Jisc's new report calls for an overhaul of exams at colleges and universities, suggesting five ways to improve assessment for all.
Assessment is a key part of education, driving improvement, shaping behaviour and providing accountability. Why then, have exams remained the same for hundreds of years, clinging to pen and paper when technology could provide radical innovation?
Our new report suggests that assessment in the UK needs to be smarter, faster, and more accessible by embracing technology.
Written by us, with input from sector experts, the report outlines five principles and five targets for UK colleges and universities to follow over the next five years in order to digitise assessment.
Andy McGregor, director of edtech at Jisc, said:
“This report highlights an important opportunity for improving education in the UK. If used well as part of good assessment design, then emerging technologies can transform the way students are evaluated so that it is more relevant to their careers, more accessible and more secure, while promoting wellbeing and removing some of the administrative burden on teaching staff.”
Change outlined in the report is already taking place in some areas, as highlighted by case studies including from Bolton College, which is extending its automatic marking to include natural language processing. Meanwhile Preston’s College in Lancashire is using immersive technology by way of a 360° camera in the dance studio, and Newcastle University is moving towards digital exams.
However, although there are strong examples of digitised assessment in the UK, these are the exception, not the rule. Elsewhere in the world, the use of technology in assessment is more established. For example, in India, the use of biometric data makes it virtually impossible for one student to impersonate another.
Between December 2018 and August 2019, the Indian National Testing Agency assessed almost five million candidates for entrance to education establishments. Each student uses an e-card with their thumbprint and photo to access the examination room and a photo and thumbprint taken on the day is attached to the attendance sheet which must be signed by the student.
Assessment is also high on the agenda of the government's EdTech Strategy, with “reducing teachers’ marking workload” identified as one of the ten key educational challenges.
McGregor continued:
“There’s real appetite for change in the UK education sector and many individuals are already exploring innovative new approaches. But widespread transformation doesn’t happen overnight and requires a change to the way data about assessment is collected and managed. Just as importantly, staff will need to be given time and space to experiment and develop confidence with new technology so it can be used to enhance assessment.”
Underpinning all the targets is the need for a priority focus on staff digital skills development, allowing teachers more time to experiment and enabling more confidence to implement innovative new approaches to assessment.
The report, the future of assessment: five principles, five targets for 2025, contains advice and guidance to help organisations improve assessment. The work is part of Jisc’s Education 4.0 vision to explore how emerging technology may change education.
The report will be discussed at Digifest 2020, our annual event exploring lifelong learning and ways in which technology can tranform it for all. Book your tickets to come along, 10-11 March 2020.
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As part of National Apprenticeship Week, new MP for Wantage, David Johnston (Con), visited Jisc's Harwell office on 7 February to meet young people working towards degree apprenticeships.
Mr Johnston, who was CEO at the Social Mobility Foundation for 10 years until his election to parliament in December, met Nicola Stewart, apprentice cyber security analyst; Richard Hennessy, cyber security apprentice; Zohara Shemakh, digital technology solutions apprentice; and Michael Murray, network access apprentice.
They felt that on-the-job training, with a wage, was a better choice for them than university. Richard said:
“Choosing the apprenticeship route over going to university enabled me to earn while working and gain invaluable industry experience in the cyber security team. During my studies, Jisc has supported me throughout, offering flexibility in helping to balance work with study and also provided additional training outside my degree, allowing me to develop my skills further and even earn some industry qualifications along the way.”
And Zohara added:
“I choose the apprenticeship route because I always found I could learn more easily when I had hands-on experience. Being an apprentice with Jisc gave me a number of great opportunities across many teams and directorates and I work with a really supportive team.”
Out of a total of 14 apprentices, Nicole, Richard, Zohara and Michael are among 11 completing degree courses with Jisc, which is listed by RateMyApprenticeship at 24 in its top 100 apprenticeship employers. A further cohort of up to 20 apprentices will be recruited this year.
Mr Johnston, who is passionate about the role of education in society, said:
“The government’s initiative to create more apprenticeships offers young people the opportunity to combine vocational training with high-level academic education at university.
“But it’s vital that organisations offer quality on-the-job training, and initiatives such as RateMyApprenticeship are valuable benchmarks. I’m particularly impressed that the wide range of apprenticeships Jisc offers will equip learners with the high-level technical skills the UK workforce needs.”
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MP for Wantage, David Johnston, with Jisc's CEO, Paul Feldman
Jisc CEO, Paul Feldman, who hosted Mr Johnston during his visit, said:
"It’s absolutely vital that everyone has access to training and education in high-demand skills areas. That’s why Jisc, as the UK’s digital partner for colleges and universities, is committed to playing a part.
“We are continuing to support young people to earn and learn by expanding our apprenticeship scheme and this year alone, we’re aiming to recruit up to 20 apprentices. This will build on our apprenticeship scheme success, which, since 2017, has seen people from all backgrounds thrive in areas such as cyber security, data science and software development.”
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The increasing use of digital tools in sectors from finance to healthcare is transforming the way work is done. So, what does this look like in education?
Microsoft says that:
"The modern workplace is evolving at lightning speed, with distributed teams, brand-new business models, and complex security issues. The right digital tools connect and support employees, wherever they are, to encourage productivity, engagement, and collaboration."
The modern workplace, as outlined by Microsoft, is a flexible and ever-changing space.
With the adoption of digital technology, the way employees perform their everyday tasks looks very different in 2020 than it did in 2000, or even 2010.
Andy Tuke, cloud solutions consultant at Jisc, says:
“Due to the flexibility of modern working, including hotdesking and the increasing prevalence of mobile work devices, the modern workplace is location- and device-agnostic and not time constrained in any way.”
The modern workplace can be applied to the education sector in order to outline what Jisc cloud CTO Andy Powell refers to as the ‘modern institution’.
Tools such as virtual learning environments (VLEs) are common in delivering teaching across HE and FE. A VLE provides remote access to everything from course content to online chat facilities. This allows flexible working for both staff and students, meaning they do not need to physically be on-campus – a key element of modern working.
The Northern School of Art updated its VLE system to make flexible working easier. Learning technologist Michael Egan says:
“It gives a lot of flexibility to mature students who need to work part-time and/or raise children.”
Creative film and moving image student Angela adds:
“It’s a benefit to be able to hand in work from your desk at home if you can’t get in to school and to access information in real-time without any delay to your workflow.”
A modern institution also requires modern workplace skills, both for staff and students. While staff will use their digital skills within their current roles, students will also need to develop these practices for when they enter the workplace.
The University of Sunderland is working to implement development plans for staff to work on their digital skills. David Conway, head of IT services, says:
“The key for us moving forward will be how we’re supporting staff to build their digital skills. We know we’ve got some areas of real strength in the delivery of digital education so we’re using the champions network to make sure where possible we’re upskilling other staff.”
In 2017, Adobe commissioned a report from the New Media Consortium (NMC) examining digital literacy.
The report, Digital Literacy in Higher Education, Part II: An NMC Horizon Project Strategic Brief, includes statements from various academic staff on the place of digital literacy in education and workplace preparation. Judith Bailey and Dr. David Santandreu Calonge from The University of Adelaide state:
“Students need digitally confident academics. A degree is very often a synonym of employment and success but also of a huge and long-term debt for many families. Students need to have confidence that their courses and programs [sic] use authentic content and assessment which will (1) give them crucial transferrable skills and (2) prepare them for employment and future life choices.”
It follows therefore that digital skills and knowledge of modern tools should be comparable across education and workplace environments. Tuke says:
“In the modern workplace, the information systems and tools we have become familiar with in the classroom, are in most circumstances, the same ones we will be required to use in our future careers.”
The same can be said of the way we learn to work together, how we communicate and collaborate together, he adds:
“These ‘human aspects’ are in many ways as important a lesson from our education as the content we learn using these methods.”
To learn more about the modern workplace, join us at Digifest at the ICC in Birmingham from 10-11 March 2020.
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The new generation of technologies, combined with the power of the human brain, is going to transform how we push the boundaries of our research worlds. Paul Feldman, Jisc CEO, sets out his vision for the future of research.
Albert Einstein once said imagination is more important than knowledge. As technology continues to transform the world around us, this view is increasingly true for research.
Throughout history, each new generation of technology has opened up more opportunities to make, create and do more, faster and more efficiently. And as technology evolves, so too does the way it helps us to think differently about problems and solutions. With the coming together of Industry 4.0, technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things, robotics and 5G networking, the opportunities to enhance our natural abilities looks set to be greater than ever before.
Over the last year we’ve been exploring with you what this could mean for education – from assessment reimagined to personalised adaptive learning. But what does the application of these technologies mean for research?
Looking at the current state of play it’s not too difficult to imagine a Research 4.0 future – one where technology is left to get on with the repetitive, the mundane and the low-level aspects of the research lifecycle. Automated systems come together to run experiments, crunch data, test hypotheses at huge scale, point to patterns and perhaps even indicate potential hypotheses.
