Safety is in numbers when it comes to creating robust security measures.
In this podcast we chat to Steve Kennett, our head of operational services, about cybersecurity, and he explains how we can shape solutions for the future. Read the original blog post.
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In a regional first, the north’s major universities have signed a deal to ensure 21st-century digital infrastructure is available to education and medical research. The shared data centre, procured by Jisc and delivered by aql, provides a cost-effective solution for UK research and education through the provision of secure housing of digital systems and services.
In a world where ‘big data’ is becoming the norm, being able to support the provision of huge processing needs, opens doors to a number of significant benefits.
For universities collaborating on core areas, such as medical research, large data sets need to be shared, and at speed – this is where a shared data centre comes into its own. Through outsourcing high-performance computing (HPC) facility, Jisc members can benefit from specialist skills and emerging trends in big data management, leveraging the extensive capabilities of the Janet network.
Northern Powerhouse minister Andrew Percy said:
"Improving digital infrastructure will help equip businesses and universities of the Northern Powerhouse with the building blocks they need to grow and compete effectively in the global market."
Among the first education institutes signing up to the service are Liverpool University, Sheffield Hallam University and the Universities of Sheffield and Leeds.
Dr Barry Haynes, head of infrastructure architecture at the University of Leeds said:
"The successful delivery of the northern datacentre is a key element supporting the University of Leeds data centre strategy to invest in a fit-for-purpose, modern solution to host and manage the university’s data and applications.
As datasets and collaborations increase, access to flexible cloud and hosted services have become essential to the delivery of IT services.
This investment will help us realise valuable operational benefits and provide a resilient and well connected hosting facility."
aql‘s secure, carrier-neutral data centres, with direct access to the Janet network will support the UK academic community’s need for high performance IT infrastructure, not only for research, but also for critical operational infrastructure such as back office systems and IP telephony.
The facilities are designed with high-performance computing in mind, including highly reinforced floors, high cooling and power capability, strong security measures, and specialist installation equipment.
Dr Adam Beaumont, CEO and founder of aql stated:
"As a Northern Powerhouse partner, providing this significant infrastructure for big data research is a great achievement for aql and for Leeds.
We have a strong track record in providing secure datacentre services. We’re keen to ensure that we support the research industry with the security measures and expertise to allow them to leverage the power of their data fully."
aql already hosts the main high-capacity northern access point into Jisc’s Janet network, giving national and international access to the academic community. This network also has a direct connection into IXLeeds – the Northern Internet Exchange - which provides an opportunity for high-capacity access between the Janet network and other commercial networks and key healthcare data stakeholders such as EMIS, making this ideal for supporting public-private big data research projects.
Jeremy Sharp, director of strategic technologies at Jisc said:
"We are very pleased to be able to give our members access to this first-rate shared data centre, and to pass on the cost savings by centrally procuring this service on their behalf. The northern data centre is one of two shared data centres Jisc facilitate for UK HEIs and the scalability of service they provide means they are as cost-effective as they are efficient."
aql datacentres provide world-class security and power, ideal for intensive applications to support the academic community’s key role in the Northern Powerhouse.
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What makes a successful online learner? Online learning is potentially a great leveller, enabling people from all backgrounds to access learning and valuable knowledge. Technically, all you need to learn online is an internet connection and curiosity about a particular subject or topic area.
In this podcast Sarah Knight, our senior co-design manager, discusses the benefits of learning in a digital environment. Read the original blog post.
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Today is Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of celebration designed to raise the profile of women in science, technology, engineering and maths. To mark the event, we asked women working in science and technology today to let us know which women had inspired them so that they, in turn, could inspire others.
"I came across [Marie Curie's] work when I was 8 in a graded reader at school. I can still remember it..."
In her video, Sarah Davies, head of higher education and student experience at Jisc speaks about being inspired by the scientist Marie Curie from a young age and by Dr Jo Boaler, professor of mathematics education at Stanford University, founder of youcubed.org and writer of The Elephant in the Classroom: Helping Children Learn and Love Maths.
"there are so many women in science and technology that have inspired me over the years...they are tackling the world's toughest problems"
In her video Daniela Duca, senior co-design manager at Jisc shares how she's been inspired by Pineapple Dance Studios founder, Debbie Moore - the first woman to have listed her company on the London Stock Exchange. She also speaks of her admiration for Professor Mariana Mazzucato, part of the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex.
