JISC

The Department for Education and Skills (DfES) is working towards a unified eLearning strategy for England, which will extend across the whole education spectrum. Similar visions have been adopted in Wales and Scotland, whilst Northern Ireland is building common systems across colleges and institutions to provide integration and shared content.

Preface

Professor Maxwell Irvine, JISC Chair (1998–2003)  

As I end my period as JISC Chair, I am particularly gratified that JISC’s contribution is increasingly acknowledged and valued across the research and education arena. The success and progress we have enjoyed over the last five years indicates to me that the impact of our work is likely to spread yet further as Information and Communications Technology (ICT) becomes firmly embedded in all aspects of learning and education.

It falls to my successor, Professor Sir Ron Cooke, to deepen our contribution to our current communities. I am sure that JISC will continue to prove an invaluable national resource, a focus for expertise and a source of innovative solutions for the whole of the education and research sector.

Introduction

Professor Sir Ron Cooke, JISC Chair (January 2004)

JISC is an international success story. In recent years it has established a first-class service for further and higher education and the research community in the United Kingdom. It has developed an advanced network, excellent services and a store of valuable content.

Our new strategy takes into account the strategies of the United Kingdom funding councils and their related eLearning plans. Such a context presents us with new challenges. JISC will respond sensitively to the views of those who depend on us for ICT services. As an advisory body to the funding councils, JISC is in a unique position, as it looks to both the institutions and the funding councils for strategic advice. In addition to our established relationships, we shall continue to explore the potential for collaboration with other national and international agencies, including the Research Councils and the new Higher Education Academy, who recognise the benefits of the scale and United Kingdom coverage that JISC offers. In addition, there is a continuing need to innovate in ways that reflect our careful surveillance and evaluation of rapidly emerging technologies and practices.

In responding to these diverse challenges, we must be careful to ensure that our limited resources are focused, as previously, on the collective benefit of the communities we serve, and the specialist groups within them, in order to achieve maximum national advantage. Already some probable developments are clear: the research Grid, research library need, eLearning and eScience, technical standard setting, managed and virtual learning environments, and content provision.

For over a decade, JISC has unobtrusively but very effectively served its users. We have unequivocally sought to provide a world-class service. For the past four years, my predecessor, Professor Maxwell Irvine, chaired JISC and I am pleased to acknowledge his outstanding leadership. I am delighted to be joining JISC as it moves from one strategic plan to the next, and build on the foundations he helped to establish.

Context

Since JISC’s last Strategy, policy attention within United Kingdom education and research has turned to embedding the use of ICT to enhance excellence in management, teaching, learning and research.

The Department for Education and Skills (DfES) is working towards a unified eLearning strategy for England, which will extend across the whole education spectrum. Similar visions have been adopted in Wales and Scotland, whilst Northern Ireland is building common systems across colleges and institutions to provide integration and shared content. These overarching policies provide a framework within which JISC’s strategy must sit.

The research community in the United Kingdom and across the world is beginning to develop the Grid. Grid technology will take the concept of the World Wide Web one stage further by allowing seamless access and use of computing resources as well as information. The Grid will have the power to change fundamentally the way in which researchers across the world undertake their work. JISC will support the research community to exploit this new technology and will ensure that appropriate linkages are made with similar activities in the teaching community.

In support of widening participation, ICT can be deployed to support student access, retention and progression. The increasing deployment of Managed Learning Environments (MLEs) will, amongst other benefits, enable improved management information especially about learners and student progression. Information is a corporate asset and increasingly the knowledge base and intellectual assets of institutions and staff are in digital form. JISC has an important role to play in integrating technology with all kinds of information-handling skills amongst its users.

Information is a corporate asset and increasingly the knowledge base and intellectual assets of institutions and staff are in digital form.

Vision

Ubiquitous and reliable access to an information and communication environment, so that users are able to enjoy world-class technologies in support of their work adn study.

A user of electronic information is simultaneously a member of several communities: researcher, student, administrator, teacher and also employee, citizen and consumer. Users are increasingly mobile, demanding reliable access at home, work, and whilst travelling. Their information needs are immediate, and they exploit an increasing variety and quantity of resources. Users will require the same, seamless and secure delivery interfaces to provide access to different applications.

Such expectations demand a coherent underlying infrastructure operating in a genuinely pervasive way, accessible when and where required. Responsive mechanisms for storage and retrieval of information, and innovative management of the digital content lifecycle, will need to be underpinned by a next generation, high performance network. Intelligent machine-to-machine dialogue will replace many routine processes, leaving the user free to use and benefit from information in the ways that they choose.

Colleges and universities will need to meet such demanding user needs. JISC must support institutions so that technology can support modern ways of working within education and research.

Mission to provide world-class leadership in the innovative use of ICT to support education and research.

