From surviving the internet to how Hollywood gets it right (and wrong), Garry Scobie, University of Edinburgh deputy chief information security officer (CISO), is taking a creative approach to educating staff and students about information security. He describes how he’s turning the need for security awareness into a tool to help change the organisation’s security culture.
“We can spend a fortune on technical controls or write all the policies and procedures you can think of but it takes just one person to be phished to compromise the network,”
says Garry Scobie, deputy CISO at the University of Edinburgh. This year he has embarked on a major campaign to raise users’ security awareness across his university’s many departments, schools and campuses: no small task.
“We're a large university, among the top in the world for research, and we’re a major employer. It makes us an attractive target for hacking and other attacks.
We’re potentially subject to data theft of staff and students’ personal information for financial gain, because we've got student fees and large employer contracts with third parties.
And there’s the potential for espionage. We hold valuable intellectual property: you name it and it's probably being researched here. We’re a prime target.”
And the biggest security threat?
“It isn’t DDoS. We use Jisc's mitigation for that, which has proved worthwhile in protecting our organisation. It’s phishing. And ransomware. And, most importantly, the lack of awareness they exploit. It’s that lack of awareness that is the biggest threat.”
Which is why Garry has set out on a major programme of education in security awareness.
“The first question is how do we educate people in the sort of environment we have here within the university: very open, very collaborative, very complex?
People are overloaded with the sheer volume of data and messages they receive daily, and my message about being security aware is just one more thing they have to process.
So how do I get our message through, how do I make it stand out among everything else? Then how do we change the culture? How do we embed security awareness so it becomes a norm for the organisation?”
The current infosec approach started with an assessment of the security culture it sought to influence.
“We got a third party in to hold focus groups across the schools and business units, looking at eight themes: empowerment, awareness, values, behaviours, adherence, accountability, responsibility and cultural norms.
It was right across the board, with participants from all the schools and business units, plus students, so it was well attended. And it was really very useful.”
The exercise provided a great deal of feedback about the current state of the university’s attitudes towards security and supported the direction Garry was taking.
“We have established a security working group with cross-school representation and business unit representation. And this representation is helping to push things forward.
We intend to trial a security champions network and plans for this are now taking shape.”
It is intended that security champions will receive training and then be in a position to help push awareness and understanding about information security, backed up with the support of the infosec team.
“One of the biggest things that came out of the focus group work was that people wanted to feel more empowered regarding security and be able to do the right thing. So our focus has become ‘our users are our best defence’ and we foster an environment that encourages people to speak up and point out, and challenge.
We've got a no-blame culture. If people make mistakes or see security issues or breaches, we want them to be upfront and tell us, and then we work on how we're going to fix it.”
But how does Garry communicate his messages across the university? The infosec team get out of the office and talk to people.
“We do a great many presentations and talks. We’ve been doing this for about 18 months, going round, turning up, speaking and engaging with many different people across the organisation.”
The number of requests for talks is increasing as people become more security aware (“it's great that people are starting to take on board what we're saying, invite us in, and we're starting to create a buzz”), and they are also proactive in adding security presentations to existing events, with a penchant for devising creative talks: “basically we're looking to make it fun.
“At the university’s week-long Festival of Creative Learning, where classes stop and students have the opportunity to do something different and creative, last year my colleague David taught information security based on a theme of medieval castles. That was different and a great thing to do.
This year we included content about Victorian fan language as part of a talk on the history of pre-digital encryption. It was a hugely popular talking point.
It was a different tone and that got people looking at how we secure messages, the need to encrypt, and how you encrypt, and why it came about. We approached what was seen as a dull topic in a fun, interactive way and that gets you noticed. We also had one of our team present a Shakespearian sonnet on data protection legislation to the event organisers at the Festival of Creative Learning. It broke the ice and built engagement with that group.
You've got to be enthusiastic. If people think you're jaded with information security, it's going to come over in what you're saying and how you're approaching it. You need to make it interesting and entertaining, while being accessible and practical.”
The pair also team up with existing training programmes. For the last year, the university’s digital skills programme, originally conceived to teach skills around PowerPoint, Word, Excel and similar, has included information security as a digital skill. And this year the university’s fraud awareness week, aimed at finance staff, will include information security.
“We also have a security awareness week: a whole week focusing on information security. This year, I'm doing ‘Cybercrime in Hollywood’ as the keynote.
I'm asking, what is cybercrime, what is hacking, and then looking at how cybercrime is portrayed in the movies, showing where Hollywood has done it badly and also where they're starting to do it well. And then I'm finishing the talk off by showing what the reality of cybercrime is.
It also creates an opportunity to tackle the image of what we do. It's not about people with hoodies and dark glasses sitting in basements, it’s not all dark, shadowy and complex. We need to get away from that. We need to be approachable, we need to de-mystify in order to get people on board.”
Garry and David also do sessions on surviving fraud and social engineering, why information security is important, practical encryption and ransomware.
“Additionally, the University provides a MOOC (massive open online course). It's a three-week online course that helps you develop your digital footprint, your online presence, and looks at the need for managing your privacy and balancing that with doing professional networking.”
The infosec team provides question sets for projects looking to procure services to ensure “all the right security questions are being asked at the start of a procurement and not at the end”, and a range of guides, including “top tip” flyers. And to ensure they’re engaging well with students, they make the most of their student interns.
“We ask them what they think, how's that coming over? If you're not engaging the next generation then you’re storing up trouble for the future.”
Engagement, and not just with students, is one of the keys to making the programme work – particularly through partnerships within the university. This will be crucial to the success of the security champions initiative and to encourage people to complete the on-line training and also attend face-to-face sessions. But it isn’t always plain sailing.
You need to get buy-in from the top and this is critical to success. Sometimes this has been achieved by staff attending my talks, then they tell the senior team and then the senior team invite me in. So, it’s not just about a top-down approach. Spreading the word and involving everyone is key here.”
As a result of so much activity, awareness is demonstrably increasing.
“A couple of years ago, security wasn't thought about much and, if considered, it was often at the end of a project. We're seeing a big shift now, right upfront, right at the start. It's great. But we need to ramp it up.
If we suddenly go, ‘Oh we're making a difference, we can ease off now,’ then we'll lose the momentum. We've got to keep pushing on and look for new ways to do things.
The attackers are going to keep changing tactics, and so we have to keep responding to different kinds of threats. That's really important.”
We’ve had spear phishers target our academics in a clever way. After signing up for a legitimate-looking conference, they receive a reply saying there's been a problem with the registration process, with an attachment included. The attachment is genuine: no malware is involved in the scam. Instead, it’s a form where they’re asked to fill in their personal details to get discounts on local hotels. The answer is to check elsewhere for the validity of the conference, rather than assuming that plausible conference links are genuine.
Spear phishing commonly targets key, relevant personnel for urgent payments. Mandate frauds, fake websites, payments to fake supplier bank accounts, spoof invoicing: they’re all regular. We have internal controls in finance to block these and people are constantly on their guard, as such attacks are attempted on a regular basis.
We have heard of students giving money to fake money advisors, lottery scams and accommodation scams, especially at the start of the year and especially for overseas students who can be taken in by the promise of "cheap accommodation".
We see certain compromises, such as bitcoin miners being installed. There was a tendency for people to think that’s fine: “It’s just a bitcoin miner." But bitcoin miners installed in an organisation will search for vulnerable servers and systems on the network and launch attacks against those. Failure to patch impacts on everybody within your organisation and not just the person who has missed a patch.
Freedom of information can offer an attack potential. We have a legal requirement to respond to cyber issues and questions, but we have to be very careful about what we say and how we say it because you could be leaving yourself open to further attack as a result of information you give out.
When academics are personally targeted in whaling attacks, we get calls saying, "How did they know all this personal information about me?" But if we look at their academic online profile, we'll find it's full of useful data. Their biography is there, their teaching, their PhD supervision, what research, what projects, who they've been working with, what they've published.
Clearly, we can't expect people to hide away, but they have to be aware that the phishing attempts on them are based on data and information they themselves put out. People need to keep that in mind and be vigilant during all correspondence.
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Sunderland University has an ambition to become a truly digital first university. They’re taking staff and students on a journey to develop their digital skills, putting technology at the heart of what they do. We’ve been working with the university and through a range of Jisc services, are supporting them to realise this ambition.
“When you know how much you’re spending, where your staff skills are, and what your infrastructure looks like, you get a picture of your business and the role IT plays in that,”
says David Conway, head of IT services.
We first worked with David in 2016, to carry out a financial x-ray. At that time, the university’s IT services were devolved, and they didn’t have a clear view of where money was being spent.
“The financial x-ray was incredibly useful in pointing out some areas where we were not investing and possibly should be, and some areas where we were spending more than we would like to,”
says David.
Taking all the devolved budgets for IT from across the business and putting them into one pot, meant they had a better handle on how the money was being spent. Setting up a new department called ‘technical services’ and moving all staff delivering IT into one place
“allowed us to understand the non-staffing and staffing resources which enabled us to manage them better,”
says David.
Not all these changes were welcomed, as some departments previously had autonomy over the purchases they were making,
“it’s quite a tense time because those people know they have to change, it’s just that initial resistance but once we get through that we’ll start to see the benefits,”
says David.
With a lot of their IT equipment coming to end of life, they needed to spend some money to refresh and renew their data services. A service plan based on a five-year projection highlighted that they would have to spend in the region of £3.5m (realistically £5m). David explains,
“I wanted to avoid that cost because I thought there was a better way to provide IT services.”
Carrying out an infrastructure and applications review helped to form the basis of a plan to move to cloud. Enabling them to put in place a data centre zero strategy, so by 2021/2022 they’ll have no traditional data centres on campus.
“All the information I’ve got from the review is leading me to understand better how we can get into the cloud rapidly. It’s also allowing me to work directly with the business and concentrate on areas where we can rationalise our expenditure,”
says David.
Not everything has been plain sailing. According to David “we’ve had some challenges around connectivity and recently worked with Lisa (account manager) and colleagues in Jisc to ensure we’ve got the relevant connectivity in place to move us forward over the next few years.”
Getting that senior management buy-in has been key to their success. With information gathered through the reviews, David wrote a proposition for the executive team, highlighting where money was being spent on IT. With the majority being spent on ‘underpinning’ such as finance and HR (the systems that make you a business), and ‘qualifying’ such as a VLE (the systems that make you a university).
Ultimately, they want to be ‘transformational’ to give them that competitive edge. David was able to show that they needed to refocus their expenditure
“as an IT services department, we want to put our effort into being transformational, to help the university to get that competitive edge”
says David.
And so, the ‘digital first’ initiative was born. Made up of a set of programmes promoting how they’ll move forward as a digital university by 2021. It includes a range of projects from online assessment and marking, going paperless to creating collaborative working spaces for staff.
