JISC

Today’s learners live, work and learn in a world that is saturated with digital technologies. Many younger learners – the so-called ‘net generation’ or ‘click generation’ – expect instant access to information and communications media. Yet research, including recent studies into the Google Generation and Learners’ Experiences of e-Learning shows that learners often struggle to see the relevance of these technologies to their studies, and that institutions are still poor at helping them to develop technology-enhanced academic skills.

Podcast: Student Learning Experience (Duration 9:14)

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Digital academic content

Access to high quality, high volume academic content is an essential benefit experienced by students, and they make more and better use of this benefit as they progress through their studies. JISC has played a major role in enhancing students’ access to content, for example working with a number of partners in the UK e-content alliance (Podcast Duration 5:35)  to enhance the accessibility and value of academic content, and funding major digitisation programmes to unlock the national knowledge archive. A digital collections service, which licenses electronic materials for education and research, and an eBooks observatory are among JISC’s contributions to the wealth of content freely available to UK HE.

JISC Intute offers hand-picked resources for learning and research across the disciplines, while JORUM is a repository of re-usable teaching materials and learning objects. JISC also supports many institutional repository projects, and cutting-edge developments such as Persona which is enabling individual students to personalise their access to repositories through social networking tools. Investments in shared content development (Reproduce programme) are about to be enhanced by a major injection of funds (£5.7m in the first phase) for the development of open educational resources

Technical services such as access management, standardised metadata, search tools and other resource discovery services may not be part of students’ lived experience, but without them this incredible proliferation in available knowledge could not have taken place.

There is also evidence that today’s ‘net generation’ prefer to access content in multiple media, including images, video, audio and simulations. Institutions and course teams can access advice from JISC’s new digital media service, currently known as TASI. Meanwhile JISC innovation projects are providing answers about the real educational benefits of multimedia, for example the use of audio to promote engagement and support a diversity of learning approaches.

Student-centred technologies

Emma, a participant in the Learners’ Voice project, summed up the student perspective when she told us that VLEs are owned by the institution, and the e-portfolio is owned by me. Students are used to owning, accessing and controlling technology in their personal lives. In fact many students see their mobile devices and social software profiles as important expressions of their identities. JISC’s work on e-portfolios has therefore been central to redefining students’ experiences with technology. An Effective Practice with e-Portfolios publication and e-portfolios Infokit with a wide range of different case studies are among the resources available on this web site. You can also listen to a podcast exploring how the PebblePad e-portfolio system, used in the Epistle project, made a real difference to the student experience. There is now plenty of evidence – summarised for example in the Tangible benefits of e-learning report – that e-portfolios can enhance students’ motivation and achievement.

More recent developments have enabled e-portfolios to interface with public services, social software sites, and even mobile devices (ePet) allowing students to integrate their informal learning and reflection more easily. e-Portfolios are also being linked with institutional and learner-related data systems to support information, advice and guidance services (Joseph) and CV building.

The LXP project found that students often preferred public websites and services to those provided by their institution, because they were easily personalised and inherently sociable. The Users and Innovations projects have recently demonstrated that social software, blogs, social bookmarking, RSS feeds and other social technologies can provide a more coherent and personalised student experience.

Less obviously, perhaps, e-assessment technologies are often highly rated by students because they allow them to exercise choice within the high-stakes process of summative assessment. Opportunities to practice and revise assessment tasks are welcomed, as are choices about when to take assessments (because tests can be randomly generated) and what to submit in an e-portfolio or online peer review. JISC has produced a guide on Effective Practice with e-Assessment, which focuses on enhancing to the student experience in these ways. Formative and diagnostic uses of e-assessment technology are particularly student-centred because they allow support to be tailored to students’ specific challenges and capabilities, and JISC has recently initiated exploratory work in this area.