How do you decide whether to intervene with students based on their learning analytics?

23 February 2016

Learning analytics specialist Niall Sclater has been speaking to experts about the legal and ethical issues around intervening effectively with students. Hear what they had to say in our podcast.

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FE learners willing to trade personal data for better grades

25 February 2016

More than three-quarters (77%) of further education (FE) students would be happy for their college to use personal information about their learning activities if it helped to improve their grades, according to our new survey.

A further 65% said they would support their institution collecting new data about their study habits, so long as it would support their learning outcomes.

Phil Richards, chief innovation officer, Jisc, said: 

“That students are supportive of their data being used to improve learning is a powerful driver for learning analytics by colleges.

Just as other sectors like retail, publishing and banking are using big data and analytics to get insights into their customers’ behaviour and use this to be more innovative, effective and competitive in how they deliver, further education needs to do the same. 

Learning analytics has the potential to support retention, satisfaction and attainment of students, delivering better results for the individual, and for the college – especially important in this time of change and austerity.

That’s why Jisc is working to set up the world’s first national learning analytics service, so that colleges can easily benefit from learning analytics technologies. Importantly, it will include a student app, which will allow the learner to monitor and ‘own’ their progress.”

Other notable results from the survey include 54% of respondents saying they would be willing for their personal data to be used if it meant it would stop them from dropping out of college. Just over half (51%) agreed with this sentiment when questioned about their friends’ data.

Richards continued:

“Often, it’s not a case of the college having to go out and generate huge swathes of data about their students. If they support a blended learning model, they’ll already naturally be collecting a lot of the information they need already.

Every time a student interacts with their college through online services – if they go to the library, log on to their virtual learning environment (VLE) or submit work online – they build a digital footprint. Their college can then use this to create a picture of their study habits and activities, including how, when and where they like to learn, and personalise their approach, as well as giving them the ability to identify and intervene for any students at risk of dropping out.”

The survey – which questioned 166 students currently enrolled in FE courses in the UK – also examined some of the challenges and priorities of today’s learners.

Grades came out as the top worry for students by a long margin, with 92% claiming it to be a frequent cause for concern. It came above finances (78%) and got almost double the responses of the third most popular answer – making and maintaining friendships (52%).

Fiona Morey, deputy principal learning and quality, Aylesbury College, said:

“Our college is committed to research and innovation as a means of achieving excellent teaching and learning. Getting involved in the Jisc learning analytics initiative at this early stage is an extension of this ethos, and the start of what we're sure will be a very exciting time for us.

It's our belief that increased use of analytics benefits us as practitioners, and in turn benefits our learners. It's really positively that the student voice is also keen to share in these opportunities, and use the power of the student digital footprint for good.”

We will be sharing the latest information about the learning analytics pilot and advice at our annual Digital Festival, taking place from 2-3 March at the ICC in Birmingham. There is also an opportunity to register and attend a session about learning analytics online.

What killed the mobile learning dream? - Digifest speaker, John Traxler

26 February 2016

Mobile learning has stalled, argues John Traxler, professor of digital learning at the University of Wolverhampton's Institute of Education. He challenges Digifest to examine what's happened and how can it get back on track.

Mobile learning was e-learning's dream come true. It offered the potential for completely personalised learning to be truly anytime, anywhere.

Instead, we've ended up with mobile access to virtual learning environments that are being used as repositories. So, in practice, students reading their notes on the bus.

To be sure, in a few pockets in a few well-resourced institutions there may be some subject-specific mobile enhancements but we've certainly not seen the fundamental transformation that was forecast.

So what happened?

Twenty years ago the technology was expensive and fragile, scarce and difficult and it was the prerogative of clever people in universities to see how it could be deployed in support of learning. They bought into a particular model of innovation, believing that their innovative work would eventually percolate downwards and outwards to the chalk face.

However, innovation conceived in that way needs money. And so it reached the chalk face and people found they couldn’t afford it or they couldn’t understand it or that it wasn’t actually improving their lives in the way that the innovators thought it might.

Small scale

One of the key mistakes we made was that most of those early projects were predicated on the researchers giving out devices to the students - because when we started the devices were expensive. So we ended up with relatively short term experiments with a relatively small number of students that may well have produced interesting results but only if we subsidised the provision of the equipment, which we couldn't do.

Small scale projects teach you little about how they'll work scaled up. Research projects that are only a year or two years do not teach you much about sustainability. They teach you about working with enthusiasts in the fixed term, but you rarely find out very much about the attitudes or abilities of rank and file teachers.

That model is not financially sustainable. The way in which institutions have traditionally provided desktops cannot simply be extended to laptops, mobiles and tablets. Even if the money was there, the variety and rapidity of churn of devices would be nightmarish. But, then, people noticed that, actually, the students have got the equipment already.

So that means that our small scale short term projects, based around giving students a particular device, has actually taught us nothing of any use in this new world in which the students bring their own devices.

Bring your own device

Bring your own device, enabling students to use their own equipment, introduces more questions: is there a specific range of technologies they can bring, what's the nature of the support offered, and have we got a network infrastructure that won’t fall over when 20,000 students turn up with gadgets? What kind of staff development is needed to handle the fact that not only will the students turn up with many different devices but tomorrow they’ll have changed to even more different devices?

I don’t think we’ve clearly thought through what exactly that might mean but, also, some of those concerns are proxies for a rather different question.  When students bring their own devices, they also bring their own services and connectivity, and whereas we used to make the rules by which they could use the desktops or by which they could access the network – because it was ours - in future it will be their network and their devices.

Who's in control?

That changes the nature of our control, especially as we’re not just talking about hardware, we’re talking about software. Suddenly, students are bringing all of their habits and expectations with them about who and how and what they learn – and that isn’t necessarily limited merely to accessing whatever stuff the lecturer puts on the VLE. That's quite challenging in terms of the lecturer identity.

What's the nature of your job, if you don’t understand the technology the students are using for learning and you don’t understand the complexity and the abundance of the resources they could be accessing on their devices?

If you can learn from podcasts and Facebook and Wikipedia then what’s the role of the university and what’s the role of the lecturer?

What’s the role of teachers and lecturers and educational designers when the world doesn’t need any more content, when the world doesn’t need any more apps?

And how do we define an appropriate digital literacy curriculum that will enable our students to survive and flourish in that kind of world and also to do so on a basis that’s sustainable and equitable?

Opening up, opening out

We ought to be challenging our students to find, or providing our students with, the best learning materials. We ought to be collecting and orchestrating what’s best out there already rather than providing another version of fundamentally the same thing.

We also want our students to learn by discussion and interaction. They can do that in an open world as well. Why do we want to get our students to get locked into our VLE to consume our closed content?