After some initial resistance to change,
“people are seeing more and more of what we can present through digital first and what we can deliver through the various platforms that we’re building such as Microsoft 365. They are embracing digital change far more rapidly and probably quicker than we can manage at the minute”
says David.
The initiative backed by the vice-chancellor, is being used as the vehicle to drive the digital first campaign. Delivered at an operational level by the ‘digital first group’, it’s led by the chief operating officer and is made up of ‘champions’ from across the business which includes students and staff from a range of roles.
Taking all their staff on a journey and reskilling them is essential. Working with Jisc and Microsoft to look at solutions such as LinkedIn Learning so that resources can be linked back to the digital skills framework, gaps identified, and suitable development plans put in place.
“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”
says David.
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Jisc worked with The Northern School of Art to redesign their virtual learning environment so that it makes life easier for students and staff. Since then, log-ins are up by nearly two thirds.
More visually appealing. Cleaner. Well-structured and ordered.
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Michael Egan, learning technologist, The Northern School of Art
That’s how learning technologist Michael Egan describes The Northern School of Art’s new virtual learning environment (VLE). He said:
“Since the redesign, it looks far better and is much more engaging for our students."
A VLE is a web-based platform to support student’s study. It includes remote access to everything from course content to tutor chat facilities and can be challenging to integrate and maintain.
We worked with Michael’s Middlesbrough and Hartlepool-based further and higher education organisation to give our perspective on the approach they were taking to redesign their VLE. One of the aims was to create a VLE that represented their visual identity. Michael said:
“It was dated and needed to better reflect our personality and get more students to engage with it.
“I wanted it to be more of a twenty first century platform which actually encouraged education.”
As a result of the changes that have been made to the VLE, user engagement has increased by 65.5%. There were 50,645 logins to the learning platform in September 2018, compared with 33,184 in September 2017. This has helped the VLE to be more integrated into school life, offering benefits for students and tutors
Why hadn’t students and staff been using the VLE as much before this?
Accessibility was a big problem. The VLE wasn’t mobile responsive which meant text was too small when students accessed content on their phones.
“It was also really hard to navigate, so I didn’t use it very much,”
says Simon1, a textiles and surface design student.
The poor navigation meant staff didn’t know about all the different ways they could use the platform to make their life easier. Most lecturers, like Tony Shaw, programme leader for production design, used it only as a storage device.
“I’d share module guides or PowerPoint lecture slides with students,”
he says.
Michael asked us to work with him to figure out what needed to change to make the VLE more integrated into school life. He said:
“I thought it would be best to bring Jisc onboard to provide additional insight and get a second opinion."
So, in November 2017, two of our consultants went to the school for the day. Working with Michael, they met students and staff, including library personnel and vice-principals, to gather their feedback on the VLE. The consultants came up with recommendations about how the platform could change, based on the school’s needs and our experience. This gave Michael an external perspective.
“Jisc’s recommendations backed up what I was thinking. They helped me to get buy-in from staff as Jisc are very much respected in the education sector.”
Michael implemented changes to the VLE in summer 2018, ready for the new academic year. Our support allowed him to justify the changes he wanted to make. These put usability, engagement and accessibility at the fore. More students are accessing the platform on their mobile now, which is helpful as there was a limited number of desktop computers at the school.
Students have been delighted with the changes. Simon said:
“They have made the system easier to navigate overall. Information is easier to find. The notification banner also helps to update you about what is happening on campus.”
A popular feature for students has been the ability to upload documents to OneDrive. It means they can submit work for assessment without coming on to campus. Simon says that being able to access files from the VLE means you’re never stuck if you forget a USB device. You always have everything you need to work off campus. This promotes accessible education and lifelong learning.
“It gives a lot of flexibility to mature students who need to work part-time and/or raise children,”
says Angela, who studies creative film and moving image.
“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.”
The upload feature also makes life easier for staff, cutting down on tedious administration – and giving them more time to teach.
Michael said:
“On the old VLE, it used to take a few minutes to upload just one document. Now it will take about 10 seconds.”
Overall, Michael says staff welcomed changes to the VLE, even though usage varies across different departments and subject areas. He put together a launch video to explain why the changes were needed, as discussed with our consultants. This, as well as training sessions, got staff on board.
“I did lots of face-to-face training sessions, as well as virtual ones, to walk staff through the changes,”
says Michael.
Now, the VLE is a teaching and learning space, rather than document repository. Michael says it’s closer to what actually happens in the classroom and lecture hall. This is because more lecturers are integrating it into their teaching. Tony, for example, has experimented with digital submissions, sending feedback to students by email.
“I use the VLE far more efficiently now,”
says Tony.
“As it’s easier to use, other staff too are more inclined to change and update content. Even those who aren’t as confident with technology are more receptive to it. It’s like an academic comfort blanket knowing the VLE is there supporting what we do.”
Listening to student and staff feedback has been key to the success of the project. Next, the organisation plans to monitor what students are getting out of the VLE content. Michael thinks a VLE is essential for tertiary education and says getting a third-party point of view can support you to create one that suits staff and student needs.
“Regardless of how experienced you are, it helps to have another pair of eyes. Even if it just confirms what you’re already thinking,”
says Michael.
“Jisc worked with us to create a platform that serves and enhances the student experience.”
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Technology is transforming learning for staff and students at vocational specialist Plumpton College. At Jisc, we’ve been supporting the college to trial new technologies and blended learning techniques – giving students the skills they need for the changing workplace.
All young people are comfortable using every type of technology – it’s the colleges that need to keep up.
According to James Maltby, learning technology manager at Plumpton College in East Sussex, while this is a widely-held belief, it simply isn’t the case.
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“It’s a misconception that all students come to college with strong digital skills.
"They’re used to using apps on their phones, but don’t necessarily have good transferable skills. At Plumpton, we focus on giving students the skills they’ll need in the workplace, both directly after college and in years to come. Our technology-focused training shows students how they can apply those skills to other programmes or applications.”
Plumpton is a further and higher education college specialising in land-based courses. This refers to agriculture, horticulture, and other topics useful for rural economies, so subjects include everything from equine studies to adventure education and motor vehicle repair.
Technology is being increasingly used to teach subjects like these, to reflect what’s happening in industry. James says:
“Digital technology is just going to get more and more embedded in industry within the next 10 to 20 years.”
In the agricultural field, this could mean things like sensors and satellites to track livestock, automated tractors, or using data to predict harvest conditions. This will require farmers to have a greater understanding of not only using these technologies, but also how to interpret data.
“We need to make sure these skills are fully developed into the curriculum now,” says James. “So, our students are prepared for the future.”
The focus at Plumpton is on ‘blended learning’: mixing digital technology with traditional teaching practices, rather than thinking about them separately. One of the biggest shifts, says James, is the move away from a suite of computers where students go for ‘IT time’.
“We’re now moving towards an approach where tech is embedded in many different parts of the curriculum.”
At Plumpton, they’ve trialled different approaches, including investing in 360-degree video technology and using virtual reality headsets in the classroom. Students have been experimenting with creating immersive content for their peers. Level 3 agriculture students created a video on how to milk dairy cows to teach Level 1 and 2 students best practice. Students lead these projects. They devise materials and create storyboards and scripts.
Sam Coles, director of teaching and learning, said:
“More and more students studying at Plumpton College don’t have a farming background.
“So, using resources like virtual reality in the classroom helps to embed learning prior to being in the environment.”
The college also takes the technology out to local schools.
“It’s a great way to show prospective students the amount of technology used in the land-based sectors, and how we can prepare them for their future careers, where technology will be used in everyday practice,” says Sam.
Plumpton students and tutors are also trialling different software to encourage active learning.
“Rather than using PowerPoint in our lessons, which is quite passive, we encouraged our lecturers to start using interactive software like Nearpods for developing lessons,” says James.
This software can create quizzes and polls and students can give instant feedback.
“It synchronises prepared lessons to all students’ devices, making learning more interactive and collaborative.”
These blended learning approaches were inspired by the college’s relationship with Jisc.
“I’ve been to a lot of Jisc workshops,” says James.
“They have helped me understand blended learning on a strategic level and how we can start embedding it at Plumpton. That’s been a huge benefit of our collaboration with Jisc.
“Jisc was instrumental in making projects like our virtual reality one happen,”
He says he found his Jisc account managers’ support and advice really useful. They made it easier for him to collaborate with other local colleges.
“It’s surprisingly difficult to know who your equivalent colleague at another institution is, but Jisc account managers knew all the people in different organisations. They created a network amongst us – locally, but also nationally. Jisc also worked with us on evaluating the project and broadcasting results to our network and wider education community.”
James continues to use our data and statistics to keep up with what other colleges are doing in technology.
“We use Jisc surveys as a benchmark to see how our digital technology compares with other FE and HE colleges,”
he says. He also uses the digital capability framework to develop training to make sure colleagues keep up with the skills they need to teach effectively.
“We have a major digital skills drive at the college and are using the framework to shape our training sessions. We don’t focus on ICT skills now, it’s about the wider competencies, rather than specific programmes.”
Plumpton’s digital projects rely on fast and reliable interconnectivity through the Janet Network.
“All our digital infrastructure is based in Janet, including our domain names,” says James. “The specialist support we get with that connectivity from Jisc is vital.”
James was recently awarded a research fellowship to develop the college’s use of technology in its land-based courses, particularly virtual reality and collaborative learning.
“We continue to move away from technology being a passive thing to something that students interact with regularly as part of their learning,”
says James, who wants to work with us again to share his research findings with other colleges and universities.
“Things are constantly changing with technology. If you’re going to keep up, you need to be looking outwards all the time. Our relationship with Jisc is a way of enabling that. It’s collaborative, which is really important for the college’s long-term approach to digital technology.”
To discuss how our consultancy, connectivity or skills development can benefit your organisation, contact your account manager.
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Integration of Airbus’ Vision-1 satellite imagery and the GeoSeer search tool give students and academics access to millions of open access geographical data sets
Jisc is pleased to announce the launch of the improved Jisc geospatial data service providing universities and colleges easy and free access to more than 1.6 million geographical datasets from around the world, including the most comprehensive index of maps ever brought together.
The service features the implementation of a new search tool, GeoSeer, and the access to Airbus’ Vision-1 satellite imagery.
The Jisc service brings open data and licensed data together in one interface, integrating GeoSeer which can search for spatial data by location and subject. It also offers the opportunity to review multiple search results at once by overlaying any of the datasets to study and compare changes in the landscape over time.
Phil Brownnett, head of UK programmes at Airbus Defence and Space - Intelligence said:
“We are very pleased to have been working with Jisc to provide academics and students easy access to valuable datasets, especially Vision-1 high-resolution satellite data. We are committed to empowering researchers and this will help transform their geographical work.”