If this sounds like science fiction, just look at disciplines such as medicine which are already being transformed. Technology is increasingly able to conduct more reliable diagnostics than doctors in certain areas. And we’re already seeing technology conduct automated hypothesis-led research that could lead to potentially lifesaving breakthroughs. Take the work going on at the University of Cambridge, where an artificially intelligent ‘robot scientist’ discovered that a common toothpaste ingredient could help fight drug-resistant malaria.
Of course, while not all research disciplines will be affected the same way, there’s no reason to believe this is just about the hard sciences. The arts and humanities look set to be equally transformed.
For example, the ‘Living with Machines’ project, led by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, is pioneering new AI and data science methods alongside the Alan Turing Institute and the British Library to analyse digitised historical resources and collections at huge scale. It aims to track societal and cultural change in new ways and, in the process, foster interdisciplinary collaboration between software engineers, data scientists, historians, curators and others.
Elsewhere, at the University of Lancaster, researchers are using an AI platform and natural tools to make sense of and explain information from thousands of pages of historical text. Written in several rare languages (including Nahuatl, Mixtec and variants of Mayan), the texts all relate to Spain’s early colonial rule of Mexico. This new research is providing rich new insights into this fascinating historical period.
Beyond the actual practice of research, Research 4.0 could also transform research management, planning and evaluation. For example, data analytics could inform a much wider range of decisions on investment, staffing, collaborations and strategy. At Jisc, we’re already exploring the potential of research analytics and working to co-design bespoke solutions that meet your priorities in this space.
So where does the increasing automation of research leave the traditional role of the researcher? From my experience, researchers are extremely creative people.
I’m confident the application of 4.0 technologies across the lifecycle will ultimately free them up to do what humans do best – be creative. It will still be people making the connections, spotting the real advancements, leading the technology to innovate. Our innate human talents will be augmented by technology.
Industry, particularly the big tech titans, are is many respects way ahead of academia in deploying 4.0 technologies for research, delving into areas that are traditionally the domain of universities. Sony is even pursuing the Nobel Prize, developing an AI system designed to make breakthroughs in biomedical science.
This ups the game for our academic researchers to look beyond what algorithms can reliably be left to churn through and, instead, develop whole new forms of research: deeper, broader, more diverse but so much more exciting.
While there are new opportunities for faster, more efficient knowledge generation, Research 4.0 also brings new challenges. Increased connectivity can make research more susceptible to sophisticated forms of cyber attack.
There are very real ethical challenges, including ensuring algorithms avoid cultural biases. As research scale and complexity increases, new approaches are needed to ensure findings can be trusted. And the sheer volume, velocity and variety of data produced by 4.0 technologies could present challenges to an orderly transition to more open research.
We’re presented, then, with what I see as an exciting challenge – one that demands we think today about what that future holds so we can start preparing our organisations and our researchers.
Researchers and those who support the research system at policy, organisational and technical levels need to understand the opportunities 4.0 technologies offer and be able to make sound judgements about how research can evolve in the context of the fourth industrial revolution.
Key to this is understanding where we are today in terms of skills, infrastructure and, perhaps most importantly of all, research culture. Indeed, examining the incentives system is vital to making the most of 4.0 technologies and there is Research England-supported work underway by Vitae and others, looking at incentives and issues of integrity across the research system.
At Jisc, we want to work with you and other key research sector stakeholders to develop a positive, long-term vision for Research 4.0. As part of this work, we’re supporting the leading independent thinktank Demos to explore the opportunities and challenges presented to UK research from increasing automation.
The project, led by Rob Proctor, professor of social informatics at the University of Warwick, aims to understand how 4.0 technologies are being used across research today, including highlighting the academics and researchers leading the way.
Demos recently published the project’s interim report, Research 4.0: Research in the age of automation (pdf), and I urge you to take a look. The project will conclude with a final report this spring. This will put forward a series of Research 4.0 policy-focused recommendations to help secure the UK’s position as a global research leader in the years to come.
When Einstein stressed the primacy of imagination over knowledge, he was referring to its importance to the evolution of human thinking, inquiry and research. While there are risks and uncertainties associated with a Research 4.0 future, I believe the advances we’re living through are fundamentally a force for good; one that will enable researchers to make the very most of their innate human abilities – not least of all, the ability to stretch their imaginations for the benefit of us all.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on the interim report, your personal experiences of applying 4.0 technologies across different research disciplines and any examples you have of best practice that might feed into the project’s findings. Please get in touch at inform@jisc.ac.uk.
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Imagine a village with a hall, that’s been there for years - it’s the heart of the community.
Used by around 5000 people for meetings and events, as a space to exchange information, they come together to share and support each other. Some only use it occasionally, whereas others will participate in everything that goes on. New residents find it a useful resource that provides them with a rich source of new contacts and networks.
The community of users may change with time, but the village hall is a constant. A trusted, reliable resource in a transforming world.
But you won’t find this village hall on the map. It exists online – it’s the JiscMail community.
JiscMail is a trusted, national service that supports open discussions and knowledge exchange among peers, subject experts and partners, both in the UK and internationally. The service has been operating since 1990 and hosts over 8000 mailing lists covering a range of topics.
Martin Dodge, senior lecturer at the University of Manchester is the owner of one of the largest JiscMail lists dedicated to human geography.
With over 5000 subscribers, his mailing list is used as a tool to broadcast information. It provides a sense of what’s going on in human geography; what’s being organised, conferences and jobs. Martin recommends it to his PhD students to reach people where they don’t have an established presence in the field.
The list fosters a sharing of knowledge, which benefits people at different stages of their career.
This list is self-supporting, when people send out a request – they get a response. There’s a real sense of a community where everyone is welcome.
Martin believes that the service is good for the community – it’s just there, it just seems to work, and it’s very robust.
Martin described the service like electricity - it’s only when there’s a power cut that you realise how much you rely on it and people notice it for its absence.
The value of the mailing list is that messages hit people’s inboxes every day, but according to Martin, that’s not an issue, you can delete the stuff you’re not interested in and take what you need.
For Martin, it’s important that JiscMail is free to use - you don’t need to give your age, date of birth and your credit card details, you can join or leave at any time. Martin has considered using social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter for information sharing, but commends JiscMail for being a free service, remaining advert free, and not sending endless requests to fill things in.
A mailing list is just a very simple thing, and nothing beats free.
It’s clear that whether you’re teaching, providing support, researching or learning, JiscMail mailing lists provide supportive and collaborative communities.
Gregory Connor, senior laboratory technician, Hautlieu School (Jersey) says:
“[JiscMail] has been a great source of knowledge, but also has a wonderful sense of community. There have been quite a few questions which the list has answered which have been really helpful.”
For Verity Tarsa, student support, funding and systems officer, Queen Mary University of London, their involvement in the community has evolved over time. She said:
"[JiscMail] has provided invaluable help in the minutiae of detail about my job. It has also allowed me to raise my profile within the sector as I have become more of a helper and less of a helpee.”
Demonstrating that the mailing list community is really making a difference to our members and beyond.
As for Martin, and the human geographers of the world, their JiscMail mailing list is their village hall, it’s a way for them to stay informed, keep up to date and access new networks.
The technology behind JiscMail is email, it’s simple and does what it needs to and doesn’t try to do anything flashy. The active community of human geographers value the rich vein of information it provides them with.
JiscMail relies on people like Martin to set up and create networks to bring people together as a community, enabling collaborations, without barriers or restrictions.
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New digital accessibility regulations are having an impact on universities and colleges. Our subject specialist on assistive technology, Rohan Slaughter, sets out what you need to know.
Some years ago, when I was working with assistive technology at the independent specialist Beaumont College, I met a student whose experience in my field had been quite negative – largely because he’d been offered technologies to do things that didn’t interest him much.
My team started by asking the student about what he really wanted to do. More than anything, like most young people, he wanted to be able to access his music. So we set up a Windows tablet to allow him to control his music independently. Then, over time, we added the ability to control his TV remotely and also added vocabulary so he could use the tablet as a fully-featured voice output communication aid that allowed him to control standard Windows applications such as Microsoft Office.
What had started out as a student-led approach to making his life more enjoyable had turned into a way he could engage with the curriculum at a higher level than he would have found possible without the technology. I saw then how caring about accessibility and assistive technology can make the difference between failing and flying.
Our 2019 digital experience insights survey results show that teaching staff often don’t know enough about accessibility and assistive technologies.
17% of teaching staff said they use assistive technologies in their role but only 24% of these receive any support in using them.
Only 26% say they’re informed about their responsibilities in relation to assistive and adaptive technologies.
15% of teaching staff say they use assistive technologies in their role and only 40% of these receive any support in using them.
Only 16% say they’re informed about their responsibilities in relation to assistive and adaptive technologies.
While that was at a specialist college, assistive technology in various forms is widely used (19% of HE students and 14% of FE students either need or choose to use it, according to our 2019 digital experience insights survey) and accessibility matters for everyone.
Accessibility regulations for online public services
That’s been recognised by the government, with new digital accessibility regulations that came into effect in September. All public sector organisations, which will include most universities and colleges, must make sure they comply. And, while the new rules offer institutions an opportunity to widen participation and improve engagement, this does mean that some organisations need to consider equipping their staff with the skills and knowledge to implement the regulations.