Mobile learning has stalled. It has spent quite some time barking up the wrong tree, looking backwards and inwards. I’d like to direct the community’s attention onward and outward instead.

This portrayal may seem overly pessimistic. It is not. It should be read in terms of cumulative experience and familiarity with the uses of mobile technology, both social and educational, at a time when their availability opens far greater possibilities and opportunities than we could conceive of at the start of the century.

Join John at Digifest 2016

This is the fifth and final piece from a series of features from our speakers for this year's Digifest. 

John is speaking on day two of Digifest, 9:00-10:00, during our plenary session about the power of digital for learning and teaching. See full programme.

Join the debate

The views expressed by contributors to Jisc Inform are theirs alone and not necessarily those of Jisc.  You might not agree with everything that the contributors say but you are guaranteed to read something that will raise questions and spark debate while you're at Digifest - and beyond. 

What killed the mobile learning dream? - Digifest speaker, John Traxler

26 February 2016

Mobile learning has stalled, argues John Traxler, professor of digital learning at the University of Wolverhampton's Institute of Education. He challenges Digifest to examine what's happened and how can it get back on track.

Mobile learning was e-learning's dream come true. It offered the potential for completely personalised learning to be truly anytime, anywhere.

Instead, we've ended up with mobile access to virtual learning environments that are being used as repositories. So, in practice, students reading their notes on the bus.

To be sure, in a few pockets in a few well-resourced institutions there may be some subject-specific mobile enhancements but we've certainly not seen the fundamental transformation that was forecast.

So what happened?

Twenty years ago the technology was expensive and fragile, scarce and difficult and it was the prerogative of clever people in universities to see how it could be deployed in support of learning. They bought into a particular model of innovation, believing that their innovative work would eventually percolate downwards and outwards to the chalk face.

However, innovation conceived in that way needs money. And so it reached the chalk face and people found they couldn’t afford it or they couldn’t understand it or that it wasn’t actually improving their lives in the way that the innovators thought it might.

Small scale

One of the key mistakes we made was that most of those early projects were predicated on the researchers giving out devices to the students - because when we started the devices were expensive. So we ended up with relatively short term experiments with a relatively small number of students that may well have produced interesting results but only if we subsidised the provision of the equipment, which we couldn't do.

Small scale projects teach you little about how they'll work scaled up. Research projects that are only a year or two years do not teach you much about sustainability. They teach you about working with enthusiasts in the fixed term, but you rarely find out very much about the attitudes or abilities of rank and file teachers.

That model is not financially sustainable. The way in which institutions have traditionally provided desktops cannot simply be extended to laptops, mobiles and tablets. Even if the money was there, the variety and rapidity of churn of devices would be nightmarish. But, then, people noticed that, actually, the students have got the equipment already.

So that means that our small scale short term projects, based around giving students a particular device, has actually taught us nothing of any use in this new world in which the students bring their own devices.

Bring your own device

Bring your own device, enabling students to use their own equipment, introduces more questions: is there a specific range of technologies they can bring, what's the nature of the support offered, and have we got a network infrastructure that won’t fall over when 20,000 students turn up with gadgets? What kind of staff development is needed to handle the fact that not only will the students turn up with many different devices but tomorrow they’ll have changed to even more different devices?

I don’t think we’ve clearly thought through what exactly that might mean but, also, some of those concerns are proxies for a rather different question.  When students bring their own devices, they also bring their own services and connectivity, and whereas we used to make the rules by which they could use the desktops or by which they could access the network – because it was ours - in future it will be their network and their devices.

Who's in control?

That changes the nature of our control, especially as we’re not just talking about hardware, we’re talking about software. Suddenly, students are bringing all of their habits and expectations with them about who and how and what they learn – and that isn’t necessarily limited merely to accessing whatever stuff the lecturer puts on the VLE. That's quite challenging in terms of the lecturer identity.

What's the nature of your job, if you don’t understand the technology the students are using for learning and you don’t understand the complexity and the abundance of the resources they could be accessing on their devices?

If you can learn from podcasts and Facebook and Wikipedia then what’s the role of the university and what’s the role of the lecturer?

What’s the role of teachers and lecturers and educational designers when the world doesn’t need any more content, when the world doesn’t need any more apps?

And how do we define an appropriate digital literacy curriculum that will enable our students to survive and flourish in that kind of world and also to do so on a basis that’s sustainable and equitable?

Opening up, opening out

We ought to be challenging our students to find, or providing our students with, the best learning materials. We ought to be collecting and orchestrating what’s best out there already rather than providing another version of fundamentally the same thing.

We also want our students to learn by discussion and interaction. They can do that in an open world as well. Why do we want to get our students to get locked into our VLE to consume our closed content?

Mobile learning has stalled. It has spent quite some time barking up the wrong tree, looking backwards and inwards. I’d like to direct the community’s attention onward and outward instead.

This portrayal may seem overly pessimistic. It is not. It should be read in terms of cumulative experience and familiarity with the uses of mobile technology, both social and educational, at a time when their availability opens far greater possibilities and opportunities than we could conceive of at the start of the century.

Join John at Digifest 2016

This is the fifth and final piece from a series of features from our speakers for this year's Digifest. 

John is speaking on day two of Digifest, 9:00-10:00, during our plenary session about the power of digital for learning and teaching. See full programme.

Join the debate

The views expressed by contributors to Jisc Inform are theirs alone and not necessarily those of Jisc.  You might not agree with everything that the contributors say but you are guaranteed to read something that will raise questions and spark debate while you're at Digifest - and beyond. 

Grades – not fees – biggest concern for university students

25 February 2016

Students are more concerned about their grades than they are money, according to our new study.

In a survey of 240 students currently enrolled in higher education (HE) in the UK, 90% said grades were a frequent concern to them. This compares to 79% who cited money as something they were worried about – perhaps surprising given the ongoing debate around university fees in England being some of the highest in Europe.

With grades such a pressing matter in students’ minds, it follows that just under three-quarters (71%) would be happy for their university to use information about their learning activities if it helped to improve their grades.

Phil Richards, chief innovation officer, Jisc, said:

“While we might have expected money to be the number one concern for today’s students – who find themselves increasingly debt-laden under rising fees – the fact of the matter is that when they’re investing so much in their education, they want to come out of it with qualifications that will make them attractive to employers.

With rising fees I believe it is crucial that universities support students to have the best possible learning experience – with the bonus being that these universities become more attractive themselves to potential future learners. This can be achieved by using learning analytics, which provides universities with information to improve student satisfaction, performance and reduce drop outs – particularly important as universities look to government mandates to broaden access to disadvantaged learners.

The fact that 67% of students also agree to their university collecting more data than they currently do about their study habits to help improve their grades, goes a step further in supporting this approach.”