Early next year, Airbus’ Vision-1 satellite imagery will complete this dataset, allowing researchers to focus on specific locations across the world, with fine and up-to-date details. Jisc is looking to work with universities to explore how the GeoSeer tool and Vision-1 data can enhance research, teaching and learning.
Cam Swift, geospatial data service development manager at Jisc, said:
“We worked with Airbus to integrate GeoSeer into our service, bringing together over 1.6 million open source maps and licensed data into one easy to use interface. This will make it easier for students, academics and researchers to use geographical information.
"Users can log into one service bringing together open access and licensed geography data and working with them seamlessly.”
Jonathan Moules, founder of GeoSeer said:
"It's great to see all of this data made readily available to so many people. Freely available geographical data is really hard to find using conventional means and GeoSeer was developed to ameliorate that. Now thousands in academia have access to this data and can utilise it by simply typing in a search term and then add their desired search layers."
Read more about geospatial data and how to subscribe.
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The Independent Commission on the College of the Future, which Jisc is part of, is asking what is wanted and required from colleges across the four nations of the UK from 2030 onwards.
There are seismic shifts happening across the UK - from demographic changes to technological revolution, from the changing demands of the labour market to climate change.
This will mean significant change for the college sector and colleges should be - and can be - at the heart of meeting these challenges.
Since its launch in spring 2019, the commission has engaged with a wide range of people who have a stake in the future of colleges.
It has now published a progress report to stimulate and provoke more ideas and thoughts as it works towards a final report for publication in spring 2020.
Key themes have emerged and the interim report reflects the commission’s initial thinking as it moves into the next stage - making concrete recommendations for each of the four nations.
Jisc's CEO, Paul Feldman, who’s a member of the commission’s expert panel, said:
“Colleges are at the forefront of government policy to upskill the UK workforce, close the technical skills gap, level the playing field for all learners and provide lifelong learning opportunities for all. Collectively, that’s quite a challenge.
“And while our colleges are used to dealing with a shifting policy landscape – and doing it on a budget - the commission is already highlighting what the sector needs now and in decades to come to deliver what learners, and the UK, need to thrive as we navigate Education 4.0.”
The commission welcomes feedback and questions on the report, which you can submit online or via email to Lewis Cooper, commission director (director@collegecommission.co.uk). You can also share your thoughts on Twitter, @CollegeComm and #CollegeoftheFuture.
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At the Association of Colleges’ (AoC) annual conference, 19-20 November 2019, representatives from further education, government and Jisc will explore how embedding digital technology in education can help colleges meet the expectations and challenges of the future.
A nationwide economic action plan and a recent review of digital innovation throughout Wales highlighted the importance of businesses adapting with digital technology. Marian Jebb, head of post-16 quality and data management for the Welsh Government, said:
“We are seeing massive changes across education, skills and employment. These changes mirror the ways in which technology is increasingly central to our everyday lives.
She added:
“It’s really important that our educational institutions help to secure a ‘pipeline’ of learners who are adept and confident at using digital tools.”
To this end, the Welsh Government’s Digital 2030 framework, which is being applied across colleges nationwide, puts technology front and centre.
Yet findings from Jisc’s recent digital experience insights research suggests that, across the UK, there’s more work to be done.
Of the 13,389 FE students that responded, only 49% see digital skills as important for their future careers, and just 40% feel their course prepares them for the digital workplace. Only 25% of the 3,049 members of FE teaching staff surveyed agreed that teaching spaces at their college are well-designed for digital technology use, and 66% would like digital technologies to be used more than they are now in their teaching practice.
The good news is, a number of institutions throughout the UK are working to address these challenges – including Weston College in the south west of England, where transformative change is taking place.
Jon Hofgartner, the college’s assistant director of technology, learning resources and skills:
“Focusing on digital skills, we’ve sought to exploit new and emerging cloud environments, enabling learners to access their resources, communicate with each other and collaborate together. How our staff digitally interact with learners is modelled upon how they digitally interact with colleagues and external partners – so it reflects the workplace.”
Jisc is also working closely with colleges to help them identify their digital needs and find appropriate tools and resources to plug any gaps. Paul McKean, head of FE and skills at Jisc, comments:
“The government’s edtech strategy in England and the Welsh Government’s Digital 2030 framework highlight the importance of technology. Meanwhile, the work of the Independent Commission on the College of the Future explores how the FE sector can be supported to embrace digital.
"Aligning courses and curriculum with the evolving needs of Industry 4.0 are key, as is upskilling the workforce to include digital skills.”
Ultimately, McKean concludes:
“In supporting colleges to embed and embrace digital, our Education 4.0 vision recognises the change colleges, government and learners want to see”.
To hear more about how colleges are being championed by government and Jisc to embrace digital technology, come to Jisc’s session at the AoC Annual Conference, 11:30 on 19 November 2019.
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There are risks to the unthinking use of everyday tech, from Alexa to WhatsApp, and the consequences – for staff, students and their institutions – can be severe. Bernadette John argues that digital professionalism is the answer.
You’re at your GP’s surgery, talking to your doctor about a delicate medical matter. She suggests you might find some physiotherapy helpful and … suddenly you hear Alexa pipe up with the name and phone number of a physio.
Or perhaps your consultant has shared a scan with some colleagues for a second opinion. You’re pleased she’s working collaboratively but … she’s shared it using a WhatsApp group. Which means that your personal image may well have been downloaded onto each of the doctors’ – or medical students’ – personal devices and stored in their unencrypted photo galleries.
Bernadette John has come across both these situations. As an experienced clinical tutor – and formerly a public health nurse and midwife – she’s deeply concerned about the lack of risk assessment around the everyday technology that’s used as a matter of course by clinicians.
“Many doctors I know exchange images of medical notes, clinical images and blood results on WhatsApp,”
says Bernadette.
“And they consider it to be secure and encrypted but they haven't realised that if they share an image on WhatsApp, it's downloaded by default into my Apple iCloud, and networked between all of my devices. It’s a security risk and we need to be considering the threat to privacy of the people we discuss and we are engaged in researching.”
For Bernadette it’s a matter of what she terms “digital professionalism”: the competence or values expected of a professional when engaged in social and digital communication. It’s a field she’s made her own since initiating it at King’s College London Medical School in 2012 (she’s now at University College Cork) and she’s passionate about training staff and students to think more seriously about the information and images they consciously, or unconsciously, share.
“People are sleepwalking into a surveillance society. They're not aware of what their obligations are with regards to the tech in their pockets, they're just using it for work without mindfully considering what the risks and benefits are and making a balanced and informed decision about it.”
From maths to law, nursing to dentistry, Bernadette finds the same issues come up again and again in the training sessions she delivers to students. Digital communications, including smartphones and smart speakers, and social media are presenting challenges to young people in how they present themselves to the world. The consequences may be immediate but their online actions may equally have an impact on their future careers much further down the line.
Bernadette has compelling examples of students who have missed out on sporting scholarships to American universities and colleges thanks to Facebook photos revealing heavy drinking below the US legal age of 21 or inappropriate Instagram pictures that affect employability in more conservative professions.
“The consequences for individual students can be severe. They can become unemployable, and I have certainly seen that,”
says Bernadette.
“We need to actively train students in what we expect of them with regard to how they carry themselves on social channels, and to make it explicit. We need to show them scenarios where things haven't worked out well for others, and ask them to explore those scenarios. But we can't do that without also doing it for the staff.”
Bernadette is a fan of compulsory and regular training in digital professionalism, ensuring a good grounding in what the current platforms are, what their terms and conditions say, what their rights and permissions are and how things are published. She also argues for e-learning modules tailored to the user, with scenarios applicable to students in different disciplines.
There is also a role for the institution in relation to monitoring and regulating the extent to which employees or students who handle sensitive information are allowed to use their own devices.
There are ways to share this kind of data safely. Bernadette points to the use of iPhones by doctors and clinical researchers in the US.
There, a hospital buys devices specifically for medics to communicate while at work, with that communication controlled by a system called Voalte. When the doctor leaves work, they hand that device to the person who is taking over from them or leave it in a secure area. If they walk off the premises with the device, it is automatically wiped. And all the apps are locked down so there is no potential for iCloud to be grabbing pictures or Facebook to be downloading contacts.
“Here they could use a secure, GDPR-compliant PDF creator app to take an image, and email it with their secure university email, or their Microsoft OneDrive that they've been issued, which is GDPR compliant, as opposed to using Dropbox or Google Drive. That risk assessment isn’t currently happening and it risks the security and integrity of the research that we generate and the privacy of our research subjects.
“We need to work together, risk assess each other and help each other to make informed decisions about what we do online,”
concludes Bernadette.
Review privacy settings on all social media profiles, accounts, chatrooms etc regularly as they can change, allowing material that was originally private into the public domain.
Consider everything that you write online as potentially public – the anonymous blog or Twitter account of today may later be exposed and associated with the author. Will that reflect your future role?
Social media should not be used as a way of raising concerns or whistle blowing.
It is best to avoid online mentions/discussions about clients, colleagues or even peers on Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat. All online discussions around clients must be anonymised and should be restricted to specific professional online forums and chatrooms.
Resist the urge to chart your exhaustion and lack of sleep with a toothache or sleepless baby, or your late-night socialising, on any social media – it may be used to evidence that you were below par in the workplace the following day!
Never accept Facebook friend requests or follows on Instagram/Snapchat from patients, clients or students. If possible, also don’t accept them from close work colleagues, those you meet on placements or internships, or your new boss.
Resist the urge to publish your photos of others on social channels without their permission and make sure that everyone knows they must ask your permission before they publish photos of you.
Be aware that EXIF data – such as geographical coordinates, date, time, make and model of originating device – are often embedded in the images that we create on our mobile devices and are therefore potentially viewable by others – and that could include the profile photos you may have uploaded onto that dating website...
Most apps now have permission to send and read digital communications (including email, SSM and iMessages) from your device without notifying you. Be aware that platforms such as Facebook can use your Bluetooth to locate you, even if you aren’t using their app and, potentially, even without asking for your permission.
Client/student data must be stored securely, and NOT in the Apple cloud. Is WhatsApp automatically downloading images to your image gallery on your personal mobile devices? WhatsApp is not an appropriate channel for professional/clinical communications.
Beware of image/message streaming between networked devices.
If you use a personal smartphone, tablet, laptop or PC for your professional/clinical work or research, be sure to establish how to clean the devices before discarding them or handing them in as part of an upgrade.
via Jisc news
Glitches in technology can be a huge challenge for disabled students who rely on accessible e-books. We’re working with Leeds Beckett University on a game-changing project to tackle this.
“Having disabilities in university can be an isolating experience,”
says Tosin, who’s studying dietetics at Leeds Beckett University.
“I struggle to read printed material due to text size. Flexible, adaptable e-books should mean I have access to the same resources as my course mates.”
