Holocaust survivors, and from African popular music to English folk music. This content is supported by relevant images and other personalisation features, and will be available to users within the UK HE and FE sectors.

National E-Books Observatory

A collection of 36 e-books has been made freely available to all HE institutions as part of JISC’s National E-books Observatory Project. The e-books, chosen after extensive consultation with librarians, include some of the most popular course texts in Business and Management Studies, Medicine, Engineering and Media Studies. By making these texts freely available through libraries, a significant step is being taken to assess impacts on traditional publisher print sales to students, and through the deep log analysis starting in January 2008, to gather a national evidence base of how students use these e-books. This data will inform the creation of appropriate business and licensing models to help librarians meet the demands of their students to have access to their course texts online.
A number of high-profile publishers are taking part in the initiative, including Pearson and Palgrave Macmillan, with the e-books available on the MyiLibrary and Books@Ovid platforms. Over 90 institutions are currently participating in the project.

Digital Repositories and Preservation

In an academic environment that is ever more dispersed and by extension virtually connected, digital repositories – collections of academic outputs for storage and use within a community – are becoming much broader than purely institution-by-institution. The challenges now lie in making the information within repositories accessible to researchers, learners and teachers around the globe, while protecting the IPR of the individual, and in making information cross-searchable.

Repositories Start-up and Enhancement Projects

(see projects below and below right):
A total of 43 Repositories Start-up and Enhancement projects aim to stimulate the use and population of existing repositories, enhance interoperability with other systems, and embed repositories within institutional working practices such as research and learning, as well as support the establishment of sustainable repositories from the beginning. Institutions, except for a small number of rapid innovation projects, provide at least 50% of the funding to match the JISC grant. The funding is intended to encourage good practice in repository management, supported by relevant standards, to improve interoperability between repositories and other services.

LIROLEM

The Lincoln Online Repository of Learning Materials (LIROLEM) at the University of Lincoln is developing a repository to store architectural research outputs, exemplars of student outputs in non-text-based disciplines, and teaching materials, including copyright-cleared digitised texts. The driver for this, aside from the aspiration to interconnect information, design and ideas, is the practical one of lack of space and capacity to index and store physical artefacts in a traditional manner. Such a repository will also form an important part of the concurrent ‘Virtual Studio’ project in the school of architecture, which aims to recreate the concept of an architectural atelier in electronic form.

JazzHub

JazzHub is a digital repository start-up project managed by the Centre for Jazz Studies UK to provide access to a number of key resources, including the LCM Jazz Archive, international conference proceedings, sector-wide jazz research/teaching and learning materials, project outcomes and publications. JazzHub will be used as a key resource for the UK Jazz Research Network, an open access membership organisation representing UK scholars and educators across 15 disciplinary areas, including Musicology, Film Studies, Education and Comparative Literature.

'The Depot marks an important milestone in the development of a national infrastructure for repositories'
Dr Keith Jeffrey, Science and Technology Facilities Council

The Repositories Support Project

The Repositories Support Project is an advice and support network for institutions developing, implementing and managing their own digital repository. Its principal aim is to increase the pace of institutional adoption, and RSP is building an active outreach programme applicable to those institutions entirely new to repositories, as well as those more familiar but seeking to embed their repositories within their institutional structures. The RSP provides technical, organisational and management support materials, attends regional and national events, provides technical support and advisory services, and works with and through a range of partners, whether developers, publishers, academic societies or funding bodies.

The Depot

The Depot, which launched in summer 2007, is a means for all UK academics to make their research outputs openly accessible. A national facility which forms part of JISC RepositoryNet, and managed as a service at the Data Centre EDINA, the Depot supports the drive towards Open Access in advance of a comprehensive institutional archive network. The Depot enables deposits from researchers at institutions that do not currently have an Institutional Repository (IR), offers support to help populate new IRs, and provides both a keep-safe service and a re-direct service, nicknamed UK Repository Junction. Like other open access repositories, its contents are available for harvesting, particularly through the Intute Search, another part of JISC RepositoryNet.