Other sectors such as retail, publishing and banking already use customer data to see how data and analytics can put the consumer front of mind. Taking the data they naturally collect on customers and using it to gain insights into behaviours means they’re able to offer more effective, innovative and personalised experiences. Learning analytics could do the same for education, and is mentioned in relation to government recommendations for the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) as something that could help inform assessment on quality of teaching.

Phil continues:

“The UK is taking great steps forward in its use of learning analytics and this survey proves students are happy to participate – but universities must be mindful that their use of data is done in a safe and secure way that meets data protection regulations. We’ve developed a code of practice, supported by the NUS, which sets out the responsibilities of organisations to ensure that learning analytics is carried out responsibly, appropriately and effectively.

It’s welcome news that students support the sensible use of information for these purposes. I’d urge everyone in the sector to sit up and take note.”

To support the use of data and analytics, Jisc is working with 50 universities to set up the world’s first national learning analytics service. This system is being developed to include bought-in learning analytics technologies and Jisc-developed solutions, such as a student app, all linked by a common standard. This will be similar to popular fitness and training apps that allow the learner to monitor their own progress and see what they need to do to improve.

Professor Tim Quine, deputy vice-chancellor for education at the University of Exeter, which is taking part in the pilot, said:

“We are working to use learning analytics to improve the quality of teaching and research to help our students reach their full academic potential while studying at the university. We are collaborating with our students as part of this project to  explore use of the data, design of the dashboards for data presentation, development of models to analyse the data and definition of ethical guidelines for data handling.”

Sue Milward, leading the collaboration with Jisc for the University of Exeter, added:

“This is a great opportunity and we are excited to be working with Jisc to lead the charge.”

Other results from the survey include grades coming  above concerns sometimes considered to be a priority of new students, such as making and maintaining friendships, which was the third highest response at 53%.

We will be sharing the latest information about our learning analytics pilot and advice at our annual Digital Festival, taking place from 2-3 March at the ICC in Birmingham. There is also an opportunity to register and attend a session about learning analytics online.

Learning to play, playing to learn: the rise of playful learning in higher education - Digifest speaker, Chrissi Nerantzi

25 February 2016

Ever thought about using Lego in lectures or play dough in seminars? Chrissi Nerantzi, principal lecturer in academic CPD at Manchester Metropolitan University, thinks you should at least be considering it. She explains why.

What is playful learning?

"Playful learning is using play activities to immerse ourselves and learn, either on our own or with others in a space we feel safe.  In playful learning it's ok to make mistakes when experimenting with new ideas, when challenging ourselves and others and doing things we normally wouldn’t do - which can lead us to surprising discoveries.

The resources we use might be low tech, such as everyday objects, games and materials, or high tech, such as specific software tools, social or mobile media and mobile apps. Often we don’t need anything and play happens based on pure imagination and we become play resources ourselves.

Playful learning can happen anywhere."

Why should we be interested in playful learning?

"Why shouldn’t we? Play helps us go back to who we really are as human beings, full of life, curiosity and wonder. Creatures who are not afraid to be different, even silly at times and ready to try different things.

Failing is a valuable vehicle for learning and progress. We often forget this. I don’t think many things happen without failure. Through failure we make new discoveries if we engage with the failure. Instead, what often happens is that failure is something that we sweep under the carpet. In a playful situation failure is part of what naturally happens, together with success and celebration, joy and happiness (and also sadness, anger and disappointment at times).

All emotions are part of the play process and all play a role in learning. Learning doesn’t just happen in our heads! Perhaps the suspension of judgment and the safe environment and community help us live these out in play situation and make the most of them."

Can you give me any examples of playful learning in action, where it’s happening, how it happens?

"In my own practice I can’t stop being playful. It’s part of who I am as a practitioner.  I'm an academic developer, so I work with academics and other colleagues who teach or support learning and help them enhance their practices. For me, it is very important to model practices that are less common or novel in their disciplines and open their eyes and minds to new possibilities. This means trying new things, experimenting.

I think we all become more adventurous when we feel that it is ok to do so and when we feel safe. So creating supporting relationships is really vital and encouraging playful experimentation.

About two and a half years ago, I joined Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) and I introduced the use of Lego on one of our modules as part of a teaching qualification for academics. It triggered both vivid interest and some opposition. Of course, we don’t do things intentionally to upset people, but when we do things that are very different, we can generate acute reactions.

Research into our own teaching practice is a really powerful strategy to get the evidence of how a specific intervention worked and was experienced but also the value it had for students or colleagues. And as research is peer reviewed, when disseminated this will strengthen the validity of what we do. It might even change colleagues’ minds, at least some of them.

I would suggest to consider adopting an evidence-based approach when introducing playful learning so that the body of evidence can grow and we can all learn from it and make playful learning more effective. We do also need to acknowledge that playful learning is not going to solve all our problems. It is one of the many strategies and pedagogical tools that academics can have in their toolkit."

So with Lego for example, how does playful learning take place?

"Lego is quite versatile - anybody can build something with Lego but there is also a specific method called Lego Serious Play. It started as an ideas generation method in the business world from within the Lego company but it has also entered higher education in the last few years as we have started recognising the potential. The opportunities are really endless and I have used it with staff and students for learning, teaching, evaluation and research but also as an assessment aid.

The method builds on the idea that building models with our hands is actually thinking with our hands. The models we create are visual representations and rich metaphors of our ideas, thoughts, feelings and understandings. We build and we share. It is a very democratic approach to manage participation and give everybody a voice.

An example from MMU comes from work I have done with a colleague who is a senior lecturer in nutritional science and asked me if we could evaluate the Nutrition 21 module in a way that would help her get rich information and deep insights about the student experience so that the outcomes could inform her module evaluation and future developments. I suggested that we could give Lego Serious Play a go, which enabled us to try it in a different educational context and also put the method to the test.

Students loved it and found it extremely valuable, as did the lecturer who was observing the session I facilitated. The students felt that they connected with their peers so much more quickly and suggested that similar activities should be introduced at the beginning of the course as well, to build community and a sense of belonging.

Students often struggle when they arrive at university, and feel lonely, so introducing playful approaches like this can help them open-up and connect with peers and their tutors – I have seen that Lego Serious Play really helps students to share personal stories and experiences that can help them to get to know each other better. We have evaluated this approach with the lecturer and one student from that group and published a joint paper.

Since introducing Lego at MMU we have applied it in many different contexts and offer courses to help colleagues develop in this area. We also plan to offer external-facing Lego workshops later this year.

Moving beyond Lego what else do playful approaches involve - art or music?

"I use new and old technologies, including everyday objects. Wool, play dough, toys, newspapers and magazines, silly hats, clothing, even pasta and many other things, even pots and pans. I find it important to model ways of playful learning that others could easily and quickly but also inexpensively adapt in their own practice. Art can be valuable for visualising concepts.