"Back in the 1960s she started the first all-female programming company"
A winner of Jisc's 2016 student ideas competition with the augmented reality app, PhD student Marta Stelmaszak speaks about being inspired by fellow entrepreneur turned philanthropist, Dame Stephanie Shirley.
Visit findingada.com for more information about Ada Lovelace Day and related events.
You can also download educational resources for schools and organisations.
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For some further education providers, forging more collaborative links or merging with other organisations presents the most viable option of balancing cost-cutting against quality learning, teaching and assessment. In this podcast our head of change - further education and skills, Sue Attewell, talks through the learnings of colleges that have already gone through mergers and transformation. Read the original blog.
We are offering full support and guidance to customers going through area reviews. If you would like any advice on mergers or transformation, or are going through area review, speak to your account manager who’ll be able to help with expert advice.
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Pearson and Jisc are today announcing a year-long pilot that will make e-books more readily accessible to students across UK higher education (HE). The agreement is based on extensive engagement and feedback from members of Jisc, and follows six months of open and constructive dialogue between Jisc and Pearson.
From this month, Jisc member institutions are able to sign up to their chosen model giving them access to whole of Pearson’s world-class higher education e-textbook collection.
Under the agreement, Jisc members can select from a range of usage models, giving students and institutions increased flexibility to access content in ways that best meet their needs and circumstances. Jisc members can choose from a library subscription with unlimited concurrent usage, or a subscription with limited concurrent usage, being able to select a combination that works best for them. Under both models, Jisc member institutions will benefit from tiered discounts, and transparent pricing, in line with Jisc’s band model already favoured by institutions.
The importance of digital in today’s learning landscape was recently reinforced by Jisc’s student digital experience tracker, which found that approximately three-quarters of students (78% of HE and 72% for FE and skills) produce work in a digital format. Furthermore, 72% of HE and 70% of FE and skills learners believe that when technology is used effectively by teaching staff it enhances their learning experience. E-books, therefore, can play a fundamental role in the average student’s learning experience.
Caren Milloy, deputy director of Jisc Collections said:
“The announcement of this pilot agreement marks the culmination of a year of hard work and negotiation between Jisc Collections, university libraries and Pearson. During the pilot we will work collaboratively with Pearson and higher education institutions to evaluate the viability of these two models and to see if the terms of use meet student expectations.
This is a critical first step towards developing an affordable offer to help institutions provide equity of access to high demand textbook content.”
Andy Moss, senior vice-president for higher education at Pearson said:
“We are delighted to announce this pilot agreement with Jisc member institutions. As a company, Pearson is committed to helping people make progress in their lives through learning, and to working with partners across the education system who share that same goal.
It’s in that spirit that we have worked collaboratively with Jisc to develop the terms of this pilot, one that we believe offers real choice, flexibility and value to Jisc’s members.”
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One of the ways that Jisc supports its members is by offering training and consultancy that empowers them to embed best practice across their organisation. Aberystwyth University is an example of an organisation that has received our advice and guidance, and been able to disseminate their learnings further, to excellent effect.
Following a 'train the trainer' session on digital storytelling with subject specialist, Chris Thomson, the university's e-learning group has delivered its own session for teaching staff. This has inspired attendees to develop innovative teaching activities using digital storytelling, with the help of CADARN Learning Portal, which provided the WeVideo platform for video editing. We hear from Mary Jacobs, e-learning advisor, and Stephen Chapman, teaching fellow and researcher about how they've embraced digital storytelling whole-heartedly.
For more information you can visit the university's guide on digital storytelling.
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A group of research funders, sector bodies and infrastructure experts are working together in partnership to promote the responsible use of research metrics.
The 2015 independent report The Metric Tide1 highlighted growing pressure on higher education institutions, researchers, funders and policymakers to use metrics in managing and assessing research. Metrics form part of an evolving and increasingly digital research environment, where data and analysis are playing an ever greater role. However, the current description, production and use of these metrics are at best experimental and open to misunderstanding, and can lead to negative effects and behaviours as well as positive ones.