For university students like Tosin, with visual impairments or learning difficulties, e-books can be a game changer. Adaptable fonts and background colours can improve visibility and clarity. With the right software, they can be read aloud. Without these options, however, some students simply wouldn’t be able to complete their course.
When e-books don’t work properly, they can cause a range of problems for students, as well as support staff.
“Technological problems can make me feel even more alienated,”
says Tosin.
That’s why we’ve been collaborating with Leeds Beckett University, 48 other higher education institutions, and a wide range of academic suppliers on the ASPIRE project1. It’s already making a huge difference to the accessibility of academic e-books.
Susan Smith, the university’s learning support officer (disability and dyslexia), helps students find accessible texts for their courses.
“We were finding that technical issues were stopping students using e-books,”
she says.
“These included things like the software students used to read text aloud not being compatible with the e-book platform. Or they couldn’t make necessary changes to the font, or background colour, to help with the visibility of the text.”
Students were missing out on the vital information they needed to succeed at university.
“We had this whole group of students who didn’t have as equal access as their peers to the books they needed,”
says Susan.
“If they couldn’t access a book they’d been asked to read, they might not be able to take part in a seminar or even have to miss an assignment. Disabled students were having to just accept the books they had access to, rather than choosing books based on what was best for their assignment.”
Susan and her colleagues often had to go back to suppliers to request e-books in different formats or to get accessibility information about e-books that wasn’t readily available. With around 3,200 disabled students at the university, each with a long reading list, the task was onerous and time-consuming.
“E-books should be phenomenally flexible,”
says Susan.
“You should be able to customise them to suit your needs. It’s frustrating to buy them and discover they’re restricted, and you can’t make use of the tech available.”
The ASPIRE team set out to tackle this problem. They carried out an audit of available information from suppliers about their e-books’ accessibility. It builds on the ASPIRE team’s 2016 audit, which looked at the functionality of e-books and how accessible they were.
Susan and her colleague analysed the results of multiple audits from 54 e-book platforms and 87 publishers – a total of 585 sets of data. They scored suppliers on how successfully they provided the information support staff and students needed.
We were there to offer both expertise and practical support. The team used JiscMail to arrange meetings. But most importantly, our knowledge of the higher education and information technology sectors, and connections, made it possible to get the right people on board with the project.
“Other university library staff, publishers and platform developers know Jisc and understand their role in advising universities,”
says Susan.
“Having that backing was really important – it’s why this project worked so well. I’d advise other universities to join forces with Jisc and get the weight of their expertise behind you.”
The ASPIRE team also set up an awards and badge scheme for suppliers to recognise those making their products’ accessibility transparent. Suppliers can use this in their marketing, and it can guide library and procurement staff when they’re making decisions about what e-books they buy.
“If we’ve got a choice between two different e-book companies, we’re now going to look for the one that has both better accessibility and information about that accessibility,”
says Susan.
E-book publishers are listening and already making changes. Academic e-book provider EBSCO Information Services has started to provide simplified accessibility information aimed at users or librarians who may not be familiar with their product. They have also created a table of navigation recommendations that can be read by a screen reader and other assistive technologies.
“We expect this information will save librarians and end users a significant amount of time,”
says Emma Waecker, senior product manager at EBSCO.
“So, it’s an investment that we were happy to make. We’re also having conversations with colleagues and publishers about how to improve the accessibility of the content we host and ensure any changes we make to EBSCO host software are designed for accessibility first.”
Thanks to the ASPIRE project, library staff across the UK have more information at their fingertips – making it quicker and easier to support disabled students.
“Understanding the needs of disabled students like me improves the quality and accessibility of e-books,”
says Tosin.
“It’s vital that staff are knowledgeable about e-books to improve our experiences as students and so everyone can use them more easily.”
To discuss how our accessibility and inclusion packages can benefit your organisation, please contact your account manager.
via Jisc news
At last year’s Jisc security conference, keynote speaker Kieren Lovell launched Exercise Mercury, a cyberattacking exercise that aims to expose weak spots in a university’s systems that could be exploited by illegal hackers.
20 UK universities signed up to take part and Kieren returned to the conference this year to tell us how they got on and what we can all learn from the competition. Here he explains how it all began, what they discovered and where it’s going next.
Two universities are paired off and each spends a week ‘attacking’ the other using an internal team of staff and students to uncover vulnerabilities in processes, policies, procedures, technology infrastructure and the digital footprint. The idea is to use university specialists from across the board – not just cyber security experts but system administrators, PR people, open-source intelligence, office administrators – to work out what they can find out about their ‘opponent’s’ organisation.
Teams typically spend two days checking out what’s most important to the opposition (sensitive research, for example) and the remainder of the week working out how to cause the most damage. Using open source intelligence and social engineering techniques, the ‘hackers’ perform a controlled simulation of an attack with clear legal boundaries. The winning team is the one that would have made the most negative impact.
It began in 2016 when I was head of the University of Cambridge’s computer emergency response team (CERT) and challenged Tallinn University of Technology to test our vulnerabilities.
It became quite apparent that while Cambridge has a lot of technical expertise, it also has a very large distributed network with lots of people doing lots of things in non-typical ways, so Tallinn had a field day with us. One of the first learning outcomes that I had was that we really need to know what we have and what others can see about us. We can't just keep relying on our ability to mark our own homework.
Universities have limited resources so when they do penetration testing, they generally do it as little and as infrequently as they have to, and superficially rather than looking at the whole organisation, which is what a hacker is doing. I continued the project when I moved to head up CERT at Tallinn University and developed it into Exercise Mercury with Jisc.
All of the universities had within the last year passed a penetration test with a lovely tick box to say they were secure. Yet every one of them was compromised by our students.
With one target, despite the fact that it had intruder detection systems and CloudFlare set up, it took the students just 12 minutes to get the entire internal schematic of the whole university without a username or password. Ironically, when we handed it to the university, they said didn't actually have their own internal schematic. We had one, but they didn't.
It's mainly around ownership and knowing what equipment you've got. The two biggest trends are legacy equipment that's been dumped on the network from academic projects where the funding has finished but the devices are still running and not being maintained, and legacy equipment and services that have been moved to the cloud but not upgraded.
The problem has simply been moved elsewhere, which has the effect of amplifying existing problems and now they can't even see in the logs if they've been compromised or not.
There's also a lot of misconfigured AWS and Google cloud services, where they've assumed that Amazon and Google are taking the security precautions for them on that particular avenue and in reality they haven't. You can do some quite interesting AWS and Google cloud attacks in order to compromise pretty much the entire installation.
If you don't know where your equipment is, who hosts it or how to contact them, what can you do about it when it’s compromised? It's the worst type of incident. You can't even turn it off. Every university we've looked at so far has these instances, either in the cloud or in external hosting.
Give me a room of a thousand university professors, students and staff, and I will ask one question: “Please put your hand up if you've read the information security policy.” Three people will put their hands up. If I then ask, “Put your hands up if you wrote it,” it will be the same three people.
Universities, like government services, can be very slow at pushing information out and updating it, so there are usually an awful lot of outdated policies and advice on a university's website that don't provide any security at all. The update process knowledge is in deficit, so you've got people getting wrong policies that no one's reading anyway.
The way that we communicate information security to users has to change. It has to be more push than pull. They shouldn't have to look for it. We have to do it in a more fun way because no one's going to choose to read a policy document and no one is going to willingly do a one-hour training course about information security.
Most of them have realised that rather than focusing on their shiny new technology, they need to work out what legacy technology they have, do a proper audit of what people have got on their network and find out what people are hosting in the name of their university, off their network.
We also need to make sure that everybody understands that if you are a target – as universities are – then you will be compromised and the only way you can deal with it is to work out how to be notified when it happens and how to deal with the incident as quickly and as professionally as possible.
On one occasion we were doing basic checks on a server and it gave us 65,000 image files of peoples' passports. Which is great because they knew that it had never been compromised before, they checked on the logs and everything was fine. We'd found it before somebody else did, so it proved that mechanism works well.
They've now secured their system or – I think in this case – actually set fire to their system.
We've got ramp-ups starting in December, January and February, and the Global Cyber Alliance will be involved in this as well. We are also taking it a step further by writing reports of how we could break a university and then table-topping it with university senior management as a real-life exercise, so they can simulate how they would deal with the situation if somebody did press the big red button and attack.
As well as the university competition, we’re also working with a number of military organisations, figuring out how we can track warships using social media and weaknesses in procedures, plus we’ve covered government bodies and a nuclear power station. I'm going to Adelaide in two weeks' time to use the same skills to find missing people, going through hundreds of cold cases.
Despite the variety of sectors in which we’ve deployed Exercise Mercury, we find remarkably similar results in certain areas.
We want to share the information that has come out of Exercise Mercury so the whole sector benefits, including the process and rules of engagement so that every other university that would like to can run a similar exercise.
via Jisc news
A system developed by Jisc to deliver seamless roaming internet access for the public sector has been named "best communications system" at the Building Better Healthcare awards 2019.
Govroam smooths the way for multi-discipline working, for example, GPs or district nurses whose work takes them into care homes, where govroam allows them to log on to their own network and input notes.
The technology is now available at almost 4,500 public sector venues across the UK, including blue light services and local authorities, but it is particularly popular at NHS premises: 42% of all organisations that have joined govroam are part of the NHS.
The judging panel, which described govroam as “a game-changer", was chaired by Roy Lilley, founder member of the NHS Trust Federation, independent health policy analyst and director of the institute of healthcare management.
Mark O’Leary, Jisc’s head of network access, said:
“The team have worked hard to promote govroam for the health sector and recognition like this rewards that effort. But for us, it’s just as rewarding to hear that the availability of govroam is increasing client contact time for social care staff or allowing clinical staff to work more efficiently at the patient’s bedside.”
Lola Harre, Jisc’s govroam service manager, added:
"Govroam is making a real difference to staff in health and social care, and it’s wonderful to hear the judges recognise this positive impact of the service"
Govroam uses the same technology as Jisc’s eduroam service, which was developed more than 15 years ago for the education sector. Its biggest benefit is that staff can access the govroam network at any participating organisation using a single, securely authenticated sign-on process. This makes working across several sites easier as users will only need to configure a profile once to connect to the service.
The Building Better Healthcare awards’ ceremony was held in London on 30 October. See the full list of winners.
Marcus Baw, GP and emergency physician:
“When I first heard about govroam as proposed in the UK by Jisc I thought: ‘That’s exactly what we need in the NHS’. The eduroam model, which has been proven to a) work, b) be cheap, and c) scale internationally, seems to be ideal.”