I have done this with our Creativity for Learning module, which worked really well. Colleagues felt that it helped them better understand some of the theories we looked at collaboratively and co-constructed as visual artefacts. For this we used old newspapers, balloons, crayons and other objects and the end products were really impressive visualisations of shared thinking that emerged through an iterative playful creative process. "

I have developed a mixed reality game called Sell your Bargains that takes place in different locations and opens up a different world and new opportunities for academics to look at their practice in a completely fresh light. Too often they feel trapped in a dull lecture theatre or seminar room. But learning happens everywhere.

The game enables them to experience multi-location playful learning and collaborative problem solving at the same time during which we also use smart devices to communicate and capture snippets from the process and journey."

What about digital technologies, how are they used?

"Digital technologies are useful tools. However, I don’t say "now we are going to use our phones" just as I wouldn't say "now we are going to use our pens". We just use them because it makes sense.

Digital tools allow us to be creative in a different way, to share with others and, most importantly, to connect with others. They allow us to have conversations and exchanges about what moves us, to challenge and be challenged and collaborate. These technologies work best when they blend into the background or the fabric of learning.

Simple things work best. It is when we try and over-engineer things that they fall flat but, it is not easy to know what will work so again being playful and trying new things is important. With colleagues from my own and other institutions I have been  experimenting with creating openly-licensed courses and development opportunities for academics using freely available social media and learning and teaching approaches that build on collaboration.

In March this year, we will again be offering the open course Creativity for Learning, an informal cross-institutional collaboration, which is an introduction into more playful learning in a higher education context."

You can view the slides reviewing the #creativeHE course below:

What’s the buzz around playful learning at the moment?

"I think that social media has helped to spread the excitement around playful learning. Many creative and playful practitioners are also open practitioners and share their work using Creative Commons licenses and social media and publish their research in open access journals. If education is for the public good, this should be the default.

More generally, the open education movement really helps spread playful practices too. We are reaching out and others reach out for us.

Last year we published a Creative Magazine around play and were amazed by the volume and range of contributions we received. We had to publish the magazine in two issues. I think this says something about the current appetite for playful learning. As a result of this we set up a Play in HE group on Google+ to continue the conversations.

At MMU colleagues are organising a Playful Learning Conference in July this year and the Association of National Teaching Fellows has picked a theme around play for their annual symposium in March this year."

How do you see playful learning developing in the future?

"Play opens new possibilities and it can invigorate learning and teaching. We often talk about the student experience but the staff experience is equally important.

Could play revitalise our interest in teaching? I think the potential is there. If we feel empowered and have the freedom to play with ideas and apply playful approaches in our practice, I think that will transform how students and staff experience university and what they get out of it.

But, I often hear that academics don’t feel empowered to innovate and teach using less common approaches. This saddens me. We need more leaders that empower us to innovate and be bold."

Join Chrissi at Digifest 2016

This is the fourth in a series of features from our speakers for this year's Digifest. 

Chrissi is speaking on day two of Digifest, 9:00-10:00, during our plenary session about the power of digital for learning and teaching. See full programme.

Join the debate

The views expressed by contributors to Jisc Inform are theirs alone and not necessarily those of Jisc.  You might not agree with everything that the contributors say but you are guaranteed to read something that will raise questions and spark debate while you're at Digifest - and beyond. 

Eight inspirational learning spaces - from Digifest speaker, Andrew Harrison

24 February 2016

The following learning spaces are not necessarily spectacular pieces of architecture destined for awards but what they represent to me are a series of spaces that interest and intrigue me, that point to thinking about learning spaces in a different way – blurring the boundaries between learning, working and living to meet the diverse needs of learners.

Kiva, Institute for Educational Development, Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan

Creative Commons attribution information

Kiva Institute for Educational Development

©Aga Khan University

All rights reserved

The Kiva is a learning space that is based on the kivas of the puebloans of the American south west but has been transplanted to a postgraduate education institute in Karachi to create a democratic space to celebrate story telling and discussion.

Technology has deliberately been pushed to the edge of the room and the space design and pedagogy are completely integrated.

University of Melbourne Learning Lab, Melbourne, Australia

Creative Commons attribution information

University of Melbourne Learning Lab

©University of Melbourne via First published in the University of Melbourne Voice, 2007

All rights reserved

A redundant 100-seat tiered chemistry lecture theatre was converted into a 40-seat collaborative classroom to improve the student experience as both staff and student found the traditional didactic lectures unsatisfactory.

The classroom now supports classes consisting of five groups of eight or 10 groups of four over four levels. Each zone has access to group-use PCs, laptop points, a camera and a large LCD screen that can be driven centrally or by the group. The lab is also equipped for remote observation and video capture to support evaluation of learning and teaching practice and to record examples of successful innovative practice.

With this learning lab a redundant space has been transformed into a flexible, student-centred learning space that supports collaborative group learning and interaction.  The increased area required per student in spaces like this is only possible through the intensification of use/increased utilisation of learning spaces across the university. 

This project shows the possibilities that exist within existing campuses for the transformation of traditional learning spaces into places that support a wider range of learning and teaching approaches and technologies.

Blizard Building, Queen Mary University London

Creative Commons attribution information

Blizard Building

©Queen Mary University London/Morley von Sternberg

All rights reserved

This building houses the Blizard Institute and around 500 researchers and students involved in biomedical research. It includes open plan laboratory and office accommodation, specialist technology spaces, a 400-seat lecture theatre, meeting rooms and a Bioscience Education Centre.

The open plan laboratories are all on a single floor five metres below ground level but with natural light coming in at high levels. The researcher work areas have been taken out of the laboratory spaces and are located on a mezzanine. It features an air curtain that prevents fumes from rising up from the laboratories into the work areas but allows visual and auditory communication between research and work areas.  Hanging above the laboratories are several pods containing meeting rooms and the Bioscience Education Centre.

This building solves a number of problems in a very elegant way. The shared, open plan laboratory spaces allow research teams to change easily over time with the shared specialist equipment being located in a separate area, the write-up space is moved out of the expensive laboratories into the adjacent mezzanine, which encourages interaction between researchers; and the location of the education centre above the main laboratory areas allows the visiting school students to see real science happening as well as engaging with the interactive exhibits.

Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft, The Netherlands

Creative Commons attribution information

Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft

©Rob'T Hart via MVRDV

All rights reserved

This space was created to accommodate the Faculty of Architecture after its previous building had burnt down. Rather than recreating a traditional academic building, the new facility created a shared heart in a lightweight structure between wings of an existing building. 

To maximise the amount of usable space the circulation areas were used to create a range of informal learning and social spaces that also functioned as work and formal lecture spaces if needed.  Less space was assigned to individuals and academics and students shared unassigned work areas.   More space was allocated to support a range of other work activities including meetings, concentrated working, phone calls and informal consultations with students.