A new forum for responsible metrics is being set up as a partnership between Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), Research Councils UK (RCUK), Wellcome, Universities UK and Jisc to advance the agenda set out in The Metric Tide.
The forum will develop a programme of activities to support the responsible use of research metrics in higher education institutions and across the research community in the UK. This will include advice on, and work to improve, the data infrastructure that underpins metric use. In this way, the whole research community can benefit from the more judicious use of metrics.
Responsible metrics can be understood in terms of the following dimensions:
In addition, the forum will offer advice to the UK higher education funding bodies on how quantitative indicators might be used in assessing research outputs and environments, as part of the funding bodies’ consultation on arrangements for the next Research Excellence Framework (REF) exercise.
Professor David Price, vice-provost (research) at University College London (UCL), will chair the forum. Professor Price said:
"From my work at UCL and as a REF sub-panel chair, I am keenly aware of both the utility and power of metrics used wisely, but also of the great hazards if they are abused or applied without the necessary understanding of their limitations.
I know there is a great deal of insight across the sector on how we can make responsible use of metrics, sensitive to their sources and context, and I am determined that the forum will make a decisive contribution in accelerating the adoption of good practices in all UK research organisations."
The forum’s membership draws on representatives and experts from university management, academic leadership, research administration and research metrics. The five partners recognise the wide interest in this work and expect to contact and involve other stakeholders in discussions over the coming months.
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The final Summer of Student Innovation winners have been announced, each bagging up to £10,000 to develop their education technology (edtech) idea in collaboration with Jisc.
With edtech set to be the biggest and most profitable digitalised sector yet1, could these winning ideas be the next big thing?
On 23 August, seven of the 15 Summer of Student Innovation ‘student ideas’ winners beat the competition to secure further funding and support from Jisc to develop their ideas into real products ready for market. The teams will also get first-hand experience of creative design, research, entrepreneurism and project management.
The winning ideas all aim to solve big problems in the education sector that the students have experienced themselves. Following a four day Jisc run ‘design sprint’ based on a technique developed by Google, the students went head to head to persuade the judges in a Dragon’s Den-style pitch.
So who are the winners?
Andy McGregor, deputy chief innovation officer at Jisc, was on the judging panel:
“This year I was impressed by how the student teams had decided to take on big problems that students and the sector have faced for a long time, such as effective public engagement for research, testing via quizzes and effective induction. I was even more impressed that the solutions they were pursuing to these problems were so original.
The two which particularly caught my eye were Know it Wall which puts together accessible and engaging summaries of research for the intellectually curious, and arHive which aims to tackle the problem of cost effective digitisation the huge mass of objects in libraries, archives and museums that only exist as text objects by using crowd sourcing.
As ever with the competition, the entrants were all outstanding and incredibly innovative. The competition really does show that students are best placed to address education sector issues, and their innovative ideas are perfect for supporting learning, teaching or research. We look forward to seeing where these ideas go in the future! ”
Miguel F. Dos Santos, from team Know it Wall said:
“Winning Jisc's student ideas competition means a lot to us. We've never been part of a competition where staff and mentors were so accommodating, supportive and helpful, being able to provide us with valuable advice across a wide range of areas.
Besides, winning this competition - with all that it entails - means that, in practice, Know it Wall is one step closer to achieving the goal of becoming the go-to place on the web for public engagement across all academic disciplines.”
The Summer of Student Innovation is in its fourth year and is managed by Jisc. It is a co-design project with Research Libraries UK (RLUK), Russell Universities' Group of IT Directors (RUGIT), the Society of College, National and University Libraries (SCONUL), Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA) and the Association for Learning Technology (ALT).
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Further education (FE) providers having to support learners resitting English and maths GCSEs are set to benefit from the launch of new e-books mapped to the curriculum.
Jisc is making available 23 core maths and English resources through its e-books for FE service.
Practitioners and learners of colleges subscribing to Jisc Collections can access the resources via the ebrary platform, offered by ProQuest. This includes maths titles from examination boards, Edexcel, OCR, SQA and WJEC, and English titles from SQA and WJEC, as well as AQA.
The agreement is part of a seven-figure investment from Jisc to support the teaching of English and maths GCSEs in colleges. Titles are licensed on a five-year basis, with additional content hoped to be incorporated over the coming months.