Medway NHS Foundation Trust:
“The benefits of using govroam for us mean that we can interoperate better with our partners and colleagues within other NHS organisations. [...] So that means that we can share our network, securely, and enable them to reach the resources that they need.”
via Jisc news
As the UK prepares for the general election in December, students at 22 universities and colleges are being registered to vote quickly and easily using a new service
And the first FE college has now signed up to the service meaning that students attending Grimsby Institute will be able to register to vote as quickly and easily as those at participating universities.
So far more than 2,000 voters have registered under the Jisc student voter registration service, which was launched earlier this year to help English universities and colleges meet an Office for Students (OfS) requirement to enable the electoral registration of students.
The introduction of the OfS requirement was subsequent to changes in legislation in 2017, which followed years of low levels of registrations of 18 to 25 year olds, including students.
With academic registrars faced with extra work to meet these requirements, Jisc teamed up with the Academic Registrars Council, the?Association of Heads of University Administration and the UK’s electoral registrar community to launch a simple solution to the problem.
Participating institutions can direct their students securely and transparently to the service. The institutions are free to decide when and how to do this. The service is available all year round.
The service presents the student with a form, which has as many of the fields as possible pre-populated using student information already held by the institution, such as the student’s name and date of birth. The student simply needs to complete any missing information not provided by their institution (eg their National Insurance number), provide their consent to be added to the electoral register and their voting preferences (in person or by post), and submit the form.
Once submitted, this information is provided automatically and securely to the relevant, participating electoral registrars, reducing the effort and expense it would take for members and local authorities to register students to vote across the UK.
The universities and colleges which have signed up to use the service at the time of writing are:
The service has seen an upturn in student registrations since parliament voted for an election as a result of institutions’ renewed efforts to promote the service to students ahead of the election.
The service also provides a portal for electoral registration officers at participating local authorities. This securely authenticates them as users and allows the download of student applications for their locality, at which point they process the registration as normal.
To date the service has been used to register students to vote in 78 local authorities of the 87 participating in the service.
Josh Howlett, Jisc’s head of trust and identity e-infrastructure, said:
"Getting students registered to vote is an important part of an institutions' mission in promoting civic engagement among their students.
"Moreover, the OfS requires providers of higher education to facilitate electoral registration.
"The Jisc service provides a cost effective and simple solution for both institutions and local authorities registering students to vote.
"We are delighted with the level of engagement we have had with the electoral registration officers and look forward to even more joining the service in the future so they are able to benefit from our data in any future elections."
Find out more about the student voter registration service by emailing studentvote@jisc.ac.uk.
via Jisc news
Alex Harding is IT services manager of Runshaw College. Alex and his team have taken the college from the information security starting blocks to being substantially on the way to achieving the coveted ISO 27001 accreditation. He shares how he did it.
Our starting point was effectively nothing. We had basic antivirus provision and email security but no big-picture thinking on information security. No policy, no frameworks, no tracking of incidents. I think much of further education (FE) is in that situation.
I remember the first time we came to the security conference in 2017 and there was a chap from a large university presenting. He said one of his challenges was that he had only about a million pounds to spend on information security. I reached in my pocket and I tipped all the change out of it on the table in front me. Our Jisc account manager was sitting next to me, and I said, "Andrew, it looks like we've got about £2.80 to spend on information security.”
Given our financial constraints, we needed to be quite light touch and agile and build from the ground up. There are only 12 of us in the team, including the service desk, the infrastructure team and the IT systems team.
We started with the basics: a comprehensive and ongoing risk assessment, some overarching policies and then policies in specific areas such as password management, encryption and clear desks. And, of course, Cyber Essentials.
Taking an agile approach, we drew a freehand diagram of what we called the rich picture on a whiteboard. Everything’s on there: the college at the centre, where the threats might come from, what existing mitigations we've got. It’s a thought shower of what the threat landscape looks like for us.
We’ve unpicked that into a more formal risk assessment, prioritising as we go and, in some instances, stopping the risk assessment process to add mitigations and create policies.
Patching as we go has proved more effective for us than sticking for a couple of months, carrying out the risk assessment, doing the analysis. It fits our available resources better because, essentially, our available resources are any time we're not doing the day-to-day firefighting.
At the same time, the threats have been changing. A couple of years ago we had some big denial of service attacks. Now we're seeing more and more phishing attempts and social engineering – people-focused threats.
We have biannual penetration testing through Jisc and last year, for the first time, we introduced a simulated phishing attack, based around an end of term celebration / gathering feedback type of email. The team had been keeping a book on what percentage we thought would be successful but when I saw the actual template come through from the security team, all bets were off at that point. My phone did not stop ringing the following day as something like 30% of people gave it their credentials.
As a result, we devised a big campaign involving our staff magazine and phishing awareness training. In a repeat test just after Easter, we were down to 5-10%. There is clearly still a risk there but we’re moving in the right direction.
Increasing awareness across all staff – both teaching and support staff – is always the greatest challenge and is where the biggest risk lies. I think convincing people that just because we are in education and we're not making mega-millions doesn't mean that we're not a viable target for these attackers.
We’ve been taking the approach that it’s like health and safety – it’s everyone’s problem. If you spot a spillage in a corridor it’s a danger to others and you report it. In the same way, people need to report phishing near-misses: "oh, I had this phishing campaign and I didn't fall for it. I'll send that through to you."
Maintaining Cyber Essentials Plus as a minimum standard is a key plank of our overarching information security policy and we will go for renewal every year. We learned a lot from that process itself.
Even though it's quite a light touch process, it highlighted that even at a low level there were gaps in our practice. Of course, we should be aiming higher and wider and going further. But it's a good starting point and a good solid foundation.
As for ISO 27001, we’ve started our journey but we are a long way from the finish line.
We’re prioritising risk treatments as gaps are identified and we’re proud that we’ve adapted our IT service management tool (Jira) to become our information security management system, allowing us to link key services and assets to elements of the risk assessment.
ISO 27001 specifies the requirements for establishing, implementing, maintaining and continually improving an information security management system within the context of the organisation. The standard is made up of 114 controls in 14 groups and 35 control objectives.
Cyber Essentials is a UK government information assurance scheme operated by the National Cyber Security Centre. It encourages organisations to adopt good practice in information security. Organisations self-assess their systems and this assessment is independently verified by accredited organisations.
Jisc is in the process of being accredited by Cyber Essentials so that we can offer the service as an included benefit of your membership. Contact securityservices@jisc.ac.uk to find out more and to be alerted once the service is available.
Talk to your Jisc account manager. There’s a wealth of knowledge and experience in Jisc to help with those foundation steps and starting out. That's been a big win for us. We've learned a lot from the Jisc security team, CSIRT and joining the UK security mail base.
Look into Cyber Essentials and see where you are from that minimum standards point of view.
via Jisc news
More students at Cardiff Metropolitan University are using digital technology to reach their potential. Our services have supported staff to work more flexibly, collaboratively and productively to make this happen.
“Our ambition is that digital is threaded throughout what we do,”
says Paul Riley, director of library and information services at Cardiff Metropolitan University.
“It will drive everything, from carrying out excellent research to increasing student numbers, helping to provide a first-class student experience.”
We worked with Paul, to put staff and student experience at the heart of the university’s digital strategy. The aim is to support more students to reach their potential and for the university to be an employer that uses digital to support communication, collaboration and productivity. This is an important shift in focus for the institution.
“Our new digital strategy looks at what business problems could be resolved by taking a digital approach and how we use digital to enable us to hit our organisational strategy,”
says Paul.
“Before we were concentrating too much on technology, rather than people.”
Creative Commons attribution information
Paul Riley
Paul used three of our products to focus on the people the strategy supports. Firstly, he attended our annual education technology conference Digifest. The event pushed his thinking forward and opened up new possibilities. He considered key trends like Education 4.0.
Secondly, in 2016, Paul took part in our digital leaders programme, a four-day course which looks at creating a digital strategy that enhances learning and teaching. Paul says he learnt how storytelling could support him to get buy-in for change from senior staff.
“The course provided space to reflect and think about what we were looking to get from a digital strategy,”
says Paul.
“I learnt to tell the story about what I wanted to do with the strategy. For example, at a budget meeting, I talked about digital touch points from a student point of view, from enrolling online, to getting learning materials through our virtual learning environment. That identified areas for development and was much more powerful than saying: ‘I need £X to develop a service’.”
Thirdly, our digital experience tracker focused Paul on the student experience and influenced the university’s strategic direction with digital. It’s a short survey which gathers students’ expectations and experiences of technology and offers comparative data from other institutions. The university had done their own student surveys in the past but Paul says this Jisc-branded one saved time, and provided credibility and objectivity.
Results were unexpected.
“Students didn’t say ‘We need more PCs or better wifi’,”
says Paul.
“It was much more about threading digital through learning and teaching and making sure staff and students could use it. This led to our pilot of Microsoft Teams.”
Information systems lecturer Nigel Jones trialled using group chat software Microsoft Teams with his students for an application building module. It allowed him to be away for 12 weeks of the 2018-2019 academic year when he was travelling internationally but still provide tailored support to his students as they needed it.
“If one of the groups was having a problem, I’d get a notification on my phone,”
says Nigel.
“I could log in to Microsoft Teams, see what was going on and provide support. This helped the final applications and websites they produced to be better quality.”
Nigel says integrating the software into his teaching has allowed his students to work together more efficiently, as they would need to in the workplace as developers.
“Teams makes it easier to get group work done when you're not at uni, or somebody is not able to turn up to work on the assignment,"
says Simon1, one of Nigel’s students.
“Teachers can use it to communicate with individuals about their work or if the student has a question they don’t want others to see.”
Staff and students have had more support to use technology since the digital strategy was published at the beginning of 2018-19. Paul has helped set up Your Tech Community, a support network for staff to embed digital in their work.
“As a result, we’re seeing more staff becoming engaged with how they can use technology in their teaching,”
says Paul.
Paul’s team is also working with teaching staff and learning technology developers on implementing role specific digital training for staff. This uses storytelling to get buy-in.
“We try to understand how a member of teaching staff can use digital to make their teaching and learning better,”
says Paul.
“So, rather than staff focusing on how they should be using the kit, they think more about how the tech can be integrated into what they want to do.”
Inductions for students have become more specific too. They look at how technology can help students complete their course and gain skills for the workplace. This is aligned to the university’s organisational strategy. It prioritises providing courses and opportunities that allow students to develop the ‘Cardiff Met EDGE’ – a series of ethical, digital, global and entrepreneurial skills to prepare them for life after university.
Indeed, the ambition is for this current digital strategy, which runs to 2023, to be the university’s last.
“The Jisc digital leaders programme encouraged us to ask if we actually needed a separate digital strategy at all,”
says Paul.
To discuss how our courses, events and resources can benefit your organisation, please contact your account manager.
via Jisc news
A new Jisc survey of 6,534 members of teaching staff at 61 UK colleges and universities reveals that less than 15% are given time to innovate or recognised for developing digital skills.