The end result is a dynamic space that can easily be reconfigured to support a wide range of learning and work activities. This space is as notable for the change management and evaluation activities that surrounded the implementation of such as an innovative space as it is for the design itself.

Formal evaluations of the workplace took place in 2009 and 2010 (and continue periodically) to evaluate use of the work spaces provided, which has led to a reduction in the number of desks provided and the space being reallocated as additional studio spaces for students.

The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school), Stanford University, USA

Creative Commons attribution information

The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school), Stanford University

©Scott Witthoft/Stanford d.school

All rights reserved

The d.school is simply a place at Stanford University where students and faculty from across the university come to take classes and work on projects to develop innovative, human-centred solutions to real-world problems.  Courses and curriculum are based on design-thinking processes, drawing on methods from engineering and design and combining them with ideas from the arts, tools from the social sciences and insights from the business world.

The space is used to fuel the creative process and it is designed to be easily transformed to support each stage in the design development process, with furniture elements such as mobile screens, foam blocks and reconfigurable walls used to create a dynamic teaching and research environment.

It is the dynamic nature of the space that is its best feature – it can be appropriated and reinvented by project teams, owned, lived in during the immersive discovery and design processes and then cleared away to present and display the final project outcomes.  Nothing is "owned" by a department or team and the space becomes a dynamic marketplace for ideas and solutions.

Information Services Building, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

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Information Services Building University of Otago

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This building was completed in 2001 and includes a range of university functions including the central library, the student learning centre, teaching support, student information services and careers.

The central library is the major occupier of the Information Services Building and this provides more than 2,200 study places for students. While many of the facilities offered are what you would expect in any high quality academic library, the library is unusual in that it provides 27 different types of study location that vary in terms of their visibility/privacy, level of technology provision and size of study group.

Some of the study settings are in very busy central zones that are highly visible and connected into the library and the adjacent student centre and others are tucked away on upper levels and provide quiet spaces for study and reflection.

The space between the library and the adjacent student centre has been roofed over to create a street that contains informal study and social settings in a series of ‘living rooms’, delimited only by areas of carpeting and plants. Rather than a formal front wall, a perforated screen connects these spaces back into the main library area and each day the furniture is reconfigured by students to meet their needs.

The variety of settings and the quality of the interior provides a rich landscape of study settings that allow students to select the setting that meets their needs at the time rather than trying to accommodate everything in standard study carrels or work tables.

The British Library, London

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The British Library

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The British Library in London has large amounts of public space that includes exhibition areas and cafes.  These cafes are important meeting places for the academic community and other library users as well as providing a welcome break from the absolute silence of the reading rooms. 

The circulation spaces in the library have also been used to house a range of informal work settings including chairs with in-built power and small group meeting tables. Combined with free Wi-Fi throughout the building this has transformed the spaces into public workplace and the spaces are heavily used by freelance workers, start-up companies and people who simply wanting a base in central London for a few hours between trains or meetings.

These work areas have their own population that is distinct from the core British Library readers but it is also a hybrid place that provides facilities for readers who also have to make phone calls and skype, meet with colleagues and work on their computers.

The intensification of use of the circulation space is a great example for universities where circulation areas may make up about 30-40% of the total non-residential space on campus.

Aalto Tracks, Aalto University, Helsinki  2010

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Aalto Tracks, Aalto University

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Not all inspirational learning spaces need to be owned by the institution or, indeed, be specifically designed as learning spaces. 

In 2010 students at Aalto University in Helsinki rented a train (‘Aalto on Tracks’) to take a group of around 100 students and faculty to the Shanghai Expo. During the 10-day trip a wide range of events took place in the train’s conference cars including workshops on entrepreneurship and the future of internet banking, lectures on Russian and Chinese culture, a course on Chinese project management practices and a mobile TedX event as well as a range of sports, cultural and social activities. 

This student-led learning experience was repeated the following year when a group of students went by cruise ship from Lisbon to Sao Paulo in Brazil to explore a range of issues including sustainability and development through formal courses with academic credit as well as other workshops, events and visits.

Natural History Museum, London

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Natural History Museum, London

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The Natural History Museum is a great example of how learning, research and leisure can overlap in the same space and how institutional boundaries can successfully be blurred without detracting from the quality of the learning or research experience.

As well as being a major cultural and leisure destination in London the Natural History Museum has education activities and resources aimed at every educational stage from five years of age.  The Darwin Centre has added substantially to the educational experiences at the museum, combining a central bank of laboratories and specimen storage facilities with a spiral path of interactive exhibits exploring various aspects of the natural sciences and the research process.

Two masters courses are run at the museum jointly with Imperial College, 80 PhDs are based at the museum and there are more than 300 researchers and curators working there with access to more than 70 million specimens.  

Join Andrew at Digifest

This is the third in a series of features from our speakers for this year's Digifest. 

Andrew is speaking on day one of Digifest, during our plenary session about the power of digital for change. See full programme.

Join the debate

The views expressed by contributors to Jisc Inform are theirs alone and not necessarily those of Jisc.  You might not agree with everything that the contributors say but you are guaranteed to read something that will raise questions and spark debate while you're at Digifest - and beyond. 

Are there ever circumstances where learning analytics can be withheld from a student?

17 February 2016

Learning analytics specialist Niall Sclater has been speaking to experts about the legal and ethical issues around giving university and college students access to their data from learning analytics. Hear what they had to say in our podcast.

• Subscribe to the Jisc podcast via iTunes
• Add the RSS feed to your favourite podcast app
• Download this edition
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"We're overwhelmed with data" - interview with Digifest speaker Tony Hey

22 February 2016

Digital is having a huge impact on how researchers work and the skills they need, from data analytics to data management. Tony Hey, chief data scientist of the Science and Technology Facilities Council and former vice-president of Microsoft Research, explains the challenges facing data intensive scientific discovery, from data curation to preservation, and the need for a UK e-infrastructure strategy.

At Digifest you're going to be talking about data intensive scientific discovery, something you call the Fourth Paradigm. What is that? 

"Almost every field in science is now being overwhelmed by the amount of data it is creating. We've gone from having very little data to having more than we can cope with.

Take the environment, for example.  The National Science Foundation in the US is funding an exciting project called the Ocean Observatory Initiative. So they’re putting a fibre optic cable on the seabed on the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate just off Seattle. Now, instead of sending out a ship with post-doc researchers that'll return after a few weeks with some data on a USB stick which they take back to their lab, the researchers will now have data streaming in, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Seattle is in an earthquake zone and at risk of a really big earthquake about every 200 years. So it seems like a good idea to be able to monitor the sea bed in real-time! 