Karla Youngs, head of digital content services for FE and skills, Jisc, said:
“Since UK government mandated that all learners who fail to get a grade C in English and maths are required to continue their studies until they achieve that grade or higher, it has fallen to FE providers to pick up the shortfall from schools in supporting learners to gain a good pass.
Such a demand is problematic: Learners may struggle to understand the requirement to resit, especially in vocational courses where English and maths can feel far removed from their college studies; they might be disillusioned in having to continue to take classes in subjects that they perhaps struggled with or disliked at school; and there is a shortage of specialist teaching staff in these subjects, especially maths teachers.
On top of this the mandate comes at a time when post-16 education is going through the biggest reform in its history, and with college budgets already pinched tight.
Through the new licensing agreements, we are able to provide colleges and their learners with free access to relevant, high-quality e-books that support teaching and learning of English and maths. This will come as welcome news, saving colleges money by not having to invest in these resources themselves. The e-book format also means learners are able to access this content on any device, wherever and whenever they want to study, supporting both class based and independent learning and helping them to develop digital skills by doing so.”
Since the government introduced its resit policy there has been an increase of approximately a third of the number of 17-year-olds retaking these exams (32% for English and 33% for maths) – which means these resources could help to support potentially hundreds of thousands of learners.
Jayne Holt, assistant principal – learning services, Walsall College, said:
“It’s a considerable task that colleges face: to plug the English and maths skills gap, against a tough financial background where resources are already feeling the pressure. You need both specialist, highly-qualified teaching staff to engage learners in the classroom, as well as quality, taught-course content that will support their studies no matter where and when they chose to learn.
“In making available these resources for free, Jisc is significantly helping both colleges and their learners to improve maths and English skills, through flipped and innovative delivery.”
Jisc’s e-books for FE service is a collection of highly-focused, curriculum-mapped e-book titles, chosen through extensive community consultation. The value of this service is evidenced by almost 90% of eligible colleges subscribing to the service previously. The new agreement includes access to the English and maths resources, as well as the collection’s full range of taught-course e-books.
Renew your subscription or sign up by visiting e-books for FE 2016-2019 on the Jisc Collections website.
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This year's four-day-long design sprint from the Summer of Student Innovation was a huge success. We hear from winners past and present at the design sprint, and Justin Haylock tells us about this year's winning ideas, and what the teams have been up to at the event (including playing with Lego).
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Jisc’s effective learning analytics project aims to help colleges and universities better analyse and understand their data, and use this to improve retention and attainment. This includes building a national learning analytics service for the sector and a student app that puts the power in their hands, by tracking their learning activity and allowing them to maximise their learning potential.
The University of Gloucestershire is one of the institutions piloting the student app. We speak to Dr Nick Moore, director of IT services for the university, about the interest in learning analytics and why they're working with Jisc.
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Reducing the burden of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) through open data and metrics is a key theme of the Stern Review – creating a momentous opportunity to improve the quality, sharing and reuse of data by enhancing the research information infrastructure underpinning it.
The recommendation states that, ‘where possible, REF data and metrics should be open, standardised and combinable with other research funders’ data collection processes in order to streamline data collection requirements and reduce the cost of compiling and submitting information’.
Jisc welcomes the recommendations to move the REF forward, based on community consensus and evidence submitted to the consultation. In particular we believe that the most appropriate, long-term and sustainable approach to reducing the burden of research assessment is to enhance the UK’s research information infrastructure to make it open, robust and interoperable, and are working with the community towards this aim.
Running throughout the review were recommendations relating to the use of metrics and indicators for assessment. Alternative indicators were acknowledged as being able to effectively complement the continuing, central role of peer review: and that as more open, consistent and relevant data is made available, this in turn will provide better quality datasets, intelligence, and benchmarking across different disciplines and domains.
Jisc too recognises this opportunity, while being fully aware of the complexities in adopting a judicious use of metrics. Experimentation through our research and development projects on business intelligence and research metrics and indicators will help contribute towards this understanding and support more transparent, evidenced approaches with data and metrics.