Welsh Repository Network

The Welsh Repository Network (WRN) start-up project, run by the University of Wales Aberystwyth (UWA) on behalf of WHELF (Wales Higher Education Libraries Forum), is putting in place an essential building block for the development of an integrated network of institutional digital repositories in Wales. Currently, just two of the 12 HEIs in Wales have open access digital repositories (Aberystwyth and Cardiff), both of which are pilot rather than production models, lightly populated and resident on shared equipment. The project aims to run a centrally-managed hardware procurement programme designed to provide every HEI in Wales with dedicated and configured repository hardware by the end of 2007 as a major step towards realisation of the WRN, in collaboration with the Repositories Support Project, also delivered from UWA.

Encouraging work-based and life-long learning

e-Learning Capital-funded activity, through some 48 projects, focuses on helping institutions to meet the diverse needs of learners throughout their lives, and builds on previous JISC-funded work in supporting lifelong learners and facilitating their progression into higher education (MLEs for Lifelong Learning and Distributed e-Learning programmes). Fundamental to this continuation work is providing a flexible personalised learning experience through the use of e-portfolios and technologies which support assessment and collaboration, as well as developing wider technology to facilitate the more sophisticated administration processes that underpin these. Also, given that work-based learning is a key route to higher education for many learners, the programme explores how institutions can engage with employers and use technology in ways that suit both parties.

KASTANET

KASTANET, in the HE in FE stream, is an access programme between two linked institutions, Kingston College and Kingston University, to introduce mobile services and social software as a means of teaching and learning. Students on the Science Degree Foundation Programme are accessing their coursework via interactive SMS services, audio podcasts and mobile web services, and using these means to provide feedback to tutors and collaborate with their peers. The project’s findings will provide an analysis of the costs and benefits of introducing mobile technology, particularly for collaborative working, into science-based access programmes, and potentially have a wide impact on approaches to teaching and assessment, methods of communicating with and amongst learners, and progression arrangements between further and higher education providers.

SURF WBL-Way

SURF WBL-Way is a collaborative project with partners from the Staffordshire University Regional Federation working towards developing a one stop shop for supporting and delivering work-based learning across the consortium. The project aims to give access to content not just to learners and tutors but also to employers and mentors, working towards creating a work-based learning community and helping with employer engagement.

'The funding ... has enabled the University and its partner colleges to make real progress in addressing the problem of sustaining employer engagement.'
Mark Stiles, Surf-WBL Way Project, University of Staffordshire

Networked Resources

Based around a regional partnership of three life-long learning networks in the North West, the Interoperability Network NorthWest (ioNW2) at Manchester Metropolitan University and Supporting Ongoing Learning in Vocational Settings (SOLVS) at Chester University projects make use of networked resources to support the progression of learners between institutions under the e-Learning for Life-long Learning strand. The ioNW2 project is particularly focused on ways in which institutional sharing of information can allow students to search for courses that meet their needs and situation, and for institutions to keep track of students using a variety of courses as a means of accumulating credit towards a qualification. The SOLVS project builds on this sharing of information to support students based in two employment sectors (Health and Social Care, and Creative Industries) with personal development planning. The construction of an online portfolio supports learners in preparing applications to part-time courses.

Tri-Party Assessment and Personalised Learning

Whilst online learning technologies are now commonly available within FE institutions, uptake amongst work-based learning programmes remains low. The Tri-Party eAssessment and Personalised Learning project, also in the HE in FE stream, is developing understanding of how the technology can be used and what value can be derived to learners, teachers and businesses. Based on a group of HND/C Engineering students employed by Rolls Royce and studying at Derby College, the project is developing materials, skills and procedures to support e-assessment and reporting. Via a Moodle platform, learners have access to high quality, flexible learning materials, teachers at the college will have a set of developed e-assessment materials, and Rolls-Royce a web services-based reporting system which can be used by other employers. The platform also enables opportunities for academics and employers to share knowledge about the student/employer in relation to the student’s work situation.