JISC

Overview

The purpose of this project (Create SSBR) is to deliver Support, Synthesis and Benefits Realisation (SSBR) services to the JISC Institutional Innovation Programme and its constituent projects.

Aims and objectives

The Create SSBR project aims to:

• enhance capacity, knowledge and skills across the sector
• promote knowledge discovery and exchange
• provide access to strategic advice, demonstrators and guidance about educational innovation
• encourage the use of emerging technologies dynamically to showcase project outputs
• foster the development of communities of interest and expertise for the purpose of realising the benefits of the programme.

contribute to the evolution of a network approach to programme support by facilitating network interactions in four modes:

• peer to peer between the projects
• between the projects and the programme
• o between project teams and their institutional stakeholders
• and between the projects and the wider educational community.

Project methodology

The Create SSBR work plan (below) consists of support and synthesis activities in two broad, inter-related phases:

• discovery, analysis and synthesis
• benefits realisation

Face-to-face, online and blended activities will be supported by a platform tailored to the information and dissemination needs of the Programme. Activities will be designed to utilise and showcase different and emergent technologies for teaching and learning, learning spaces, institutional administration, energy management and community development. The project will provide support for both the processes of synthesis and the products or outcomes of synthesis activities.

Although this is not a development project per se, the project will be implementing and adapting a support service website based on latest web 2.0 and semantic web technologies

Anticipated outputs and outcomes

The principal output is support for the JISC Institutional Innovation Programme. This will be realised through the following tangible outputs:

• Gathering and analysing project baseline data (WP1.1)
• Facilitation of approximately 26 project assemblies (WP1.2)
• Synthesising and disseminating the outcomes of the programme (WP1.3)
• Establishing, hosting and managing a project website (WP1.4)
• Managing 4 phases of benefits realisation activity (WP2.1)
• Manage disbursement of Benefits realisation funds (WP2.2)

Technology / Standards used

In delivering support, synthesis and benefits realisation services we will be running a “projects’ network website.”

The projects’ network front end will be based on Elgg 1.x. The service allows:

• aggregation of feeds from all the projects
• incorporation of latest news
• static pages
• project cluster grouping

The SSBR service will provide the Elluminate audiographic conferencing environment to the programme. We will use Moodle for events management and archiving events information. For social events around online conferences we will provide the use of the Emerge Island in SecondLife. This faciiity will also be available to projects who wish to explore Second Life in an educational setting. In addition to these platform components we will make use of public Web2.0 facilities such as Flickr, Diigo, Delicious, etc.

The main project site will be read-only to the public. Governance will be Brookes acceptable use policy, foi, etc.

Participants in the programme will be encouraged to comment on posts through their own blog: "I read here [link] and thought this..." Connections will be established through track-backs. Membership of the site for writing will be primarily for the support and synthesis project team. SSBR team will blog inside the network site, essentially producing mini-reports of analysis and discovery activity, synthesis and dissemination activity, events, weekly update, etc. If anyone in the programme wants to set up a blog we will give them advice, guidance and support in using JISC Involve, public WordPress, or Blogger.

Along side the main project site the SSBR service will run platform for individual community presence, derived from the jiscemerge site.

SSBR services will make use of Web2.0 standards (RSS, ATOM, DOAP). We will be guided by TechDis and the emerging Web2Access project on accessibility. All site content will be released under a Creative Commons, England and Wales, Attribution, Non Commercial, Share Alike License.

Lead Institution

Oxford Brookes University