Linda Naughton, our head of research, said:
“It’s highly encouraging that the review recognises the potential for gaining more value from the data and the need for open, interoperable information systems. In the consultation we strongly made the case for improving the infrastructure that supports research information management – something that was previously identified in last year’s The Metric Tide report, where Jisc is named as playing a lead role.”
Rachel Bruce, our deputy chief innovation officer, added:
“The heterogeneity of the UK’s research sector produces a rich and diverse range of impacts, but it also creates operational challenges, with multiple approaches being adopted at the technical level to the management of administrative data.
Our vision for a fully interoperable, national research information infrastructure – underpinned by open research data and open access to research outputs – would enable the UK to maximise the impact of its world-class research. Further, we could expect this to support more intelligent research analytics into the UK’s research base, leading to improved insights and better strategic decision-making at the institutional and national level.”
Jisc has long been an enabler of research excellence. We offer a number of services to the community, including a co-ordinated portfolio of open access services to help researchers meet funder requirements and improve the discovery, usage and impact of research outputs, as well as various solutions that support interoperability and open standards, such as the unique open researcher identifier, ORCID, which we offer through a national consortium in the UK, and are working on other identifiers, such as those for the research organisation.
We are also working with the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), Research Councils UK (RCUK), Universities UK (UUK) and Wellcome Trust to move forward a UK Forum for Responsible Research Metrics – first proposed in The Metric Tide, and mentioned in the Stern Review as having an important role to play in addressing data issues. Through the forum the intention is to effectively support the diverse qualities and impacts of research, by working with stakeholders to ensure data infrastructure and best practice develops to support the community.
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Four of the UK’s leading research organisations - Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), Research Councils UK (RCUK), Universities UK (UUK) and Wellcome Trust - have today launched a concordat that proposes a series of clear and practical principles for working with research data.
The Concordat on Open Research Data has been developed by a UK multi-stakeholder group - Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), RCUK, Newcastle University, UUK, HEFCE, University of Warwick, Research Information Network, Springer Nature, British Library, Wellcome Trust, University of Essex, The Russell Group and Jisc - and is a set of expectations of best practice reflecting the needs of the research community.
This concordat will help to ensure that research data gathered and generated by members of the UK research community is made openly available for use by others wherever possible; in a manner consistent with relevant legal, ethical, disciplinary and regulatory frameworks and norms, and with due regard to the costs involved.
The ten principles include:
While there are four initial signatories to the concordat, there has been wider consultation with the research community and their feedback and input helped shape the final text. The Concordat on Open Research Data is open for other organisations and groups to sign up to over time. Interested parties can contact alexandra.saxon@rcuk.ac.uk.
David Sweeney, director of research, education and knowledge exchange, HEFCE, said:
“Open research data has the potential to deliver substantial benefits to research and to wider society. Open data will reveal new research avenues, and deliver innovative new technologies and services that will improve our lives.
Achieving open data is not easy; there are substantial challenges ahead which will require the commitment of everyone involved in research. This concordat is an important step towards securing this commitment. I would now encourage all those involved in research to sign up to the principles and engage with this agenda.”
Prof. Duncan Wingham, chief executive of NERC and RCUK open data champion, said:
“RCUK welcomes the Open Data Concordat and the focus that the core principles bring to ensuring that the data resulting from the research that we fund is as open as possible.
By ensuring good practice around the open use and reuse of data, where appropriate, we can ensure that research brings optimum benefits to the long term prosperity and wellbeing of the UK and to the world.”
Nicola Dandridge, chief executive of UUK, continued:
“Open research data has the potential to deliver significant benefits for society by enhancing the impact of our world-class research base. Universities UK welcomes this concordat, which sets out the aspirations of the research community while recognising the costs and challenges that must be addressed if we are to realise these benefits.
By supporting the concordat, universities and other research organisations can help ensure that the UK remains at the cutting edge of science and research.”
Nicola Perrin, head of policy at Wellcome Trust, added:
“The Concordat sets out core principles to guide the research community in ensuring that research data can be accessed and used in ways that will accelerate discovery and maximise benefits to society. Importantly, it recognises that not all research data can be shared openly, and that there is a need for all researchers to plan how they will manage and share data as an integral part of planning their research.”
Open research data is the next step in achieving the UK’s open science ambitions and will help improve cooperation and strengthen the UK’s position as a global science leader.