Fortunately, there’s an increasing amount of sector-specific guidance on getting it right, as well as a growing body of support to help you give staff the skills and knowledge they’ll need.
A good starting place is the UK government page on making online public services accessible, developed by the Government Digital Service (GDS). GDS is responsible for monitoring the new regulations and its website spells out that you need to do two things:
The site offers guidance on how to do these things and also a template for your statement.
You’ll also find a rich and growing variety of resources – created by the Further and Higher Education Digital Accessibility Working Group. The group includes representatives from education and accessibility organisations and it provides a supportive space for people working on these issues in FE and HE. Its aim is to speed up the flow of information about the regulations and make sure it is relevant and helpful for the education sector.
The key output from its work to date is a digital accessibility toolkit offering rich resources including articles about effective approaches to improving digital accessibility, presentations, cheat sheets, templates and guidance on specific topics such as auditing for accessibility and procurement.
At the end of last year, we published some legal guidance and we’re working with a variety of stakeholders to ensure the digital accessibility regulations can benefit learning and teaching.
For example, we’re working with both GDS and the Further and Higher Education Digital Accessibility Working Group and we’re collaborating with the Department for Education on implementing its edtech strategy, with our chief executive Paul Feldman taking a seat within the leadership group.
I’m also a member of the assistive technology experts’ group, focusing on making sure assistive technologies are considered carefully as the edtech strategy rolls out.
We’ve also developed a range of measures to help members focus effectively on accessibility and compliance with the new regulations.
For example, following an online briefing late last year in which we asked participants to choose the priorities they wanted us to focus on, we’re running monthly webinars for members looking at issues such as accessibility statements and we’re also offering online digital accessibility drop-in clinics from December. Join the JiscMail digital accessibility regulations list if you’d find these useful, as we’ll be publicising opportunities there. The list is also an easy way to keep up with developments both within Jisc and at other universities and colleges.
You can also keep an eye on our accessibility landing page, which takes you to a range of resources.
Between 2010 and 2015, while working at Beaumont College, I led the Jisc-funded DART project, which provided training and support to help mainstream and specialist FE colleges improve their assistive technology services, aiming to replicate the assistive technologist role that had been developed at Beaumont College and National Star College.
Looking further into the future, we’re exploring ways to develop structured training programmes at multiple levels with various HE partners, starting with an MSc for people who want to be assistive technologists. We think it’s important to professionalise the role and we’re taking a multi-disciplinary approach, aiming to introduce new modules alongside existing education, health and IT and technology modules.
It builds on previous Jisc work at Beaumont College where we developed an approach to training assistive technologists that started with a skills assessment for the individual, looking at their teaching/education skills, therapeutic approaches (notably from occupational therapy and speech and language therapy) and IT and assistive technology-related skills and knowledge; these three areas are combined in the educational assistive technologist role.
We plan to present the new modules as ongoing M level continuing professional development for professionals working in a variety of roles, including specialist teachers or lecturers, occupational therapists, and speech and language therapists. We’re also considering introductory training courses to meet the specific assistive technology training needs of supporting staff such as learning support workers and social care staff.
This work is in its very early stages and we’ll keep you posted.
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Microsoft’s announcement that it will no longer support the Windows 7 operating system has serious implications for legacy users. So, we have put together everything you need to know about the situation, and tips on how to proceed for institutions using the system.
The Microsoft website states: “After January 14, 2020, Microsoft will no longer provide security updates or support for PCs with Windows 7.” This includes software updates and technical support.
While machines running Windows 7 will still work, any devices running the system that are connected to the internet are more vulnerable to cyber-attacks, due to their lack of security and regular updates.
The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) warns that ‘malware can spread much more easily on obsolete platforms because without security updates, known vulnerabilities will remain unpatched. As a result, it’s crucial to move away from them as quickly as possible.’
Richard Jackson, cloud security engineer, e-infrastructure at Jisc, advises that the safest option is to migrate from Windows 7 to a supported operating system, which will have the regular security patching and technical support. He says:
“The end of support means you don’t have an option to install security patches without substantial cost implications, and so problems can open up – whether through internal and/or external factors – with the issue only getting worse over time.”
Jackson also notes that Server 2008/R2 is at end-of-life (EoL) and should be upgraded to Server 2016 as a minimum.
To put this into context, according to Microsoft Inspire 2018, roughly 80% of all enterprise applications run on Windows Server. Of those applications, 70% still run on Windows Server 2008 or earlier versions.
Colm Blake, cloud solutions consultant, e-infrastructure at Jisc, suggests there are two main possibilities for action:
Upgrade on-premises – this option includes upgrading your servers and workstations to supported operating systems – at least Server 2016 and Windows 10 LTSC
Migrate to cloud – this option means that the products you use, including your operating system and server, will be updated regularly and serviced by required security patches
Jon Hunt, information security officer, strategy and corporate services at Jisc, also emphasises the importance of having an end-of-life plan going forward for devices and software that will no longer be supported. The NCSC guidance on this matter says:
"At some point, updates will no longer be available (as the product reaches the end of its supported life), leaving it fixed at an old version that does not have the latest security patches. This means you need to be planning to replace your devices and software so the new ones are ready to use before the support for older versions expire."
If you’re unsure about how to start migrating or updating away from Windows 7, Jisc can help. Jackson suggests that end points (such as PCs, laptops, phones and tablets) may be some of the most vulnerable areas for education institutions, as they are potentially “open to untrustworthy parties or accidental misuse” due to the lack of physical security controls and entry points such as email clients/web browsers.
Jisc is a cloud solutions provider and can provide support for members interested in migrating to cloud services such as AWS or Azure.
Talk to an account manager about how Jisc can help migration and updating.
Find out about Jisc’s cloud and cyber security services.
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Digital transformation is of huge importance across sectors, and across the world.
Research conducted by North Carolina State University’s Enterprise Risk Management Initiative and management consulting firm Protiviti Inc., found that digital transformation was seen as the biggest risk factor in 2019.
Protiviti MD Jim DeLoach told The Wall Street Journal:
“Organisations need to gear up and align the culture, people, processes and intelligence gathering to embrace this rapidly changing environment.”
Digital transformation is a broad term, but largely refers to the process of incorporating digital technologies into an organisation in order to streamline and improve working processes, and reach organisational goals.
This means that digital transformation is increasingly about change management; how staff and senior leaders respond to the digital technology available to them, and how it fits into an overall organisational strategy for improvement of services and working practices.
Chris Thomson, subject specialist in digital practice at Jisc, said:
“Technology holds out the promise of transformation, both for the individual and the organisation. But it’s no longer news to say that adopting new technology – despite its benefits – can be extremely troublesome. It’s something that’s especially relevant for the people responsible for leading change in their institutions.”
So how can educational institutions manage their digital transformation most effectively?
Change involving digital is inevitably complex, which is why strategy is key. Thomson said:
“As well as having a robust e-infrastructure, leaders have to consider how any change relates to a wider strategy, and what new processes and policies have to be designed to facilitate the change in practice. This is something that’s applicable at any scale.”
An article published in The Harvard Business Review in 2019 promotes a similar approach, stating that the first lesson in digital transformation is to “figure out your business strategy before you invest in anything”.
Digital technology is already relatively popular with teaching staff both in FE and HE. Jisc’s digital experience insights survey from 2019 reveals that 43% of staff in FE and 48% in HE see themselves as early adopters of digital tech when they can see clear benefits.
The digital experience insights survey foreword by Professor Ian Diamond, chair of the Independent Commission on the College of the Future, also notes the importance of technology in future workplaces and the imperative to improve digital skills and services. He said:
“It is well known that the UK has a digital skills gap so it’s encouraging that survey responses show teaching staff are highly committed to ensuring their teaching practices prepare students for their future careers – the majority of which will involve technology.”
However, there is a question around whether technology should be the starting point of any digital transformation. Andy Powell, Jisc cloud CTO, said:
“This may sound counter-intuitive, but applying tech without thoroughly understanding the problem is unproductive.
“None of this is really about technology. While [digital transformation] is highly likely to require significant migration to the public cloud, for example, the primary challenges will be around leadership and culture more than around technology.”
Thomson explained:
“Although new tech is often very tempting it’s rarely the whole answer to innovation. Using innovative technology doesn’t inevitably make you more innovative. Most importantly, if you want to achieve transformation, start by thinking about why you want to change and what practice should look like, then work backwards.”
Weston College identified that digital classrooms with collaborative learning capabilities improves course delivery. But before investing in this development, the college’s assistant director Jon Hofgartner worked with Jisc to run a ‘sticky campus roadshow’, allowing college stakeholders to try out a fully outfitted digital classroom before committing to any purchase. Hofgartner said:
“We ran a traditional roundtable meeting with all of our heads of faculty and deputy principal in the roadshow classroom. At first, we struggled to work out how to use the space, but working in groups, we used the technology to share activity happening in the meeting – that was the lightbulb moment.”
This allowed the college to reflect on how digital tools would help support its goal of increased collaborative learning, and the option for remote access.
Weston College has since rolled out development for two new spaces, including a digital classroom as a collaborative space, and a virtual classroom geared towards distance delivery.