Role

JISC is expected by its funding partners to take a wider role than its original higher education and research focus and its more recent further education role. It is expected to seek ways of benefiting the wider education and life long learning community where this supplements and does not compromise its responsibilities to its core funders.
In meeting this role JISC will build on and continue, its existing activities of providing a world-class infrastructure and promoting innovation through development programmes. In addition, JISC is uniquely placed to promote the joining up of activities in a number of dimensions:

• Helping cohesion through the use of ICT across the education spectrum: schools, colleges, universities and wider non-compulsory education to improve student progression and promote best practice
• Helping institutions integrate their research, learning and teaching and administration processes to improve efficiency and quality
• Developing generic online information management techniques and underlying infrastructure to enable the effective sharing and use of information resources regardless of data type
• Maximising the use of ICT and eLearning across the countries of the United Kingdom.

JISC will do this in partnership with the institutions and other organisations. In particular BECTa in relation to joining up activities across education, the Learning and Teaching Support Network in relation to eLearning in Higher Education, and the Research Councils in relation to supporting research. 

JISC will build on its existing activities of providing a world-class infrastructure and promoting innovation through development programmes.

Strategic aims

These aims have been chosen to reflect and support both government objectives and the needs of the JISC community.It should be noted that most of these will require JISC to work in partnership with other organisations from the United Kingdom and international education and research communities.  

JISC's 5 srategic aims to: 

• develop solutions that help enable the United Kingdom education and research communities to keep their activities world class through the innovative use of ICT
• provide advice to institutions enabling them to make economic, efficient and legally compliant use of ICT, respecting individual and corporate rights and responsibilities
• help the sector provide positive, personalised user learning experiences and aid student progression
• develop mutually advantageous partnerships with organisations in the United Kingdom and abroad
• advise, inform and help implement the strategies of government, funding councils and Research Councils

Aim one will be met through:

• providing a first-class sustainable infrastructure
• supporting the use of Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) and the development of Managed Learning Environments identifying and defining technical standards and, with other organisations, helping to embed eLearning
• supporting research and in particular eScience, and helping to embed eScience more widely across research. 

Aim two will be met through:

• helping institutions plan and manage change to exploit ICT
• providing an observatory role, coherent advisory services and forming a more robust evidence base for the effectiveness of ICT
• improving the effectiveness of scholarly communication in support of research, learning and teaching
• improving communication and feedback mechanisms with JISC to help institutions with their investments in ICT, to discover and respond to change needs, and to provide user led advisory services. 

Aim three will be met through:

• supporting the use of VLEs and MLEs to facilitate student progression and help embed eLearning
• investigating the development of virtual communities and use of the internet as a communications tool.

Aim four will be met through:

• developing strategic partnerships with other organisations particularly in the areas of the development of a common, integrated information & communications environment; VLE and MLE development; embedding eLearning and eResearch; and the management of online resources
• engaging with suppliers.

Aim five will be met through:

• promoting wider participation in education
• improving research outreach activities to benefit education and ensure eResearch is developed across the research environment
• expand JISC activities where relevant to meet the needs of the wider post 16 community.

Priorities

To meet the five aims detailed, it is possible to identify a number of key generic priorities within JISC's remit. To achieve these aims, the priorities for JISC in 2004-2006 are to: 

• maintain a world-class network infrastructure
• create and maintain sustainable procurement and delivery services for online content
• develop a common, integrated information and communications environment
• create MLEs, linking VLEs with MIS
• provide cost effective and user-led advisory and support services
• improve information and feedback mechanisms between JISC and its target audiences
• ensure ICT is embedded within post 16 and higher education
• develop eResearch infrastructure and use
• help institutions manage investments in ICT
• provide a technology observatory role and robust evidence base of the benefits of ICT
• engage with appropriate national and international organisations
• improve the effectiveness of JISC to carry out its operations
• enhance JISC’s role to support widening participation

Approach

The JISC is an advisory committee to the funding councils, made up of a number of sub-committees, each with a different focus. The JISC and its sub-committees are entirely populated by experts and senior managers who bring a real knowledge of how ICT is used within institutions, what benefits it brings and the issues that need to be addressed in order to support its use.

JISC funds development programmes within the community to test innovative uses of ICT which involve action research. Without JISC involvement, developments to support community-wide strategic objectives would not necessarily be undertaken and results would be disseminated more slowly. 

In order to support institutions in using ICT to its best advantage, JISC funds three kinds of service:

• Advisory services to help institutions select the best approach or product where choice and independent advice tailored to the community is important.
• Production services, where a standard infrastructure is required or clear economies of scale and value for money can be maximised.
• Development services to test the validity of novel approaches and applications, especially where this avoids costly repetition.

JISC works with many organisations both in the United Kingdom and internationally, to enable it to meet its strategic aims. JISC enters into formal partnership with organisations for a number of reasons including policy collaboration, development programmes and the delivery of production and advisory services.

JISC strives for value for money for its communities and its funding bodies. Value for money and sustainability are not always easy to measure quickly in research and development activities. JISC continues to evaluate the inputs, outputs and impact of its work to ensure that it is achieving maximum benefit from within the resources available.

The JISC Strategy provides an overall direction to the work of JISC and its sub-committees. It provides a basis for the JISC operating plan, which is reviewed on an annual basis, along with the JISC funding recommendations.