Launched today at an event hosted by Jisc and the Independent Commission on the College of the Future, the digital experience insights survey findings suggest that teaching staff need more time and support to innovate in their use of technology.
Despite Office for Students’ predictions that more than a million digitally skilled people will be needed by 2022 and a recognition within the government’s edtech strategy that ‘technology is increasingly part of our society’, only about third of the survey respondents agree they have regular opportunities to develop digital skills.
Further, just 15% of the 3,049 respondents working in further education (FE) and only 13% of the 3,485 respondents working in higher education (HE) agree that they have time and support to innovate. As little as 14% in FE and 9% of staff in HE agree that they receive reward or recognition when they develop digital aspects of their role.
Reflecting on the results, Professor Sir Ian Diamond – chair of the Independent Commission on the College of the Future and the UK’s national statistician – comments:
“Colleges and universities are investing in infrastructure and their digital environment. Now is the time to ensure that the systematic and continuous updating of staff digital skills is prioritised too.
"The world of work is changing at pace, so it is crucial that students are equipped for our increasingly digital workplaces. This is only possible if teaching staff are confident and encouraged in their use of technology, now and in the future.”
Among respondents to the survey, around a third (33% in FE and 27% in HE) agree that they receive guidance about the digital skills they are expected to have - but, within the survey, a member of HE teaching staff notes:
“One of the reasons many tutors don't trial new technologies is they are afraid they will not be able to manage or deliver them in front of students, and that this will impact adversely on the learning experience and create embarrassment. It is not enough to be given instruction on how to use new technology. We need to be able to try it out in a situation where, if we fail, it won't matter.”
Sarah Knight, Jisc’s head of change - student experience, says:
“We work with colleges and universities to review their digital practice, helping to create a technology-focused environment that works for all.
"FE and HE staff need the confidence and capabilities to embed technology within teaching and learning, to deliver the world-class experience students deserve, and to prepare learners for the jobs of tomorrow.”
via Jisc news
We have supported Swansea University and three colleges in Wales to use technology to be better connected. This is making learning more fun, fulfilling, and future-focused – for students and staff.
A-level physics student Sam1, apprentices Jane and Mohammed, engineering undergraduate James, and experienced engineer Sarah are designing a new part for an aeroplane. They represent three further education colleges, one university and a global company, all based in Wales. Each is in their own institution using video conferencing to work together on the engineering challenge.
“Collaborative learning is the future and can lead to more connected communities,” says Paul Holland, dean of educational technology at Swansea University. “It means we can collaborate more effectively with local further education colleges and be more aligned, helping students through their education journey. It also helps them to work in teams with different skillsets – as they will need to in their future careers.
“I’ve seen the need for a connected and collaborative way of working that our students will need for the fourth industrial revolution. I don’t think everyone realises the potential of where this is heading, or how disruptive it could be. But it’s my role as dean of educational technology to enable that change."
The engineering challenge mentioned above is one of the imagined scenarios of how Paul sees the Growing Comms project working. The project is a collaboration between Swansea University, Gower College Swansea, Pembrokeshire College and the NPTC Group of Colleges.
“Growing Comms is an example of Jisc’s vision for Education 4.0 – when student experiences improve because of advanced technology,” says Paul.
Each of the four institutions involved will have an active learning space they can use to teach in. They can also use the space to link to partner institutions for collaboration and host industry-led innovation events.
The spaces are currently being designed and will contain furniture and technology which directly involve students in the learning process.
“This allows students to go deeper and do more design-based learning, rather than the traditional method of a lecturer stood at the front transmitting knowledge,” says Paul. “Instead, lecturers can put their classroom materials online for students to study before they come to an active learning session. This promotes deeper learning.”
The partnership aims to support further education students to learn more about what higher education is like. Kate Pearce, information learning technology manager at Gower College Swansea, imagines this happening through innovation events, like the one mentioned above.
“Another example is our A-level science students accessing high-level teaching and learning that we may not be able to facilitate here. They can use an active learning space at our college that links up with the one at Swansea University,” she says.
The institutions will work together to find ways for students living in remote areas to stay in education without having to come into college. This will improve employability across Wales. “We know there’s a skills gap,” says Paul. “Students will have to be able to adapt really quickly to do different jobs. They need digital skills and to learn quickly. These active learning spaces bring those things together.”
The partnership is supporting the university and colleges to learn from each other. Kate at Gower College says it’s really important for higher education to understand the environment which students come from and for colleges to understand the environment they’re sending students to.
For some higher education teachers, this interactive way of supporting learning is new. But, lecturers at Swansea, like Paul, are passionate about the benefits of active learning, for students – and staff.
“I’ve had my best experience of teaching in higher education in the active learning spaces,” says Paul. “That two hours is magical. I’m walking round, sitting with students, listening to them, talking to them. It’s much more personal and easier to see your impact on them because it’s a two-way conversation and there’s all the peer learning. There’s a happy buzz in the room. The idea is that it’s not you as an expert at the front, it’s the ideology that we all learn together.”
Many of Paul’s colleagues first experienced this way of teaching and learning in April 2018, when Swansea University hosted a Jisc sticky campus. This is a mobile digital classroom which we take to institutions around the UK to trial this active way of learning.
For two weeks, the sticky campus hosted everything from teaching to student society meetings. Staff and students who used the space gave lots of positive feedback and asked for more active learning spaces, which helped influence change. “It will provide a better student experience and a selling point to distinguish us from the competition,” said one staff member. “The spaces allow everyone to interact and collaborate on answering questions,” added a student.
The sticky campus event led to Swansea University installing permanent active learning spaces. One of them, room A019, in the College of Engineering Central has computers on 10 tables that seat six people with a collaborative screen at the end of each. Teaching can be traditional, with students working individually while a lecturer teaches. Or the computers can be folded down inside the tables, creating a more collaborative space where students can work in teams and lecturers can use active learning approaches.
Students using the space are not limited to pen and paper. They can bring their own device and, via an app and wifi, connect to the collaborative screen so everyone can work together. Lecturers can also make collaborative screens appear next to each other so the 10 tables can share their work with everyone in the room.
“My third years use the space in multiple ways and it’s a really supportive – and cool – learning environment,” says Paul Davies, lecturer at the school of management. “They present to each other and can fold the PCs down so they are out of the way, allowing real social and peer learning. I can’t tell you how much this helps promote learning compared to the standard PC lab layout and the students appreciate it too.”
This investment in active learning inspired Paul and his colleagues to successfully apply for £370,000 Higher Education Funding Council for Wales funding for the Growing Comms project. Since then, we’ve worked with Paul to lead Growing Comms. He says we’ve been a “neutral stakeholder” in the project, hosting a workshop to help the four institutions decide what should be in the active learning spaces. “Having Jisc involved was useful. Although Swansea is the lead partner, we didn’t want to impose our views,” says Paul.
Paul suggests we can help other traditionally conservative institutions to evolve to this collaborative way of working. “I trust Jisc to help facilitate this process and be a partner in the work,” he says.
via Jisc news
If the answer to that question’s a slightly weary “yes”, you’re not alone. Jisc’s 2019 cyber security posture survey shows that IT and security specialists in both higher and further education organisations believe phishing remains a major threat.
Phishing has been the top threat mentioned in the annual cyber security posture survey for the last three years and Dr John Chapman, head of Jisc’s security operations centre (SOC), says the phishing incidents seen by his team show that members are right to be concerned.
As cyber attacks increase in frequency and sophistication, this is an issue that colleges and universities are working hard to address. For example nearly three-quarters of HE providers have now recruited staff for dedicated cyber security roles and 66% have a strategic cyber security lead – that’s an increase of ten percentage points in the last two years. Corresponding figures are lower in FE, where 11% have dedicated cyber security roles and 38% have a strategic cyber security lead, but they’re increasing here too.
Members are fighting back against the rising threat in other ways. 97% of universities and 75% of FE colleges are now using third party services to help in spotting and managing current and future threats, compared with 66% of universities and 49% of colleges in 2018.
But, despite significant work to bolster cyber defences, some organisations feel less protected than they did last year. Respondents were asked to say how well they feel their organisation is protected against cyber threats, rating it from one to ten, with ten representing ‘very well protected’. The mean score in HE was 5.6 (a drop of 0.3 since 2018) and 5.9 in FE (a larger drop from 7.1 last year).
That’s partly because cyber attacks are more often in the news, but it is also suspected that the increase in security staff has led to a more realistic assessment of an institution’s security posture.
People-related incidents are the second most frequently mentioned threat for both HE and FE, whether that is due to accidents, or students and staff not always following correct procedures because they aren’t aware of them or are resistant to them.
To help with this, Jisc advocates compulsory training for all students and staff. Dr Chapman says:
“We’re pleased that the sector has begun moving in this direction.
“Our first cyber security posture survey in 2017 showed that 48% of universities and 41% of colleges had mandatory training in place for some or all staff, and this rose to 57% and 55% respectively in 2018. Although this year’s figure for HE is now an impressive 81%, the number of FE organisations with compulsory staff training has remained static.
“It’s concerning that far fewer organisations insist on security training for students. In 2017, ten percent of people surveyed in both higher and further education said this training was mandatory for students. In 2018 this figure dropped to only three percent of universities, although there was an increase to 31% in colleges.
"This year, it rose to eight per cent of HE institutions insist on all or certain students taking training, but dropped to 24% of FE providers.”
"While training is an important weapon in the cyber security armoury, it isn’t enough on its own," says Dr Chapman.
“Some phishing emails are so sophisticated that they are almost impossible to distinguish from genuine mail, so it’s essential to put in place technical solutions as well. The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has some detailed guidance about the type of controls to choose.”
Although phishing and lack of compliance with agreed procedures are seen as the biggest threats, there are others. In HE, the survey found frequent concerns over data breaches, ransomware/malware attacks and patch management, and those responding from FE institutions also mentioned malicious attacks from inside and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
As an important step towards mitigating such risks, colleges and universities are working in increasing numbers towards Cyber Essentials accreditation.
“This is one of the biggest changes since last year’s survey,” comments Dr Chapman.
"Almost a third of FE and more than 40% of HE institutions say they have achieved this certification – up from four per cent and 14% respectively in the 2018 findings. This rise is likely down to funding requirements, government pressure, contractual obligations and due diligence requirements from research partners asking for formal proof of an organisation’s cyber security posture.”
Jisc is using the survey responses to focus efforts on developing the solutions that members want. So, for example, 95% of HE and 98% of FE respondents said they want Jisc to offer automated reporting of DDoS attacks and the cyber security team is exploring ways to extend the core Janet Network CSIRT service to accommodate this.
The team has also been working on its own ideas, such as deployment of honeypots. It seems this is an area that not many members are currently looking at, but initial feedback shows that it’s an idea worth exploring.