The notion of the Fourth Paradigm came from my late colleague and Turing award winner, Jim Gray. Jim observed that if you've now got huge amounts of data, researchers need to know how to organise it, how to reorganise it, how to access it, how to visualise it, and how to do sophisticated data analytics on it. For scientists drowning in data, life gets enormously complicated!

You now need to teach researchers new skills of data management and analytics. That’s what Jim meant by the Fourth Paradigm, following on from the three other paradigms - experimental science, theoretical analysis and computer simulation. These Fourth Paradigm skills don’t supersede researchers needing to know something about these other three research paradigms, but increasingly, many scientists now need to be equipped with techniques for managing and analysing data. "

Jim Gray’s dream was to have a world in which "all of the science literature is online, all of the science data is online and they interoperate with each other". How close are we to that? 

"I think 2013 was a very significant year. One of the things that I was pursuing when I was a dean at Southampton University was a repository providing open access to research papers. I was keen to establish a research repository because, as dean of engineering, I had 200 engineers and about 500 post docs and students in my faculty, all writing research papers and each year, the library asking me which journals I wanted to cancel.  In fact, the university could not afford to subscribe to all the journals in which my staff published - yet I was supposed to write a review of the faculty’s research at the end of each year. 

Journal prices have been going up by something like 10-15% on average per year over the last 10 or 15 years while library budgets have been going up by at most 3% per year, so there's clearly a real mismatch and something has to change in research publishing. So I started by insisting we keep a digital full-text copy of all the faculty’s research papers in a faculty research repository. Although I started this initiative, it was other academics and librarians at Southampton who made this vision a reality.

A major role for the library at a research-led university is surely to manage the research repository and be the guardian of the research output of the university. Running such a repository is a key part of a research university’s "reputation management".  

But what you really need is to be able to get from the paper to the data on which the authors have based their results. For me, the most significant event in 2013 was the US White House memorandum requiring every significant federal research funding agency in the US to come up with a plan to increase public access to the results of their research. And the definition of research included not only research papers but also the relevant data sets. This memo has kicked off a worldwide focus on open science with research papers linked to the relevant data sets. 

So I absolutely do believe in Jim Gray’s vision: the future is all about putting both the paper and the relevant data online. "

And, over here, what do you think about the current open access landscape, how have things evolved since the Finch Report? 

"I think the Finch report made a mistake in advocating only gold open access1. I have always advocated green open access and this is not because I hate publishers, I don’t. I edited journals for non-open access publishers for many years, but as dean, I just could not afford what they were selling me. 

We need to have a new partnership with publishers. I don’t want to do all the things they do, but I do want to have a service that is good value and that I can afford. That’s all I want! But of course, at the moment, we’re in the middle of a revolution. 

So, currently, it’s all very confusing but, at the end of the day when the dust has settled, the general public will be able to have access to the research papers that their taxes have paid for without having to pay out large sums to publishers. That’s surely a good thing."  

So you think the open access road is going in the right direction?  

"Yes, I think we are definitely going in the right direction. It’s just very confusing as to exactly what funding model will emerge at the end of this revolution! If you talk to different people, you get different answers. 

The Finch Report just proposes one possible answer. However, curating, publishing and archiving data is much more complicated than keeping just research papers in repositories, certainly in terms of how this process should be funded. It is clearly not sensible to keep all the data scientists create, so how much data should you keep? I believe that you have to have the people who were involved in generating the data – the scientists – also involved in deciding which of their data should be kept.  

But there is also another problem: in computational and data-intensive science, some of the most important people are the scientists who write the scientific software or who do the sophisticated data management and write the clever data analysis codes. But these people are not the principle investigators, so they don’t get the limelight. 

How do you give attractive career paths to these talented people who are now, increasingly, becoming essential to the progress of modern science? I think this is a real challenge for universities and the research community. It’s especially a challenge because if you train people in data intensive science, they can go and get a job in industry at twice the salary!" 

You're working on the UK infrastructure strategy – what does that involve? 

"At a national level we need to have an infrastructure capable of supporting first class research. On the network, data and software side, I think there are six key elements. The first is a high bandwidth research network, which is what the Janet network attempts to provide at the moment. However, I think we need to do more with the Janet network in order to support data-intensive applications adequately. 

We also need to have a robust authentication and authorisation infrastructure so that the right people can get access to the right systems. Then we need to worry about the production and sustainability of research software. A fourth component consists of technologies and standards for data provenance, curation and preservation. Only then can we realise Jim Gray’s vision for open access to publications and data via research repositories. And finally, we need to create appropriate and powerful discovery tools capable of searching efficiently across globally distributed repositories. 

Complementary to this network, software and data infrastructure is the provision of high performance computing resources.  In the UK we must provide our computational scientists with access to supercomputers that are competitive on a world scale. In addition, we need to provide appropriate high performance computing resources at both regional and university levels. We then must put this all together and train the people we need to make efficient and effective use of this research infrastructure.  

The E-infrastructure Leadership Council, which I co-chair with the minister for science and universities, Jo Johnson, is all about how industry can make appropriate use of this expensive research infrastructure. Can we make the e-infrastructure really usable for industry so that our companies can become more competitive and productive? For me, this is a very exciting challenge."  

More generally, how do you see Jisc's role with the infrastructure strategy? 

"I see Jisc as capable of playing a leadership role in providing a high performance research network.

One of the challenges we face is the need to have a high bandwidth network that is able to move high volumes of data direct from the data source right to where the researcher needs it. The problem is that you can have a very high bandwidth wide area network but when the data stream reaches the researcher’s university it has to go through the firewall and gets mixed up with the email, web traffic, students watching videos for teaching and so on.

What you need is what they call in the US a ‘Science DMZ’ - a science demilitarised zone. This architecture means that when the data gets to the firewall, it doesn't go through the firewall but goes straight to where you need it. In this way, you solve the ‘last mile’ problem and can have sustained high end-to-end bandwidth. This is critical to enable you to transfer lots of data in a reasonable time as opposed to taking weeks.  

In the US, they have implemented this type of data stream architecture at over 100 universities under the NSF’s Campus Cyberinfrastructure initiative. In the UK we have no comparable initiative involving university CIOs. Traditionally, Jisc’s responsibility has stopped at the university firewall so there is a worrying gap in our UK e-infrastructure. To address the needs of the new generation of data-intensive scientists, I think that Jisc needs to partner with universities to implement high speed end-to-end data links.   

However, Jisc’s development of robust authorisation and authentication middleware is extremely important and allows companies as well as academics to access our national research infrastructure as authorised users. Jisc has also played a key role in promoting repositories for research publications and data. Finally, the Digital Curation Centre (or DCC) is funded by Jisc and has been a pioneer in data curation and a key source of expertise for the research community for more than 10 years."