There are many further resources available to both HE and FE institutions to help with implementing a strategy that fits with each institution’s goals. For instance, in 2018, Lawrie Phipps, senior co-design manager, and James Clay, head of higher education and student experience at Jisc, wrote a paper for leaders in education to provide a structure that helped with the planning of technology implementation (pdf).
They called it a “digital lens”. It’s a way of taking a step back to look at the wider picture of digital change and suggests a step-by-step approach to project planning that provides room for effective consultation, reflection and evaluation.
For the University of Stirling (UoS), student experience was a key factor in its digital transformation strategy. During the 2017-18 academic year, UoS used the digital experience insights survey to monitor student experience as it developed its digital learning approach. This allowed monitoring of patterns and changes as the university’s digital learning transformation initiative evolved, and an understanding of students’ reactions.
Key to success was a clear strategy, starting withspecific goals and defined influences. Only then was it able to decide how (or whether) technology fitted into this journey.
The main point? As Thomson and Powell suggest:
“Start with why your institution wants to transform, then use the tools at your disposal – digital and otherwise – to help you enact changes.”
For more information on digital transformation, the following resources may be of use.
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When Swansea University wanted a better way of getting feedback from students, it looked to a tiny startup for the answer. Together they developed a platform that works in practice as well as on paper.
Educational technology (edtech) is thriving in the UK. But edtech businesses often struggle to test, pilot and prototype their products in real-life situations.
As a result, feedback can be limited, making it difficult to evaluate and refine the products.
Swansea University and a small edtech startup are bucking the trend by successfully developing a product together – and getting a Times Higher Education Live award nomination into the bargain. Swansea University was shortlisted in the technology innovation category for its work on Unitu, an online multi-device platform designed to disrupt the traditional ways students engage and better reflect the student experience.
In 2017-18, Swansea University rolled out Unitu following several small pilots. It enables students to post and comment anonymously on university-wide boards and staff can respond, which makes meaningful discussion easier.
More than 14,000 students have access to the system and in its first year there were more than 70,000 interactions with students.
Sophie Leslie, Swansea’s student partnership and feedback development officer, says that the traditional ways they’d sought feedback, which relied on highly motivated students, did not always provide a true reflection of Swansea students’ experience.
“Issues have been filtered and diluted when passing through the system, with student comments often having lost context upon reaching senior management.”
By teaming up with the Unitu team, Sophie says they were able to develop a product that challenged the cultural norms around feedback and positively changed staff and student views of how to engage with each other.
The new platform has also been important in providing a voice for those students who are often hard to reach.
For Swansea, that success is all down to the relationship with the team behind Unitu and the way they worked as partners to develop a platform that works in practice as well as on paper.
Anish Bagga, founder of Unitu, says that Swansea understood that they were working with a startup. Anish says:
“They accepted that there were going to be some challenges. But we were learning, they were learning.”
Sophie explains:
“We currently have a fortnightly phone call with Unitu to look at any developments, issues or questions.
“We also work together on new software developments, which provides us with the opportunity to user-test new features, make suggestions and comments and they are also keen to gather feedback from the student users.”
Anish adds:
“Through the constant engagement we had with Swansea we were able to observe how they were using it and to make changes.
“I would class our relationship with Swansea as a partnership, a value exchange, not just of money and service but of knowledge transfer. This allowed us to build more value into that product.”
For Swansea, the platform has had the positive impact on feedback they’d hoped for.
Areas that the feedback has influenced include student wellbeing, catering, sustainable transport, study and social spaces. And the university has also seen an increase in National Student Survey metrics, with improvements in the Learning Community and Student Voice categories.
Sophie says that she would happily work with similar small edtech startups in the future as a result of this work.
“The ability to work closely with the partner and therefore help shape the service has been a big help in creating a platform that best suits our students’ needs and also the needs of our staff.”
“You need very clear KPIs about what you want to gain from a project.”
“You need those resources in place to embed it into the institution – something like Unitu needed student reps just to implement it.”
“The rollout of Unitu is a credit to our student partnership and engagement team, to the many colleagues who respond to student comments, and to the support and commitment of our student body as a whole.”
“The close working relationship allows for us to better communicate the needs of the students and staff to keep developing the platform.”
”For startups, the best institutions to work with are the ones who have an explicit desire to solve the problem that your team are working on.”
via Jisc news
Joining the organisation on 13 January, Nicola Arnold steps into the shoes of Mark Wright, who retired from the post in the summer of 2019.
Previously the finance director at St George’s University of London, Nicola’s focus will be ensuring that Jisc remains financially sustainable.
Nicola has worked in higher education for more than 10 years, first as deputy director of finance at University College London, before joining St George’s in 2016. She qualified as an accountant while working with the “big four” firm Ernst and Young and then spent 12 years working at the BBC.
Nicola said:
“My focus will be on making sure there is investment in the areas that allow Jisc to bring new technologies and innovation to the sector. I will also make sure the organisation provides good value for money for members and funders, spending the sector’s money wisely, so that Jisc’s reputation as an efficient and lean organisation is maintained.
“It’s not possible to work as a finance officer in higher education without being aware of Jisc’s key functions like the Janet Network, Jisc Collections and eduroam, but now that I am here, I am beginning to learn that Jisc does even more than I realised.
“These services would be more expensive and less tailored to the sector if procured from elsewhere - that’s why there are many people who would like to replicate Jisc in other countries.”
Jisc’s, deputy chief executive and chief operating officer, Alice Colban said:
“We are delighted to have someone with Nicola’s experience in higher education as our chief finance officer, and I’m sure she will bring new ideas and insights to this role.
“Jisc aims to be regarded as the best-run sector agency and recruiting talent - such as Nicola- into our professional services is vital to achieving this goal.
“Our strategy is underpinned by strong financial foundations and, under Nicola’s guidance, we will continue to deliver high quality services, while ensuring that membership delivers great value and subscriptions are kept as low as possible.”
via Jisc news
From creating a recycling superhero to investigating how to treat a homeless person with lung disease. We’ve been helping the University of Portsmouth improve the student experience through collaborative working and by making learning fun and engaging.
In June 2019, the university hosted a sticky campus roadshow. Sticky campus is a pop-up digitally-enabled classroom that gives you the practical experience of an active collaborative learning space on site. It can help you make informed decisions about what is involved and how it can benefit students and staff.
Gavin Knight, course leader from the school of pharmacy and biomedical sciences, led the sticky campus at Portsmouth with help from Duncan Peberdy, senior lead – digital learning spaces at Jisc.
Gavin says,
“I wanted to create a dialogue to get people talking and working together to use technology in a different way”.
The university already has a couple of technology-enhanced learning (TEL) facilities on campus within the business and technology space.
“I was keen to create something that didn’t have a particular faculty home that would bring people in from all different areas of the university”.
Using the sticky campus to demonstrate to staff and students how the existing spaces could be used will hopefully increase future uptake.
Getting senior management buy-in was the first step. Luckily for Gavin this was quite straightforward. He approached the pro vice-chancellor for student experience at the time who was equally keen to explore new ways of working that would improve the student experience, so he offered his support.
Finding a big enough space on campus for four weeks was tricky. Hosting the sticky campus in June meant that it coincided with the university’s annual learning and teaching conference. The aim was to integrate the two but unfortunately that didn’t work. Some staff and students were busy with assessments and others could only commit to attending the conference.
Gavin says,
“aligning the content of the conference more with the agenda for the sticky campus would have been a better thing to do”.
Despite this they were successful in running a month-long series of events and projects for staff and students. Having an internal website to advertise the space and to share information about upcoming events was key to getting good engagement.
To get the creative juices flowing, Gavin worked with enterprise advisers Lynda Povey and Eilish Gorse to develop an innovation project. Students from across the university were invited to take part to create a solution to the global challenge of recycling.
“I really enjoyed the sticky campus. I met fellow students who are all on a variety of courses and from a wide range of backgrounds. We worked together and had lots of fun whilst coming up with really positive and productive outcomes.
These were beneficial sessions and should be more regular across the university. I would recommend it to all students and staff”
says Sally (name has been changed).
One of the groups invented a recycling superhero called ‘Captain Waste and his sidekick dog Scrap’ to help children and their families understand the importance of recycling. The group really engaged in the activity and one individual even interviewed pupils at a local school to gather feedback on the idea.
Eilish says,
"it was such a joy to see students from all levels coming together and working in teams so naturally. The students really enjoyed working with the technology and found it helpful for collaborative working. The ideas they came up with in such a short time frame were both innovative and creative.
As facilitators we found the technology fun to work with and it made sharing across the teams easy. We can't wait to run some more sticky campus sessions."
Right now, interprofessional education is a hot topic in the area of health studies. It involves students learning from students from other professions.
In one experiment using the space, Gavin worked with Shelley Peacock from the school of health and care professions to recruit a multi-disciplinary team of healthcare students to work on a clinical scenario involving a homeless person with a lung disease.
Gavin says,
“the students had to troubleshoot and find solutions. They were scribbling on the desks and using the technology to research and make notes. Although the number of participants was fairly small, there was the buzz of animated discussion in the air”.
Being multi-disciplinary the students brought in different perspectives. Working collaboratively meant they were developing skills vital for the workplace.