For more information on this year’s cyber security posture survey, its findings and the work Jisc is doing to support members' work on cyber security, don’t miss John Chapman’s talk at the Jisc security conference 2019. See John's session, "Jisc’s cyber security posture survey – how secure are you?" at 2:00pm on Tuesday 5 November 2019 in Newcastle.
via Jisc news
An innovative collaboration between a graduate of Jisc’s student startup competition and Swansea University has been recognised with a nomination for a Times Higher Education (THE) Award.
Swansea University’s online multi-device student voice platform, 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.
Unitu, which has been shortlisted in the 'Technological or Digital Innovation of the Year' category of next month’s THE awards, was introduced at Swansea to improve on traditional mechanisms of engagement, which relied on highly motivated students and do not always provide a true reflection of students’ experience.
The platform allows students to post and comment anonymously on college and university-wide boards and staff to respond, promoting meaningful discussion.
Sophie Leslie, student partnership and feedback development officer at Swansea University, said:
“Unitu has been transformative, challenging the cultural norms around feedback and positively disrupting staff and student views of how they engage with each other. It has also been instrumental in providing a voice for students who are often hard to reach.
“We are very proud to be nominated for a THE award. This nomination demonstrates the importance that Swansea University places on student engagement and working with students to improve learning and their wider experience across the university.
“The close working relationship we have built with the Unitu team is key to the success of the tool. We would happily work with similar small edtechs in the future as a result of this work.”
Unitu was developed by a team led by Anish Bagga and born out of his own student experience, which included frustrations that his voice and those of his fellow students was not being heard.
The first version of Unitu was launched shortly after his graduation in 2012 but disappointing take-up of the project in its early months forced a rethink. Anish said:
“We realised that what we had built was not what institutions needed.”
At this point and when he was looking for funding, Anish heard about SOSI – now part of Jisc’s student ideas competition - and realised that it could help to develop the product into something that potential customers would be more likely to use. He said:
“Before SOSI, we had pressed pause on further development, and continued our conversations with staff and students. As a result, we developed a new version in the form of a design prototype of what we envisioned could solve a key problem in helping institutions better engage with the student voice.
“After we won £5,000 in the competition, we had hired two interns and a freelance web developer. Within three months we were able to build three applications, for IOS, Android and web and roll Unitu out for two institutions.”
The Unitu team is now working with ten institutions in higher and further education. The enterprise is also taking part in Jisc’s step up programme, which assesses emerging startups against key sector requirements, awarding the ‘assessed by Jisc’ badge to those which can be trusted to deliver on their promises.
Anish said:
“This accreditation supports efforts to bridge the gap between education institutions and startups and helps us in our demonstrations and move the conversation forward with institutions. Going through the step up programme offers potential university partners more reassurance.
Jisc’s director of edtech Andy McGregor said he was delighted to see the partnership between Swansea University and Unitu recognised for its work with a nomination for a THE award:
“I have had the pleasure of working with Unitu over a number of years. We first worked with them as part of our SOSI competition and were impressed with their drive, clarity of vision and desire to help students.
“We have continued to work with Anish Bagga in shaping how Jisc should work with startups and Unitu was one of the first startups to be awarded the Jisc step up badge, which assesses which new projects are ready to be piloted or procured by universities and colleges.”
The THE award winners will be revealed on Thursday 28 November 2019, at a ceremony in London.
Any members interested in collaborating with edtech startups can read our guide for senior leaders - championing the untapped potential of edtech startups.
via Jisc news
The Knowledge Exchange has published its first book with contributions from Jisc and other experts in the field of open scholarship. The book - Open Scholarship and the Need for Collective Action - aims to better understand challenges to make scholarship more open.
The authors look at the stakeholders and their interactions and networks, concluding that collective action approaches and establishment of a supportive infrastructure are key for a successful transition to open scholarship.
The publication was created through the 'booksprint' method, a way of writing a book collaboratively in only a short period of time.
Frank Manista, European open science manager and representing Jisc at the Knowledge Exchange said:
“We’re pleased that Jisc, and specifically Neil Jacobs, has been a part of this ground-breaking book that has come to fruition through collaboration and support from European institutions and experts. It works to paint a more comprehensive picture of how to realise the full potential of openness.”
The book addresses various perspectives offered in the Knowledge Exchange Open Scholarship Framework which was created in 2017 to highlight the changes occurring in scholarly communications.
The Knowledge Exchange is a partnership that brings together six key national organisations within Europe; CSC in Finland, CNRS in France, SURF in the Netherlands, Jisc in the UK, DFG in Germany and DAFSHE in Denmark. They aim to develop infrastructure and services to enable the use of digital technologies to improve higher education and research.
via Jisc news
Join us in Newcastle next month for the annual Jisc security conference 2019. Under the theme "discovering the next generation of cyber security, together", delegates will explore emerging trends and threats to the education sector.
The two-day event provides a networking opportunity and a safe space to engage in frank and open conversations on sensitive topics, secure in the knowledge that all information released will stay in the confines of the conference. The sessions cover core topics, including:
1. A chance to double up - Make the most of your stay in Newcastle by joining one of Jisc’s training courses the day before at the same venue - and conference delegates get a 10% discount. The courses cover hands-on incident response training, and penetration testing. Or if you are interested in security information and event management (SIEM) then the Splunk education user group is also on nearby.
2. Digital pro? Keynote speaker Bernadette John explains how to protect reputation and employees by educating staff about Digital Professionalism best practice and providing clear guidelines and codes of practice.
3. Push for change - Learn how Leeds Beckett University planned and delivered a project to improve its IT and cyber security practice and culture.
4. Safety first - Andy Phippen, professor of digital policy, University of Plymouth will explore the online abuse and harassment of students and universities’ "duty of care".
5. Aim higher - Hear from Alex Harding, IT manager at Runshaw College, who will describe the college’s journey to achieving ISO 27001, starting from scratch.
6. The state of the sector - Dr John Chapman, head of Jisc’s security operations centre and the brains behind the annual cyber security posture survey, reveals key findings from 2019.
7. Cheers! Continue the discussion and network with peers at a drinks reception at the end of the first day.
8. DoH and DoT - Take a deep-dive into DNS over HTTPS (DoH), DNS over TLS (DoT) and encrypted server name indication (ESNI) - new technologies promising to preserve online privacy, but which are already being abused by malicious actors.
9. Get the max from data - Thomas Willson, security team lead at Imperial College London, demonstrates how multiple IT teams at Imperial College London use Splunk to collaborate on the same data with different viewpoints.
10. What you know, about who you know - Abigail McAlpine, PhD researcher in cyber security at the University of Huddersfield, looks at breaking down how children's personal information online could lead to a change in how we authenticate ourselves with our accounts.
11. Wolf in sheep’s clothing - The National Cyber Security Centre’s Keir P relates some cautionary tales from the education sector demonstrating how advanced persistent threats (APTs) are taking advantage of easy attack routes.
Find out more about the Jisc security conference 2019 and plan your trip.
via Jisc news
Jisc is bringing together research leaders in a community workshop to identify how technologies can enhance research.
The group will explore how the application of industry 4.0 technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, ubiquitous connectivity and IoT environments can help address societal challenges and transform research.
These technologies are already offering unexplored research insights, but the question for the group is how can these technologies be used to improve the lives and work of researchers?
For example, the IoT is being used in the development of ‘smartlabs’. These labs illustrate that not only can these technologies open up new opportunities for the management of research laboratories, but the potential to change researchers’ home-life balance too.
Other topics that will be discussed include how industry 4.0 technologies can:
The Jisc research community workshop will be held at the University of Salford on Thursday 28 November. The workshop is by invitation only, to express your interest and find out more information, visit the event page.
via Jisc news
Jisc and the Microbiology Society have sealed a two-year pilot transitional open access (OA) agreement.
The 'Publish and Read’ deal will allow researchers at participating institutions to publish an unlimited number of open access articles, as well as access to the society’s full portfolio in return for a cost-neutral fixed fee.
The Microbiology Society is the first small learned society publisher to strike a transitional deal through the Jisc consortium. Jisc Collections undertakes negotiations and licensing for 180 UK universities and is close to agreeing similar deals with Portland Press, the International Water Association and the European Respiratory Society.
Kathryn Spiller, licensing manager at Jisc, who has worked with the society to negotiate the agreement, says:
“We are thrilled to have worked with universities, funders and the Microbiology Society to create a transitional model that allows 100% of UK output to be published open access on a cost-neutral basis”
Under the terms of the agreement which will be effective from 2020, scientists will be able to publish in the Microbiology Society’s six journals, two of which are born OA journals, the other four subscription and/or hybrid journals.
Dr Peter Cotgreave, chief executive of the Microbiology Society said of the agreement with Jisc:
“We are delighted to have forged this agreement with our first national consortium for the benefit of microbiology researchers in the UK. As a small publishing Society, we are keen to introduce models to promote new, innovative and country-wide OA publishing across our portfolio of journals”.
Robert Kiley, head of open research at Wellcome commented
“Following the work we commissioned with UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) to help learned society publishers transition to full and immediate open access, I am pleased to see these cost-neutral transformative agreements come to fruition and I hope others will follow the lead of the Microbiology Society.”
via Jisc news
Coleg Sir Gar’s head of IT development Simon Palmer outlines his plans for a resilient, fibre-optic ring network to serve a five-campus college that’s increasingly reliant on bandwidth.
As a multi-campus FE college with 9,000 learners and 800 staff, Coleg Sir Gar in Carmarthenshire, south-west Wales, is increasingly reliant on cloud solutions as it aims to enhance the student experience.
Simon Palmer recognises that means it is important to invest in a resilient network with sufficient capacity to support teaching and learning.
“Students may take videos on their phones and tablets as part of their coursework – whether they’re working on an art project or perhaps filming cattle in fields as part of an agriculture course, for example.”
One of the college’s five campuses, Gelli Aur, is a purpose-built farm campus with 344 hectares of land near Llandeilo, 14 miles away from Carmarthen.
“We want to make it easier for students to upload those videos from home or from a remote location.”
For essential office systems, he explains, the college increasingly uses SaaS cloud services such as Google G Suite, Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft OneDrive. “But that means that if the network is down, these services are down,” he adds.
To help solve challenges like these, Coleg Sir Gar has plans in place for a ring network, which resiliently links all of its five Carmarthenshire campuses, while upgrading internet links to 10Gbit/s because of the extra bandwidth required for cloud.
For an FE college, of course, it’s vital to keep the networking solution cost-effective while helping to limit the burden on a small IT team. Simon says:
“We are keen to save money and be efficient – we have to do everything the most efficient way to get stuff done.”
And that’s where he hopes the fibre solution should be an advantage.
“We’ve designed a network which doesn’t use MPLS (multi-protocol label switching) – avoiding the need for expensive and complex hardware at each connection site, with maintenance schedules that you have to be constantly aware of.