Join Tony at Digifest

This is the first in a series of features from our speakers for this year's Digifest. 

Tony is speaking on day two of Digifest, during our plenary session about the power of data. See full programme.

Join the debate

The views expressed by contributors to Jisc Inform are theirs alone and not necessarily those of Jisc.  You might not agree with everything that the contributors say but you are guaranteed to read something that will raise questions and spark debate while you're at Digifest - and beyond. 

The death of the digital native: four provocations from Digifest speaker, Dr Donna Lanclos

23 February 2016

In these four provocations, anthropologist Donna Lanclos argues that the notion of the "digital native" is bogus and disempowering, that pandering to student expectations can backfire, universities should be open by default, and our attitude to educational technology needs a rethink.

Provocation one: The death of the digital native

The 'digital native' is a generational metaphor. It's a linguistic metaphor. It's a ridiculous metaphor. It's the notion that there is a particular generation of people who are fundamentally unknowable and incomprehensible.

The original formulation even posited that there is something biologically different about the brains of these so-called digital natives, because of their early and frequent interaction with particular types of technology. It's not true and anybody who connects with students and members of academic staff in any kind of practical way knows that people who engage with technology are not motivated by their age category.

Dangerous assumptions

There are very real dangers in adhering to this sort of generational narrative of disconnection – it's an argument that says we'll never understand them and, furthermore, that we cannot teach them.

There are policy implications: if your university philosophy is grounded in assumptions around digital natives, education and technology, you're presupposing you don't have to teach the students how to use tech for their education. And, furthermore, it will never be possible to teach that faculty how to use that technology, either on their own behalf or for their students.

So you've set up at least two different barriers. You've set up a student barrier and you've also set up a barrier for members of academic staff who are then being fed a line about how they're dinosaurs and will never get it. It cuts both ways and it's disenfranchising across the board.

Visitor and resident

A very different paradigm is 'visitor and resident'1. Instead of talking about these essentialised categories of native and immigrant, we should be talking about modes of behaviour because, in fact, some people do an awful lot of stuff with technology in some parts of their lives and then not so much in other parts.

Each person's choices are embedded in a very particular context and each person is going to have different reasons for that behaviour. And that's going to inform the nature of their practice. That's going to inform the frequency they're in that place. Indeed, it's going to influence whether they think of the internet as a tool or a place.

Give people freedom

The workshops we're developing with Jisc are around helping people to visualise their practices so that if they do want to change, at least they know where they're starting from. It's so much more empowering a metaphor than native/immigrant. It's about what you do and why you do it, not about who you are as a person. It takes some of the value judgements out of descriptions of modes of behaviour.

They are descriptions of a range of possibilities and I like the idea of giving people the freedom to figure out where they fit in that range of possibilities instead of categorising and pigeonholing them and making them feel limited based on some kind of bogus identity category.

Provocation two: Open by default?

How much of your university practice is behind closed doors?   This is traditional, of course, gatekeeping our institutions of higher education, keeping the gates in the walled campuses closed.

The power of open

What if those gates were open? What other sorts of things would we want to be open?

Imagine having at least part of your virtual learning environment (VLE) open, not just for current students (and even current students usually can't see all the teaching that might be useful to them) but for non-students, prospective students, or staff members who want to know what's happening down the road, across the country, in that academic department that interests them.

There would be so much potential for seeing the different ways in which departments are teaching, for instance. Which departments of biology are doing what in their labs? What theoretical approaches are they taking?

Paywalls and passwords

So much of the pedagogy as well as the content of the university is locked away. That has implications not just for potential students but also from a policy perspective – if part of the problem in higher education policy is of non-university people not understanding the work of the university, being open would have really great potential to mitigate that lack of understanding.

What would happen from a political perspective - the funding of universities, the running of universities – if the people who want to hold universities accountable really knew what they do? And if we lock all our content away behind paywalls and password protection, we're not giving the public an opportunity to see the work of a university either.

Networked, open, transparent

The product of education should be effective citizenship that is enacted out in the open. I would like to see our universities modelling themselves more closely on what we should be looking for in society generally: networked, open, transparent, providing the opportunity for people to create things that they wouldn't create all by themselves.

I understand the rationale for gatekeeping, I just don't think that there's as much potential with a gatekept system as there is with an open one.

Provocation three: Stop being ruled by 'student expectations'!

There are two huge problems with the notion of "student expectations": firstly, the sense that, with the UK's new fee model, students' ideas of what higher education should be now weigh much more heavily in the institutions' educational planning. Secondly, institutions in part think their role is to make their students "employable" because some politician somewhere has said the university is there to get them jobs.

Setting low bars

Students coming into higher education don't know much about what higher education can be. So if we allow student expectations to set the standard for what we should be doing, we create an amazingly low bar.

It's the same as student and academic staff expectations of libraries: these tend to be quite traditional and fairly low level stuff. Do libraries provide content? Are they in a building? These users don't know enough about the potential, so can their expectations stretch practice or reach for innovative things?

Student expectations limit

So, being ruled by student expectations is limiting because they don't know what they don't know, while we who work in higher education do have a certain level of expertise around what's possible. That's not to say we should ignore the needs of students or shouldn't pay attention when they tell us what would be effective for them. But part of our job is to provide a space for our students to stretch and explore things and if all we do is meet their expectations they're not going to do that.

The employability issue

The employability issue is more difficult because I don't think we in higher and further education ever want to be saying we don't care if our students don't get work – that's not true. But the framing of it is all wrong. The point of any educational system is not to provide citizens with jobs. That's the role of the economy.

So, if the economy is failing and people can't find work, it's not the fault of the university; the university shouldn't feel it has to shift fundamentally its reason for existing.

Universities are not vocational

To my mind, the reason we have higher education – and, indeed, any state-funded education system – is to provide space for us to produce engaged and effective citizens who will be prepared for whatever the economy throws at them, by being able to think and connect and be critical. And those things are relevant to employability, in the sense that any smart employer will want employees with those attributes.

Businesses are not saying "I want someone who went through a programme that promised them a job". I think there's a real disconnect between what real employers actually want, the political rhetoric around the role of the university and the university's reaction to political pressure.

I'd like to see universities, and people who work within them, take a stand against being defined as vocational. I don't think that serves anybody.

Provocation four: Educational technology – fit for purpose?

I want to get people to start from the notion that there are educational things that they want to do, or educational processes that they would like to engage with, and then - and only then - talk about the technology.

Educational practice first

This is the opposite of having technology drive practice, of saying to an educator,

"so we have Moodle, this is what you can do in Moodle. You want to have a conversation with your class? This is what it has to look like in Moodle".

That's technology shaping educational practice in a really top down way. I want the educational practice to come first.