James (name has been changed) said,
“this experience helped me to step outside my comfort zone while I could enhance my skills. I worked with people I’ve never met to solve a problem in a relatively short period of time. Apart from the fact it will boost my CV, it was so much fun!”
Getting students to understand and apply statistics can be challenging. At the university statistics is traditionally taught in an IT suite, with students sitting in rows in front of a computer. It’s no surprise that some students struggle to engage.
Gavin was eager to tackle this and make learning fun. Working with Heather MacKenzie from the graduate school, students from across the university were invited to take part in a project to work collaboratively to solve statistical problems. The response was overwhelming. Working in small groups and using the space and technology available to them they worked through the problems.
Gavin says,
“it was a complete game changer, we had people hanging around at the end wanting to ask questions about statistics and saying thank you for making it accessible”.
The goal that Gavin set out to achieve was to get people talking and using technology to work creatively. Through a series of projects, and by bringing together staff and students from across the university, he has been successful. Gavin is now planning to use the existing TEL spaces on campus to continue running the innovation and interprofessional education projects.
Reflecting on the experience of working with Jisc, Gavin says,
“Duncan was absolutely fantastic in enabling the sticky campus to happen and helping us to see how we could use the technology and get the best buy in from staff.”
The sticky campus roadshow continues with dates scheduled across the UK in 2020. Visit the project page for dates and how you can get involved.
via Jisc news
Jisc is delighted to announce that Ashley Wheaton, principal of University College of Estate Management, has joined as a trustee.
Ashley, who was nominated by GuildHE, of which he is also a director, brings a wealth of experience and a deep understanding of online education. In the 1990s he was director of global learning services at Microsoft, where he played a pivotal role in transitioning its services from classroom-based to online learning.
Commenting on his appointment, Ashley said:
“I believe that technology should play a key role in the enhancement of the student experience and Jisc is uniquely positioned to guide this transition.
Truly innovative ways of learning can be successfully achieved when the use of technology in education is driven by the appropriate pedagogy.”
Apart from his dedication to online learning, Ashley is also a fervent cycling enthusiast. He enjoys everything from riding and repairing bikes to watching the Tour, and even reading about bicycles and the history of the sport.
Find out more about the Jisc board.
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For the first time, and with input from Jisc, a code of ethics has been created for all professionals working in product/computer security incident response teams (PSIRTs and CSIRTs) in all sectors, including education and research.
Cyber security and the important work of security incident response teams in keeping the internet safe has never been more important. As the security landscape changes, more is expected of experts working in this field.
The new, internationally-applicable code could supersede the historical position, whereby different sectors and certification bodies have developed their own guidelines or rules that, if not followed, could lead to removal of membership. For example, the (ISC)2 Code of Ethics that applies to those undertaking the CISSP exam or the CSIRT Code of Practice adopted by TF-CSIRT/TI Accredited Teams.
Created by the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) with the help of the head of Jisc’s security operations centre, Dr John Chapman, the new guidelines have now been issued for consultation – a process which completes at the end of this month.
Almost two years in the making, EthicsfIRST - Ethics for Incident Response and Security Teams - aims to provide practical advice and support to the CSIRT community, including those among European NRENs. The code is designed to inspire and guide the ethical conduct of all team members, including current and potential practitioners, instructors, students, in?uencers, and anyone who uses cyber security in an impactful way.
The framework, which includes statements of responsibility, based on the understanding that the public good is always the primary consideration, seeks to reinforce the duties of trustworthiness, coordinated vulnerability disclosure, authorisation, team health, and recognition of jurisdictional boundaries, among others.
Dr Chapman, who was involved in developing the new code as part of his role on FIRST's ethics special interest group, said:
“As security professionals rise to the challenge of technology changes and evolving threats, the way they make decisions about handling incidents can raise ethical questions.
“The EthicsfIRST guidelines gives security professionals and teams the confidence to better handle difficult ethical situations in a methodical manner. It’s a big step forward in further professionalising security practitioners.
“Individual professional bodies, such as ISACA or BCS have their own codes for members, but FIRST’s code of ethics is an all-encompassing, cross-sector document that’s relevant for all. EthicsfIRST code will be freely available to any organisation and I’ll certainly be encouraging Jisc’s members running their own CSIRTs to adopt it. Jisc’s Janet Network CSIRT has been a member of FIRST for some years and will also be adhering to the code.
“I hope that, by putting EthicsfIRST into practice, it will help strengthen the trust between teams and between teams and their communities.”
The document is now available on the FIRST.org Ethics SIG page for public consultation.
via Jisc news
We are looking for 50 edtech startups with solutions to some of the biggest challenges in education.
Those meeting robust criteria will form the Founding 50 of Jisc’s step up programme, run in partnership with Emerge Education.
Step up is a membership-based programme that assesses emerging startups against key sector requirements, encouraging institutions and edtech startups to work together with confidence. Step up will provide a direct access point for institutional decision-makers when deciding which companies to work with.
Between now and February, Jisc is looking for applicants of the highest quality to join the nine accepted into the programme at launch in May 2019. They should have a robust business model that offers innovative and proven solutions to problems facing education providers, particularly around student experience.
Jisc has worked with senior policy makers to ensure that step up supports the ambitions of the government's edtech strategy (pdf) to help create a vibrant edtech business sector in the UK. The team has worked with institutional decision makers to co-create this initiative - tackling concerns around engaging with startups and providing opportunities for institutions to engage with the best on offer.
Sue Attewell, head of edtech at Jisc, says:
“We’re looking to find 50 of the best and most innovative post-16 edtech startups that will interest and excite our members.
“Our members will find it much easier to partner with startups when they know sector-validated due diligence has been carried out and its solution is procurement ready. They need access to a set of reliable, vetted startups that are of the highest quality, and cover the range of the student experience. This is what we want to build with the Founding 50.
“Step up is creating a vibrant community of edtech startups that are ready and keen to work with institutions.
“By nurturing these new businesses, Jisc hopes to make technologies that are shaping the fourth industrial revolution more accessible to the sector, helping to build a corresponding Education 4.0 that responds to these shifts.“
The deadline for registering interest in the Founding 50 is 28 February 2020. Please email Eva Stirling for further information.
via Jisc news
A team at the University of Bristol is revolutionising the way vaccines are developed, paving the way for faster and more effective vaccines against diseases for which there is currently no means of prevention.
The scientists at the heart of the project explain how the Research 4.0 tools of big data and cloud computing are changing the way they engineer vaccines – and protect everyone from viruses.
“Half a century ago, many people started to think that infectious diseases had been solved. And we were totally wrong. Infectious diseases have never been more of a problem than they are today.”
That’s the stark warning from Adam Finn, professor of paediatrics at Bristol Children’s Vaccine Centre, University of Bristol. He explains:
“As you conquer some problems with infection, others come up to replace them. And the drugs that can treat these infections stop working as the organisms learn to be resistant to them.”
But there is an answer: vaccination. It is “our most successful defence against infectious diseases,” according to Imre Berger, professor of biochemistry at the University of Bristol and the director of the Max Planck-Bristol Centre for Minimal Biology.
However, vaccines do not travel well or last long, particularly in warmer parts of the world.
“A major problem with vaccines at the moment,” says Imre, “is that they need to be refrigerated for storage and for transport. Otherwise they become inactivated.”
“And a fridge needs a power supply,”
adds Adam.
“So while you might be able to reach any part of the world with a bottle of Coca-Cola, being able to reach any part of the world with a refrigerated vaccine is really quite a challenge. And without effective monitoring you may end up giving ineffective vaccines to children and then the vaccine gets a bad name even though there was nothing wrong with it. What was wrong was your cold chain.”
Then there are the diseases for which there is no prevention, such as Zika and chikungunya. These mosquito-borne diseases were previously confined to sub-Saharan Africa but, because of global warming and climate change, the mosquitos that carry them are travelling further afield, to Europe and the US. There is currently no vaccine against chikungunya.
Not yet, anyway. But the answer may well lie in the latest iteration of engineered vaccines that are now being developed. They might yet tackle many of the challenges posed for centuries by the traditional vaccines that trace their history back to the original smallpox vaccine, invented by Edward Jenner in 1796.
“We have developed a new class of synthetic vaccines. We call it the ADDomer,”
says Imre. The ADDomer is a synthetic particle to which harmless parts of the chikungunya virus can be added, to fool the immune system.
“When the immune system sees it, it develops antibodies against it, which will protect when the real virus arrives.”
“This technology is unique because it doesn't rely on a cold chain,”
says Frédéric Garzoni, director of Bristol startup Imophoron, which is bringing to market the technology underpinning the ADDomer development. Adam agrees:
“You can engineer it to be very stable and we need vaccines that will survive in hostile environments.”
In addition, says Frédéric,
“we can mass produce it at low cost, which is basically ticking all the boxes.”
Another benefit is the potential for speedy development.
“One problem today is that it could take six to nine months to produce a vaccine,”
says Frédéric. So by the time a vaccine is ready to meet one winter ‘flu, a different virus strain is on its way for the next winter. But the purely synthetic ADDomer can be produced more quickly and without the present-day risk that the vaccine itself might mutate during production.