“By putting high-bandwidth links in, we can also get rid of servers at remote sites, which massively simplifies the network.”
Overall, the benefits are that there is less hardware to manage and less chance of an outage.
“One of the biggest challenges in IT is accidentally breaking something. This way, we aim to have enough resilience and redundancy.
“We’ve also got a telephone project backing on to this, and we’re confident we can carry phone calls resiliently over the internet link.”
In the short term, the plan is to consolidate servers from five sites to one, this summer – which would provide the means for a possible cloud migration at a later date. But even then, suggests Simon, that would be under a hybrid cloud model.
“I’ve thought about what challenges it would give us if we put everything on the cloud.
“For example, if we were patching all our Windows, Mac and Android machines via the cloud, the amount of bandwidth that requires is staggering. Even an Android update can be up to 700Mbit/s.”
The college plans to repurchase a SAN and compute infrastructure or a hyper-converged system, he says, which would work out more cost-effective for the college than putting everything into IaaS.
As a Welsh college, Coleg Sir Gar’s Janet connectivity is provisioned by Public Sector Broadband Aggregation (PSBA) (see below), which is delivered under contract by BT. Jisc’s role, says Simon, has been to provide quotes for connectivity and act as an intermediary.
The falling cost of high-bandwidth fibre connectivity, especially compared to MPLS with its costly network termination equipment (NTE), helps make the college’s solution affordable.
At the same time, Simon relies on the research and education community, including college staff, for support when it comes to the ever-present challenge of maintaining a campus network on a budget.
“We self-help within community groups. And there’s a lot of value in having staff who have been here a long time, who understand our processes – and who are keen to engage in new things in efficient ways.”
via Jisc news
Immersive technology, the sector which includes virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality, is booming. Could it also be bucking the gender gap trend in technology? Suhad Aljundi, Jisc future technologies developer, talks to some of the women at the forefront of this new tech field.
At this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, women took centre stage when it came to the realm of immersive experience. In the Storyscapes award, which recognises achievement in storytelling via technology, four of the five virtual reality experiences up for the award were made by women creators, with projects ranging from escape-room thrillers to a mixed reality piece about a queer Egyptian couple seeking asylum.
Is this a hopeful sign that, in one area of technology at least, the gender gap is not quite as dire as throughout the rest of it?
Admittedly, it’s not a high bar to scale – only 19% of the digital tech workforce is female, compared to 49% across all UK jobs, according to research from BCS and Tech Nation which shed light on diversity and inclusion in UK tech. A recent Unesco report looking at gender bias in voice-activated assistants1 found that just 12% of AI researchers are female.
The Women in Immersive Technology Europe group is an initiative that aims to connect and support women and allies working or interested in virtual, augmented and mixed reality across Europe.
What it believes is different in this sector is that women have recognised that, since the industry is in its infancy, there is a significant opportunity to be grabbed to play an active role in leading where and how it goes. In that way women can ensure that it doesn’t become male-dominated in the way that computer programming did after its female boom years in the 1940s and 50s.
Through working with female entrepreneurs, storytellers, filmmakers, researchers, developers and directors, the group argues that
“the start of a new medium provides an unprecedented opportunity to structurally improve the industry from the get-go. XR innovation happens today, and we need to ensure diversity, equality and inclusion are cornerstones of this booming new industry.”
The sector certainly is booming. Nesta reported last year2 that there are around 1,000 immersive specialist companies in the UK employing around 4,500 people and generating £660 million in sales, potentially representing as much as 9% of the global market share.
What role are women playing? It may not be quite as rosy as the Tribeca snapshot suggests.
According to Alexandra Hussenot, CEO and founder of Immersionn, an immersive tech startup focusing on VR content,
“there isn’t a level playing field for how VR content is distributed or accessed at the moment. The main distribution platforms mainly focus on gaming which is generally created by men for men, which is disappointing considering 52% of gamers are women.
The majority of content created by women focuses on topics such as documentaries, education, arts and culture and health, but this isn’t being distributed in the same way and therefore only reaches a limited audience.”
However, women in the immersive tech industry are responding to this and fighting back against the bias and unconscious bias in order to shape the industry in a way that women become an integral part of it.
“In the same way that cinema was initiated by women, we believe that women have great talent in the immersive technologies space and we have a new chance not to get it diluted,”
says VR writer, director and producer Ioana Matei.
One intriguing way in which this is happening is through the immersive stories themselves. VR is a great medium to “experience in situation” and one that director Nathalie Mathé has made the most of with her award-winning VR film UTURN.
The premise is that a young female coder joins a male-dominated floundering startup that's deep in an identity crisis. The film explores themes of gender discrimination and sexism within the workplace through interwoven stories that allow viewers to embody either a female or male character.
Viewers can choose what perspective to follow at any time and then swap roles, offering a chance to experience both sides of the gender divide and understand each other’s realities.
Reactions to the film have been intriguing, explains Mathé.
“Most reactions from male audiences are very diverse, from a few total deniers saying this can't be real because it's not a documentary or asking to justify how we created it, to a large majority recognising this is problematic, unjust, saying they will pay more attention from now on, to a small percentage who gets quite upset and want to ‘punch these guys in the face’.
For women, it's more uniform, 90% of them say ‘Oh my god, this is so real and so much like my life at work every day!’
Although women were not my primary target audience, many of them have thanked me for giving them a voice. And several shared insights they got from this experience, changing their perspective on their personal problems, saying they feel it's a lot less about them and more about men being ignorant or totally oblivious to these gender issues most of time, it's part of a larger cultural issue of gender bias, which gave them a different approach to deal with it.”
While not created as a training app – Mathé is keen to emphasise that it is an engaging and entertaining live-action piece – it has been used as part of diversity awareness workshops at universities and companies.
The potential for VR to act as an empathy agent has been seized on by Equal Reality, a company co-founded by women, which recreates important scenarios within the workplace, showing the world from the eyes of a female, and demonstrates the ubiquitous nature of unconscious bias.
Users can interact in the scenarios and learn to identify the bias, but also learn the behaviour to deal with it from multiple perspectives.
For Mathé – perhaps surprisingly, given the success of UTURN – a VR film alone is not enough.
“It is a great starting point as a personal experience and as an accelerator for having conversations about gender issues, but more conversations and then concrete initiatives need to happen around it to create cultural change.”
Both cultural and structural change also needs to take place in the immersive industry if it is not to go the same way as film or any of the other male-dominated tech industries.
“The same people are involved in term of decision power, gate keepers and who's got the funding! The main difference is that women, especially women creators or entrepreneurs, have been very active to jump into this new field from the start and to build support networks, because they saw it as an empty page where they could get a chance to get their voice heard.
But the same barriers to entry are still there: having access to the right network, access to support and funding, selection committees and so on,”
comments Mathé.
There is a role for schools, colleges and universities to move the gender equality conversation forward and to think critically about gender roles, stereotypes and diversity.
While there are positive signs, there is a need within the immersive technology industry itself to amplify women’s voices, stories and content so virtual reality becomes a positive space in which to execute those stories.
It is everyone’s responsibility to help make the immersive technology industry the most diverse form of entertainment it can be – and one that can be truly reflective of society.
With their female voices and names, many consumer-focused artificial intelligence products have been accused of reinforcing stereotypes about a woman’s role. These stereotypes help to maintain long-term problems of a gender imbalance in the tech workforce. Does it matter and, if so, what can be done about it?
Catch up with this thought-provoking session from Digifest 2019 in which Serrie Chapman, founder, Women’s Tech Hub – Bristol, Miranda Mowbray, lecturer in computer science, University of Bristol, and Jisc’s Suhad Aljundi tackle one of the most pressing tech topics of the moment.
via Jisc news
It’s May 2020 and Jon Hofgartner, assistant director at Weston College is in a room on campus preparing for a meeting with his curriculum leads.
Due to busy schedules, some of the curriculum leads can’t attend the meeting physically. But thanks to the power of technology, they’re able to join remotely and play an active role. The room they’re using is a digital classroom – a digitally-enabled learning space with collaborative learning facilities.
“We’ve been inspired by the sticky campus roadshow, we’ve reflected on it and thought about what might be right for us. Since then we’ve shaped our thinking on how we use technology.”
Twelve months ago, during a meeting with Duncan Peberdy, digital learning spaces senior lead at Jisc, Jon was introduced to the idea of running a ‘sticky campus roadshow’.
“Having just completed the build on our new health and active living centre and with curriculum teams moving in, we wanted to develop some training opportunities to think about how we used technology in this space.”
A ‘try before you buy’ initiative, the roadshow offers universities and colleges the opportunity to try out a fully configured digital classroom.
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Sticky campus set up at Weston College
“The trickiest part was finding a room in the new build to host the roadshow. Because it wasn’t yet timetabled, we didn’t have the footfall, so we had to bring people there”.
Working as a hub not only for students but also stakeholders from across the institution and in your locality, it’s a great opportunity to share experiences of active collaborative learning.
“We booked in groups of senior managers, curriculum leaders, delivery staff, support teams, IT staff and the head of estates. It’s important to get those people using the space who are the decision makers or who are the ones responsible for fitting out and developing spaces on campus but don’t usually have the opportunity to see or hear the context of why.
“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 light bulb moment.
“At that point everyone was physically in the room because I thought it was important for them to see and feel the space. I wanted them to experience what a student would feel like walking in there or a teacher who was going to facilitate a session.”
Before investing in a digital classroom or looking to develop your current learning and teaching spaces, it’s important to understand the success factors. But what did Jon and the team learn from hosting a sticky campus roadshow?
“Get your students in there! I would like to have seen more of them using the space, but we were in the middle of exams so think about the time of year when planning to host a roadshow. Use a timetabled space where you know you’ll get the footfall and that natural intrigue. Get staff from a range of roles across the organisation using the space.”
Following the success of the sticky campus roadshow, Weston have two spaces in development - a digital classroom and virtual classroom. The digital classroom will be a collaborative space modelled on the sticky campus approach, and the virtual classroom will be geared towards distance delivery using some of the technology showcased at the roadshow.
“The students can connect from anywhere around the world, we want to create an interactive, engaging and high-quality experience for them with great audio and visuals – almost like a studio.”
Looking ahead Jon is keen to explore the active collaborative learning approach to see how teachers will use the spaces to enhance their courses.
“It goes back to curriculum design and what the teacher wants their students to achieve and how technology can play a role rather than here’s a room and the technology.
“With the virtual classroom we hope to share learning and deliver teaching on a bigger scale over much bigger distances and create engaging experiences with no geographical boundaries.”
To find out more about hosting a sticky campus roadshow, contact your account manager.
Jon will be joining us for our panel session at the AoC Annual Conference at 11:45 on Tuesday 19 November 2019. Read more about the session on our event page.
via Jisc news