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Jisc is upgrading its Janet network, to triple capacity across parts of the network over the next three years.
Today the Janet network serves 18 million users worldwide and provides UK research and education with a reliable, high capacity, world-class network, enabling national and international communication and collaboration.
The upgrade will see the core network capacity across some paths increased from 200Gb to 600Gb, improving potential access to distance learning and web-based educational resources while continuing to provide organisations, students, researchers, academics and staff with an efficient, high-speed network that enables effective collaboration.
The Janet network upgrade has been made possible by funding that Jisc secured from the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS), the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and the funding councils in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
The change will offer organisations greater capacity and more flexibility to ensure that present and future needs are met. It will support new business models like the surge in data intensive research, analytics, media-rich teaching, the growth of satellite campuses and the increase in cross-organisational and industry collaborations.
As the government pushes for more collaboration between universities and for the sharing of big data, the Janet network update will support academics so they can continue to access, store and share their research with peers and partnering organisations. The extended capacity will, for example, allow universities across the world to share petabytes of research data every day. To put this into context, a single petabyte is enough to store the DNA of the entire US population and clone them twice1.
The upgrade will also play a major role in improving the student experience. The Janet network will make video-based teaching, group working and online interactions between students and lecturers more effective and seamless. The added capacity will also support a larger number of technology options, allowing students and staff to log in anywhere at any time and connect their own devices to the network.
The investment follows continued growth in data traffic across the Janet network. Data traffic has consistently doubled every two and a half years since 2010, with the demand being driven by a considerable rise in the use of cloud-based services. A recent survey conducted by Jisc revealed that 69% of institutions are either planning to adopt cloud resources, or have already done so.
Tim Kidd, executive director of Jisc technologies, said:
"An increasing culture of change and innovation within higher and further education organisations, along with a surge in cross-organisational collaboration and access to open educational resources, have all contributed to the increased data traffic across the Janet network.
“We believe that the upgrade will be instrumental in keeping UK research competitive on a global scale and enable high end collaborations across a wide range of projects which support things like medical research, all of which are making great contributions and advancements for mankind.
“The improvement will mean that researchers can have access to facilities like high performance computing which will speed up data heavy activities and carry out high-quality collaborations in real time. They will also feel more confident when bidding for grants as they know they have the right infrastructure in place to support projects.”
The Janet network’s capacity is reviewed and upgraded on a regular basis, in line with current trends, policy requirements and technological advancements, to ensure it continues to meet the objectives of connected organisations.
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In our last podcast for Connect more 2016, we take a look back at all of our events, featuring interviews from our events in London, Belfast, Stirling, Swansea, Liverpool, Nottingham and Cheltenham.
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Google for Education provides go-to solutions for students and teachers - with more than 50 million users of Google Apps for Education and ten million using Google Classroom. Jisc futurist, Martin Hamilton reports from the latest Google for Education Summit.
We hear from colleges and universities about how they are using Google tools in their own practice, as well as Liz Sproat, head of education EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) at Google, about the latest product and service developments.
Read more about the Google Education Summit in Martin's blog.
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For our final Connect more event of the summer we headed to Nottingham. Jisc's Gemma Ellis spoke to a number of practitioners from across higher education, further education and skills who were presenting at the event and sharing their experiences and practice for others to learn from.
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VIRTUS Data Centres, the UK’s fastest growing data centre provider, today announces the latest member of the first national shared data centre for research and education, offered by UK higher, further education and skills’ digital services and solutions organisation, Jisc.
The University of Bristol joins 16 education and research establishments already benefiting from the shared facility at VIRTUS’ LONDON4.
The university will use the data centre to host systems for business, teaching and research, including the next generation of BlueCrystal, their sector-leading high performance computing (HPC) facility. This is part of a ten-year strategy which will see the university shift the balance of their systems from on-site to third-party hosting.
The easy-to-use shared data centre framework agreement provided by VIRTUS and Jisc enables the University of Bristol to take advantage of the state-of-the-art, agile and flexible data centre ecosystem. It opens doors for increased collaboration for research projects and allows the 17 organisations to partner with each other to unlock innovations.
Other benefits include reducing their carbon footprint and improved efficiency across core IT and on-premise data centre facilities that will also be used for teaching and other operational requirements.