“We know what we are producing and we know which product we're going to have at the end. We can produce quite fast.”
What makes ADDomer possible today is the way researchers can manage big data through fast, high-volume cloud computing and fast, high-volume connectivity to transport the data to the cloud.
Imre explains:
“We had to know the structure of the ADDomer at near-atomic resolution. This we determined by cryo-electron microscopy. This was a first. Cryo-electron microscopy yields literally thousands and thousands of images of your particle. By combining these images from all conceivable orientations, you can calculate the structure.”
Dr Matt Williams, research software engineer at the University of Bristol, takes up the story.
“You need lots and lots of images because each image is quite fuzzy and noisy but by using very advanced reconstruction software packages to align, classify and then reconstruct, we were able to get a full 3D model of the particle at a far higher resolution than was ever available previously.”
As a member of the research team on this project, Matt was asked to find a way to take the large data volumes collected on the microscope, use the cloud resource provided and put them together into something that could support the demanding data analysis.
“The software we created for this is called Cluster in the Cloud,”
continues Matt.
“It allows anyone with access to cloud resources to create a very familiar software environment but fully based in the cloud, making the best use of cloud facilities and cloud technologies.
“For that, Janet was really useful. It provides a very stable, high speed connection to the cloud providers. If we hadn’t had access to the high-speed Janet Network, I think the real constraint it would put on us is that we would have to use smaller amounts of data in our analysis, which would have resulted in a lower resolution. We wouldn’t be able to do our jobs.”
Looking forward, Imre expects ADDomer technology to tackle far more than just the chikungunya virus:
“We generated thirty other different vaccine candidates for a wide range of human and veterinary diseases, to demonstrate that our approach is not confined to chikungunya alone. In the future we will pursue the most promising candidates and we are very interested to see how powerful our technology really is.”
“I think this is a step change,”
concludes Adam.
“It's a proof of principle. Until now we've had to accept the materials that biology gives us, that microbes make when they make themselves. This represents a more deliberate attempt to actually engineer the bits and pieces that you need to make a vaccine work.”
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Matt Williams
“Research software engineering is a fairly new field that largely started in the UK and is now spreading all over the world,"
says Matt Williams.
"It's a group within a university that fills the gap between people who are experts in computers and people who are experts in scientific research. Research software engineers allow researchers to make better use of computing resources and ensure that they are best suited to the needs of researchers.
“Researchers need to use computers in highly technical ways – for large scale data analysis, in-depth computer programming, in-depth algorithm design. While there are many scientists who are experts in those things, it's too much to expect every researcher to be an expert in all the tools they use. By finding people who are specialists in their subjects and who find it really interesting it allows us to get the best people into the right role to get the distribution of efforts in exactly the right way.
“We do that in two main ways. One is by working directly with researchers – working on research projects with them, sitting alongside them, guiding them through the process, helping them write their software. The other approach is we do a lot of training, running courses teaching scientists how to do some of this stuff for themselves."
via Jisc news
As part of efforts to strengthen its offer for further education (FE) members, Jisc has appointed Debra Gray, the principal of Grimsby Institute, as a trustee.
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Nominated to the board by the Association of Colleges (AoC), Debs, as she prefers to be known, took up her post late in 2019 and says that she hopes to ensure that FE has strong representation on the board and is looking forward to supporting the sector in developing its edtech practice.
A native of Sheffield, Debs led an outstanding public services team at a college in South Yorkshire for many years before moving to a college in Derbyshire, where she took a struggling faculty and turned it into an “outstanding” department within 18 months, winning an AoC Beacon Award in the process.
Debs was appointed deputy principal of curriculum and quality for the Grimsby Institute Group in February 2014, and principal and deputy chief executive in November 2015, but adds that she will “always be a lecturer at heart” and still loves to get into a classroom when the opportunity affords itself.
Debs adds:
“I love my job. I think college staff have the best job in the world because we get to make a difference every single day. Colleges are life changing and the incubators of the next great academics, entrepreneurs and industries.
“Part of my job as a college leader is to give learners snapshots of what their life and work might look like in 10, or 20 years’ time, and to show them how best to prepare for changes so they don’t get left behind. Technology is key to those developments, just as it has been throughout history.
“That’s why, at Grimsby Institute, we work closely with employers to develop future-focused programmes, initiatives and projects that give learners a taste of the world as it might be in the future.
“By exploring the principles behind emerging technology, we are preparing learners not just for jobs that may not yet exist, but for a life that will look very different in the future - and supporting them on that journey.
"Jisc is at the forefront of education technology and it’s something I am passionate about, so becoming a trustee seemed a great fit.”
Jisc chair David Maguire says:
“Debra is a well-known and respected leader in the FE sector and I am delighted that she has agreed to join Jisc as a trustee, where she will strengthen the FE membership of the board.
“Grimsby Institute in general and Debra in particular are innovators in the use of technology to improve the student experience and to reach business goals, and that experience and advocacy will be valuable to Jisc and inspirational to its members.”
via Jisc news
Jisc is working with five leading developers of immersive experiences to bring virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) into the classroom and lecture theatre, helping to transform teaching and learning and make Education 4.0 a reality.
According to Jisc futurist Martin Hamilton:
"We've seen from members that have already taken steps in this area that VR and AR have massive potential, and by partnering with leading suppliers we can help more universities and colleges to create high quality learning experiences.
“These could include virtual field trips to places that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive or dangerous, such as the ruins of Palmyra or the depths of the Mariana Trench, or virtual workplaces that allow students to safely access complicated machinery or hazardous substances.
“With this technology, teachers can now use immersive technologies to make lessons more impactful and engaging for students everywhere, no matter their geographical location. This is a key part of our vision for how teaching and learning will be transformed as we move towards Education 4.0.”
Jisc’s senior co-design manager, Rob Bristow, adds:
“Getting up and running with VR and AR can be complicated and time consuming as there are a plethora of tools to choose from, and most universities and colleges don't have in-house expertise to make informed decisions, or to understand how to use this technology in day-to-day teaching.
“To help members navigate the complexities, Jisc has set up a procurement framework agreement with five companies that have created award-winning immersive experiences and virtual classrooms. We will work with members to firm up project requirements, and then run a mini-tender exercise to find the supplier best placed to fulfil them.”
The companies in the Jisc procurement framework are Daden, Gleechi AB, Gooii, Hidden Creative and Medical Realities.
To find out more, fill out this enquiry form, and a member of the team will get back to you within two working days.
via Jisc news
The agreement allows open access publishing in 44 IOPP journals and removes article publication charges for authors.
Researchers at up to 58 UK universities will soon benefit from a new open access (OA) ‘read and publish’ agreement between Jisc and IOP Publishing (IOPP), a pioneer in open access physics publishing.
The four-year agreement begins on 1 January 2020. It enables unlimited open access publishing for affiliated corresponding authors in 44 of IOPP’s subscription journals, without barriers or charges to authors.
Members will also have reading access to 75 of IOPP’s journals, covering physics, materials science, biosciences, astronomy and astrophysics, environmental sciences, mathematics and education.
Anna Vernon, Jisc Collection’s head of licensing, said:
“For the Jisc consortium, the agreement constitutes an important next step towards rapidly increasing immediate access to scientific research under transparent conditions and pricing. This contract offers highly optimised workflows for different institutions, giving access to even more open access journals.”
Fully aligned to and compatible with open access mandates in the UK, the transitional agreement means there are no article publication charges (APCs) for qualifying articles at the point of publication.
Steven Hall, managing director at IOP Publishing, said:
“We’re delighted to have come to this agreement. We already have several transformative agreements in place in Europe, and there are more being agreed soon. We want to make publishing open access as easy as possible for our authors and help them comply with funder requirements. This agreement enables us to do this.”
The model offers a streamlined process for researchers and librarians; researchers can publish open access in IOPP journals without administrative burden or payment thanks to article identification, and unnecessary overheads are removed for librarians. Additionally, all accepted articles will be published under an open licence (CC-BY), which allows authors to retain copyright.
The agreement builds on one of the UK’s first OA agreements, established in 2014. It will drive up OA publishing from participating institutions in 44 IOPP subscription journals from 33% in 2018 aiming for 100% open access in year one, to the benefit of researchers, students and the global scientific community.
IOPP and Jisc are also forming an advisory group comprising representatives from IOPP, Jisc and institutions to evaluate progress and support the OA transition in the UK. Institutions will also benefit from transparent and comprehensive reporting at an institutional and national level.
Copies of OA articles published under the agreement will be automatically deposited in institutional repositories, via Jisc’s Publications Router. The full agreement terms will be made public shortly on our licence subscriptions manager service site.
via Jisc news
Jisc and five UK-based society publishers have signed pilot transitional open access (OA) agreements, now available to UK universities.
The agreements are the first to result from work undertaken by Jisc Collections, negotiating with smaller publishers to offer a sustainable transition to OA.
The Microbiology Society, Portland Press, IWA Publishing, the Company of Biologists and the European Respiratory Society all now offer transitional journal agreements through the national Jisc consortium.