LONDON4 is directly connected to the core of Jisc’s Janet network, the high capacity network for education and research. It means researchers can make use of fast, resilient and secure connectivity between data storage and high performance computing facilities, both nationally and globally.
Nick Skelton, assistant director of IT, University of Bristol, says:
“We are delighted to be joining the shared data centre in partnership with VIRTUS and Jisc. This initiative delivers the capacity and flexibility we require and enhances our ability to engage with new opportunities. Working with experienced and trusted partners gives us the confidence that our critical systems are in safe hands. The quality of VIRTUS’ facility goes beyond anything we could have achieved independently.”
Jeremy Sharp, director of strategic technologies, Jisc says:
“Many universities and research institutions are reviewing their data centre strategies and exploring off-site facilities to create efficiencies, free up valuable estate and increase their opportunities for collaboration; but in doing so they want assurances that their sensitive data will be secure. Our framework agreement with VIRTUS meets these needs, while providing quick, resilient access via a direct connection to Janet – all adding up to the agreement being highly popular with the sector. We welcome the University of Bristol as the newest tenant.”
Kelly Scott, account director, education at VIRTUS Data Centres, added:
“It is fantastic to see this shared services model paving the way to real innovation that advances meaningful research. It is gaining real traction in the public sector and education establishments are leading the way by sharing infrastructure resources to be smart about organisational efficiencies. The more institutions that use the facility, the lower the cost for everyone else already there.”
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In this podcast, from Connect more Wales, we spoke to Cliona O'Neill, head of student experience, HEFCW. We also caught up with Alyson Nicholson, head of Jisc Wales, as she explains why we're stronger together.
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The four winners of a competition to support technology startup projects have been announced, each scooping a £20,000 grant to kick off the project and a chance to turn their working beta into a fully functioning product.
Along with the prize money, the teams will receive support, business mentoring and marketing advice. The winners will be supported to develop robust and quality assured products for universities and colleges.
This is part of Jisc’s Summer of Student Innovation, which called for technology startups that could improve the student experience in further or higher education and skills. This attracted dozens of entrants, whose pitches accumulated 5,710 votes in total on the Elevator website.
Owen White, consultant (Ed Tech Futures) and startup programme lead said:
"The Jisc startup programme is designed to help the winners to turn promising ideas and early stage products into sustainable businesses. That’s easier said than done, but Emerge and EdTechFutures have designed a programme (based on Lean Startup and Innovation Consulting principles) to maximize the chances that this year’s startups can prosper long after the programme ends.”
“Participants from the 2014 and 2015 programmes, like Unitu and Potential.ly, continue to go from strength to strength and we’re confident that we’ll see something similar from this year’s cohort. The four startups we’ve selected for the 2016 programme are all very promising in slightly different ways. I’m really looking forward to working with each one of them. The different ways in which they are proposing to exploit new technologies to positively impact the lives of students and staff in the higher and further education sectors is genuinely exciting.”
Keep an eye out for this year’s winners’ ideas in the future, watch a video playlist of all the winning ideas below or view the list of winners on the Summer of Student Innovation project page.
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In this podcast, recorded at our Connect more event in Cheltenham, we discuss digital capability with Plymouth University's Steve Wheeler. We also catch up with Jisc's resident futurist Martin Hamilton and head of Jisc south west and midlands Lyn Bender, who talk about their highlights from the day.
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In this podcast, recorded at our latest Connect more event in London, we talk to Jisc's Sue Attewell about what students really want from their learning experience and get an idea of what makes our series of Connect more events unique. We also talk to Lewisham College's Jo Burbidge about the flipped classroom concept and Dave White from the University of Arts London discusses his idea of 'learning as becoming'.
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Whether you are in the process of deploying eduroam, have an operational service or are considering applying to join eduroam, you can gain a lot from joining one of our free live online eduroam clinics. Alan Buxey, senior IT services specialist at Loughborough University, tells us more.
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In this podcast, Nao the robot introduces Paul Bailey, our senior co-design manager, as he discusses learning analytics. We also meet other speakers, staff and delegates as they discuss technology in education and their experiences at our Connect more event at Belfast Metropolitan College.
via Jisc news