These ‘read and publish’ two-year pilots allow 100% of UK scholarly output to be published OA in the societies’ hybrid journals, with some including fully OA titles in the fixed-price deals.
Kathryn Spiller, licensing manager at Jisc, who has worked with the societies to negotiate the agreements, says:
“We are delighted to offer smaller publishers a chance to negotiate with a national consortium. OA publishing is becoming within reach, especially now Wellcome has confirmed that these agreements are in compliance with their policy and that their funds can be used to support these agreements. Together we’ll continue to explore new ways in which small learned societies can transition to OA in a sustainable way.”
The Charity Open Access Fund (COAF), a partnership between six health research charities, including the Wellcome Trust, invested £1.3m in OA publishing fees (APCs) with UK-based self-publishing learned societies between 2016 and 2018. These five publishers account for just under a third of this investment.
Through these agreements, the sector transitions away from hundreds of individual APC payments to a fixed annual payment between the institution and the publisher, significantly reducing the administrative burden on researchers, institutions, funders and publishers.
Robert Kiley, head of open research at Wellcome, comments:
“I am delighted that Jisc Collections has successfully negotiated transformative agreements with a number of learned society publishers at no extra cost to institutions. Institutions in receipt of COAF OA funding are able to use these funds to offset the publishing costs for COAF-attributed research published under these agreements.”
via Jisc news
There are many benefits to being on social media for educators and academics – not least the ability to keep peers, employers and funders aware of what you’re doing – but an online public presence is not without its security risks.
Abigail McAlpine is a postgraduate researcher in cyber security at the University of Huddersfield. She’s also a social media user, despite the risks she encounters in her work. Here’s her quick guide to the who, where, when and what of managing social media security risks.
Most of us feel it’s vital to maintain our online professional identity across several social media accounts, not least LinkedIn and Twitter, but we should avoid exposing too much of the personal.
So separate out professional and private accounts. On Twitter, for example, use a nickname for your personal account so that only your real friends and family know who’s posting all that personal information, or consider locking your account. And to deter discovery, don’t use your date of birth, year of birth or other personal information in your username.
You can retain some of your personality in your professional profile but restrict the information you give away to what is professionally necessary and beneficial to you.
You can also separate your critical and less critical identities by using different email addresses – eg one for your social media accounts and an entirely separate one where security is paramount, such as online banking. So if your social medium of choice happens to expose the email address and password they hold for you (and many have – see below), your more vital identity remains secure.
Treat public wifi with caution. Public networks are easy to hack – or for a hacker simply to join and survey who else is using it – and so you become more vulnerable when you’re posting messages that expose what public wifi network you’re using.
At a conference or similar, the negatives of vulnerability are often outweighed by the positives of tweeting or posting messages about the event or using the event hashtag, so you may be willing to take the risk. But you can mitigate it somewhat if you’re wary of giving away any other information about your comings and goings and if, in particular, you avoid tagging your hotel and exposing your identity on that public network as well.
It’s all too easy to join online conversations about your hotel, such as complaints about its wifi, but you should resist. Keep your location private when you can.
If you feel you're going to be communicating any sensitive, personal or private information or any account details, try coming off the public wifi and using the more private 4G instead. It’s easy to forget to do this: you’re Googling something and then checking your bank balance and you forget to switch over – we all just flick through applications automatically – but the discipline of switching to 4G is worth the effort.
Another alternative is to set up a VPN – a virtual private network. It's best to get one that uses an app on your phone and that you can use with any device including your laptop. Basically, a VPN encrypts all the information from your phone, laptop or other device, as if you were on a private network instead of a public one. Check which VPNs are recommended as best for your device and have a look at the reviews.
Sometimes you need to post something immediately. It may be breaking news, feedback from a conference floor, reactions to an announcement, arrangements to meet.
But if it isn’t necessary, however attractive and enjoyable instant posting may be, consider not posting in real-time. Muse on the day’s events at work when you’re no longer there. Divulge the fact that you were away after you’ve returned. Post photos of your hotel after you’ve checked out. In short, separate the location of your topic from the location of your post.
Just over a year ago, Facebook announced that 50 million of its users had been “exposed by a security flaw”. In 2012, LinkedIn suffered a security breach and then announced four years later that the stolen data, including email addresses and passwords, had become available online; this was followed by news reports that more than 117 million account details were being sold on data sharing websites.
Other global services have suffered similar data losses. Last December, more than 770 million email addresses and passwords were posted to a popular hacking forum. Yet many of us are still using the same email address and password combination that we’ve used for years. If you do, the chances are high that the hackers have them.
Clouds – including the cloud – can have silver linings. Since 2013, security researcher and Microsoft regional director Troy Hunt has been collecting stolen data and listing compromised email addresses and usernames (without the passwords!) at haveibeenpwned.com. This means you can visit the site, for free, enter your email address and you’ll see if you’ve been compromised (“pwned”) and where the breach was found.
If you’ve been pwned and haven’t recently changed your password on key sites, this should convince you to do so, using a strong, long password and setting up two-factor (or multi-factor) authentication if it’s available.
But don’t rely on secondary authentication instead of decent password security: authenticators can also be breached (especially if they rely on sending a text to your phone: phone numbers can easily be cloned), so your security-conscious regime should look after passwords as well as other authentication.
And remember the idea of having more than one email address to separate out critical and non-critical online identities. Your security online can be in your control.
via Jisc news
An online student engagement platform developed by a startup that was developed through a Jisc edtech competition has been recognised as the technological or digital innovation of 2019 at the Times Higher Education Awards.
Swansea University’s multi-device student voice platform, Unitu, allows students to post and comment anonymously on college- and university-wide boards, and staff will respond to the issues raised.
Unitu was developed by a team which took part in the 2014 Summer of Student Innovation (SOSI) and went on to be one of the first startups assessed under Jisc’s new step up programme. The Unitu team was led by led by Anish Bagga and born out of his own student experience, which included frustrations that his voice and those of his fellow students were not being heard.
The platform is designed to give the university access to the “authentic” student voice because the filtering effect of traditional feedback mechanisms can distort or misrepresent the student experience. The technology also allows students who are hard to reach or do not engage through traditional channels to be heard.
Some 14,000 students at Swansea now have access to Unitu, which was rolled out in 2017-18. In the first year, there were more than 70,000 interactions. The university says the platform has already led to changes in learning and teaching, sustainable transport and catering, and has also provided a way of celebrating success and good practice.
The judges praised Unitu for revolutionising “the way the university engages with learners about key issues, such as well-being and transport”. They added: “Unitu itself is an edtech startup product that has been significantly enhanced in response to feedback from the university.”
Unitu was developed in partnership with Swansea and the university credits this close working relationship with the Unitu team as key to the success of the tool. When the platform was nominated for the award, Sophie Leslie, student partnership and feedback development officer at Swansea, told Jisc the university would happily work with similar small edtechs in the future as a result of this work.
Jisc’s director of edtech, Andy McGregor, said:
“I was delighted to see Swansea University and Unitu win the THE award. Jisc has worked with Unitu since the early days of the company and we have seen Anish and his team build a great product by caring deeply about improving the student experience through ensuring student voices are heard.
“Edtech startups are an underused source of innovation for universities and colleges in the UK. That is why we have introduced the step up programme - to help people working to improve education and research find the most promising start-ups and make it a little bit easier to procure their services.
“In 2020, the step up scheme will be publishing research and putting on events to familiarise education professionals with the edtech start-ups and how they can be used to help address the challenges we face in education and research. Swansea’s work with Unitu is a great example of the value they add.”
Read the full list of Times Higher Education Awards winners and nominees.
via Jisc news
A Scottish university’s efforts to create a sustainable campus by using cutting-edge technology has won it a Green Gown Award in a category sponsored by Jisc
University of the West of Scotland (UWS) triumphed in the campus of the future category for the redevelopment of its Lanarkshire site into what the award organisers described as “one of the UK’s most modern and inspiring learning environments”.
The two-year project, which required an investment of £110m, used emerging technologies to embrace the latest developments in teaching and learning in a shift away from traditional lecture layouts. The aim of the project was to provide staff and students with a flexible environment that is fit for today and for future generations.
The project put sustainability is its heart, along with a focus on health and wellbeing, appreciating that quality of learning is impacted by quality of the environment. is the buildings are powered by 100% renewable energy from a nearby windfarm and features rainwater harvesting technology, resulting in one of the greenest campuses in the UK.
Cutting-edge technology, such as mixed reality, is used in teaching, social and research spaces. These include the country’s most modern simulated hospital wards, where nursing and midwifery students learn, and a cutting-edge extreme environments laboratory, designed to replicate extremes of temperature, altitude and humidity.
The University of Worcester was highly commended in the same category for its redevelopment of the Art House to provide a facility for art and design students and community creative projects. The development is based around flexible open spaces that are fitted with intelligent lighting, user-controlled real-time energy management, heating, ventilation and cooling, which are improving the student experience and campus sustainability.
The other finalists in this category were:
Sam Thornton, senior co-design manager, who leads work on Jisc’s intelligent campus project, said:
“Yesterday’s Green Gown Awards provided an inspiring opportunity to see what sustainability excellence looks like in the UK. It was particularly encouraging to see nominees and winners from a really diverse range of institutions, with great engagement from both staff and students.
“A special mention must also go to the organisers, who did an excellent job of providing a more sustainable event than I thought possible, from the sourcing of the food to the table decorations and everything in between.”
Iain Patton, chief executive at the Environmental Association for Universities and Colleges (EAUC) and co-host of the Green Gown Awards ceremony, said:
“The submissions this year were of an incredibly high calibre, tackling a huge array of sustainable development areas.”
He added that it was a privilege to work with UK institutions on “pioneering initiatives” that contribute to reaching the UK government’s target of reducing all greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 at the very latest.
This year’s UK and Ireland Green Gown Awards finalists represented more than a million students and 162,000 staff. Organised by EAUC - the Alliance for Sustainability Leadership in Education, the awards ceremony was held in Glasgow on 26 November 2019.
Find out more about Jisc’s vision for Education 4.0 which embraces many of these trends.
via Jisc news
Abertay University and Jisc share an ambition: to make higher education flexible, accessible and welcoming for everyone – no matter who they are and where they come from.
We’ve been working together to improve campus technology and student experience.
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James Nicholson
James Nicholson, Abertay University’s director of student services, said:
“I believe around 20% more students are using the library since we’ve taken the ‘sticky campus’ approach.
“There’s been a cultural change too. Students are starting to know they can use any space in the university if teaching isn’t going on.”
According to James, students are encouraged not only to see computers and software as ‘teaching facilities’ but to make use of them outside of class.
“That’s an important part of being at university,” he says.
These shifts have happened since the university took on an ambitious project to update some of their learning spaces, including redesigning the library and adding state of the art technology and a blend of formal and informal spaces. The motivation came from a new strategic plan to improve student progression, retention and attainment.
The student population at Abertay University bucks trends. Of the students who are from Scotland, a massive 96% went to state school. Many come from deprived backgrounds and are the first in their families to go to university. Over 60% are local or ‘commuter students’, who travel in to campus each day and have jobs and other commitments.
Encouraging these students to fully engage with university life, spend more time on campus, and achieve the best possible results can be challenging. To make it happen, they need a strong sense of belonging and connectedness with their peers and lecturers. The university environment needs to feel welcoming and flexible.
Ian Simpson, director of operations, Abertay University, said:
“We were looking to not only attract students to campus, but keep them there, even outside of their scheduled teaching time.
"That way, they’re still learning and are able to take advantage of what we can offer.”
In 2016, Alastair Robertson, director of teaching and learning enhancement, attended the Jisc sticky campus roadshow. He said:
“That was quite a catalyst for us.
“We started to adopt the sort of technology on display at the roadshow and used many of the principles in our campus renovations.”
Redesigned spaces at Abertay encourage students to study, relax and interact.
In the creative design suite, students can view digital content at individual tables wirelessly, as well as being connected to a group screen at the front of the room. Video conferencing means students can collaborate with their peers in the room and those off campus. James1, one of the students who has used the new space, said:
“You get more of an opportunity to broaden your horizons and see what people’s opinions are in other discussion group."
The suites have ‘whiteboard’ style walls that students and staff can write on, which inspires creativity and interaction.
“The rooms are great for creative work. It’s easy to visualise your materials and we have the ability to write on the walls, which is really cool,”
says Asha2 another student who enjoys the space.
“In a traditional classroom or lecture hall, students can be afraid to ask questions – they don’t want to interrupt the lecturer. That’s not the case in this classroom, you have the opportunity to be in contact with other students and the lecturer. It improves the way groups can work together, and the lecturer can explain things.”
As well as encouraging students to collaborate, the spaces promote independent working. Students can book areas in the library to practise presentations and do mock interviews without being interrupted. They can use recording tools to review their performance, improving their skills, confidence and job prospects.
A virtual classroom facility gives students who can’t make it on to campus a sense of belonging.
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Moriamo Oduyemi
Moriamo Oduyemi, head of corporate information systems, says students will be able to take ownership of this virtual classroom and use it for their own activities, like managing student societies.
"The social interaction element of these spaces is as important as the academic side. We’re hoping some of the tools students are using for their learning can be used effectively for that as well.”
We worked with Abertay to shape the sticky campus renovation project, attending workshops and offering guidance. James said:
“Jisc was involved from the discovery stages when we were looking at what other organisations were doing and what was happening in the sector.
“They encouraged us to think how we could make digital technology part of the curriculum.”
The team found the Jisc student digital experience tracker useful when they compared what they were doing with other institutions. Alastair said:
“The tracker has been fantastic for benchmarking, as well as getting staff and student feedback on our learning spaces.”
Our consultants took part in the university’s workshops for staff to look at what they needed from redesigned classrooms.
“A lot of the initiatives that came out of that workshop fed into the final decision-making,” says James.
Ian used our Higher Education Learning Space Toolkit to guide discussions with colleagues on how to create the new environments. He said:
“It’s very difficult to get people to discuss what they might want in a physical space when you start with a blank sheet of paper.
“It’s much easier when there are examples they can use to think about what would work.”
For the new spaces to be a success, the university needed excellent wifi coverage throughout the campus. This was taken care of by our Janet Network. Alastair said:
“There were other small things too that really added up in our planning of spaces, like making sure there were enough power points for students to charge their laptops between classes.”
Alastair says that upscaling digital literacy for staff was another big driver for the sticky campus project. He believes the new spaces, and technology, have inspired teaching and learning. He said:
“They offer a much richer set of pedagogies and higher quality student experience than traditional lectures and tutorials.
"It’s opening up new avenues for staff to engage with students, which is critical.”
Adopting the sticky campus approach has allowed the university to stay relevant in a competitive market.
“The traditional classroom set up is no longer good enough,” says Ian.
“Our students have already been exposed to some of this technology at school. So having this modernised approach to classroom space is one that students are expecting and demanding.”
If you’d like the sticky campus roadshow to come to your university, or you want to find out more about our workshops, please contact Duncan Peberdy (duncan.peberdy@jisc.ac.uk).
via Jisc news
Researchers from 180 UK universities can now benefit from a national open access deal agreed between Jisc Collections and Frontiers, the second largest fully open access publisher in the UK.
This landmark deal provides a simplified and streamlined route to open access publishing for researchers in the UK, who publish 7% of the world’s research1.
Fully aligned to open access mandates such as Plan S, the new framework agreement equips 180 UK research institutions in steering scholarly communication towards a new era where open access becomes easier. The deal includes a national discount on article processing charges (APCs), centralised, flexible invoicing, payment options, and dedicated support for library staff dealing with APCs.
Liam Earney, executive director for digital resources at Jisc, said:
“We are delighted to have reached this agreement with a pure gold publisher. This is another significant step forward in reaching the goal of full and immediate open access helping UK institutions and researchers to make open access publishing in Frontiers journals as frictionless and as cost effective as possible.”
Kamila Markram, co-founder and CEO of Frontiers said:
“This national deal shows the strong commitment from the UK to make publicly funded research openly available. This is our third national deal in Europe, following deals in Austria2 and Sweden3, and we hope other countries will follow in this visionary transition to open science.”
The agreement is effective from 1 December 2019 until November 2022. As part of the agreement, researchers affiliated with participating organisations will have full access to Frontiers' open science tools, including collaborative peer-review, article and author impact metrics, and enhanced dissemination tools such as Loop.
All submitted articles will remain subject to Frontiers’ editorial processes, policies and conditions including rigorous peer review, and all accepted articles will be published under an open license (CC-BY) that allows authors (or their institutions) to retain copyright.
The research organisations also benefit from transparent and comprehensive reporting provided by Frontiers on expenditures as well as research output at the institutional and national level. The full agreement terms will be made public shortly on our licence subscriptions manager website.
via Jisc news
Universities UK has convened a new group to support and enhance the mandate of Jisc in negotiating publishing agreements with major academic publishers.
The formation of this new, high-level group recognises the importance of involving senior leaders from UK institutions in order to achieve sustainable, affordable and innovative agreements with major publishers.
Chair of the new group, Professor Stephen Decent, provost and deputy vice-chancellor at Manchester Metropolitan University says:
"The UK has made great progress in recent years towards the target of achieving open access to UK research, but if we are to ensure that progress continues and we are to achieve affordable, full and immediate open access to all UK research at speed then the most senior level support to our negotiators is essential.
"We have an opportunity to support the transition to open access and more importantly open research. That transition is challenging but has the potential to deliver real change in universities’ relationships with publishers of all sizes and across all disciplines.”
Liam Earney, Jisc’s executive director for digital resources, says:
“The research publishing environment is facing huge change with high-profile negotiations in Europe and the US, the UKRI’s review of its open access policy, the establishment of cOAlition S and the release of a new Wellcome Trust OA policy.
"It is essential that our negotiations with publishers are backed by senior leaders to help universities overcome the challenges and maximise the benefits offered by this changing environment.”
The group will meet for the first time in early 2020, and will comprise senior representatives from across UK universities, sector bodies and observers from major UK funders. Its work will be informed by an expert practitioner group, to ensure alignment between strategy and implementation at the national and institutional level.
via Jisc news