Institutions can approach educational technology in two very different ways. They can have a learning technology division that is basically in charge of acquiring and maintaining educational technology. Or they can provide spaces to develop pedagogy and then think about the role of technology within that pedagogy.

I think the 'fit for purpose' debate is evidence of the tension for those who would like to start with the education but are being told by their institutions that they have to work with particular kinds of tools. I think those debates are actually artefacts of going about it the wrong way: a history of institutions handing people tech instead of starting with the pedagogy.

So, what are you trying to do?

So, educators need to figure out what they need to do. Are you trying to have a conversation? Are you simply trying to transmit information? Or are you, in fact, trying to have students create something?

Answer those pedagogical questions first and then - and only then - will you be able to connect people to the kinds of technologies that can do that thing. 

Join Donna at Digifest 2016

This is the second in a series of features from our speakers for this year's Digifest. 

Donna is speaking on day one of Digifest, 9:30-10:45, during our plenary session about the power of digital for change. See full programme.

Join the debate

The views expressed by contributors to Jisc Inform are theirs alone and not necessarily those of Jisc.  You might not agree with everything that the contributors say but you are guaranteed to read something that will raise questions and spark debate while you're at Digifest - and beyond. 

How do you deal with student consent when using learning analytics?

8 February 2016

Learning analytics specialist Niall Sclater has been speaking to experts about the legal and ethical issues around asking university and college students for consent to use their data for learning analytics. Hear what they had to say in our podcast.

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Hear from our customers

2 February 2016

On the 26 January 2016 we welcomed customers to our annual stakeholder forum. Hear what they think of our recent work with education and research providers and what their current concerns are for the coming year.

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Jisc response to the Higher Education Commission report ‘From Bricks to Clicks’

22 January 2016

Today we welcome the Higher Education Commission (HEC)'s report ‘From Bricks to Clicks: the potential of data and analytics in Higher Education’. 

It contains the findings of the Commission’s ten-month inquiry into the potential impact of data and analytics for universities, students and the sector as a whole.

Commenting on the report, our chief executive Dr Paul Feldman, said:

“This report unambiguously sets out the transformative impact that digital technology and use of big data can have on British higher education. It highlights the powerful role learning analytics can play in enabling universities to achieve their strategic goals and in supporting students to maximise their potential. It goes as far as recommending that all universities consider introducing an appropriate learning analytics system.

Our own research shows that learning analytics can help to improve the quality of teaching, cut drop-out rates, build better relationships between students and staff and empower students to take ownership of their learning.

We are working with 50 UK universities to set up a national learning analytics service – this will be the first time learning analytics has been introduced on a national scale anywhere in the world. The framework we have established will also enable any university that has already implemented learning analytics to contribute to national efforts by following the industry standards we have developed with the sector.

We also look forward to continuing to work together with the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), Universities UK and other partners to make progress on the other issues raised in the report, particularly around excellent and innovative data management, and supporting digital leadership within universities.”

Are you flying high in social media for UK further education and skills?

20 January 2016

This month Jisc launched a call to find the 50 most influential FE & skills professionals in the UK on social media. 

Tom Mitchell, group social media manager, talks about the initiative - which will recognise those individuals who are using social media in a way that benefits and adds value to teaching and learning.

Nominate yourself or someone you know, and join in the discussion using the hashtag #jisc50social.

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Jisc and Adam Matthew collaborate to provide access to 'Migration to New Worlds' to all UK higher education and further education institutions

21 January 2016

Migration to New Worlds, a collection of materials on the ‘Century of Immigration’, is to be made freely available to all UK academics and students in higher (HE) and further (FE) education institutions from January 2016 thanks to a collaboration between Jisc and Adam Matthew.

Market research conducted by both Adam Matthew, a leading provider of digital content for the humanities and social sciences, and Jisc identified Migration to New Worlds as having relevance to contemporary society and responding to many undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the UK covering the subject of immigration. This was from an inter-disciplinary point of view and includes the subjects of history, geography, anthropology, sociology, politics, cultural studies and English.

Collection materials include unique primary source material on the ‘Century of Immigration’ (1800-1924): a period when hundreds of thousands of migrants left their homelands in Great Britain, Ireland, mainland Europe, India, China, Japan and other Asian countries to start new lives in the United States, Canada and Australasia.

Materials include unique diaries, personal letters, oral histories and journals; each narrating the intimate journeys and challenges immigrants faced when settling in foreign countries.

Andrew Linn academic at the University of Sheffield comments:

“This ambitious resource allows students and scholars to understand, perhaps for the first time, the individual, personal and local stories which underlie the impersonal, statistical and global history of migration.”

As well as making the product available to the entire UK academic and student community for free, and as part of the shared commitment to improving accessibility to archival sources, this agreement will also see up to ten percent of the content available to the UK general public.

Paola Marchionni, head of digital resources for teaching, learning and research at Jisc, said:

“This is an important collaboration for Jisc in its mission to make digital resources as widely available and accessible as possible. We have worked closely with Adam Matthew not only to explore new and more efficient ways of procuring digital collections for our customers, but also to support discovery and openness by ensuring that the metadata and up to ten percent of the content are openly available in the UK.”

Managing director of Adam Matthew, Khal Rudin, added:

"We are delighted to be involved with this ground-breaking initiative, which is enabling our latest flagship resource to be accessed by all HE and FE institutions in the United Kingdom. We are also very pleased to have this opportunity to inspire and assist teaching and research in the UK."

UK HE and FE institutions wishing to take up a free subscription to Migration to New Worlds can do so from the Jisc Collections website.

Images from the collection

British Universities Film and Video Council’s changing model

18 January 2016

The British Universities Film and Video Council (BUFVC) has been supporting higher education, further education and research in the production and study of moving images since 1948. It provides a wealth of services, databases and other publications to encourage the use of this digital medium.

BUFVC has received grant funding since 1968 and has benefitted from working with Jisc, the UK higher, further education and skills sectors’ organisation for digital services and solutions, and its predecessor bodies over many years.

In recent years, support provided by Jisc has been used towards the provision of core BUFVC services, also sustained through other funding mechanisms.

Due to changing circumstances, the BUFVC’s grant funding from Jisc is being annually reduced over the next two and a half years with additional support being available to assist with transition in the current financial year (2015 – 2016). Correspondingly, BUFVC must aim to become fully self-sustaining from August 2018.

Virginia Haworth-Galt, chief executive, BUFVC explains:

“Whilst we recognise that the move to becoming entirely self-sustaining will be challenging we have worked hard over recent years to develop our business model and our service offer and we are determined to continue to deliver the highest quality services to our members.

We have enjoyed our long working relationship with Jisc and we will be continuing to support their work.”

Keith Cole, executive director Jisc digital resources adds:

“Jisc is pleased to support BUFVC in this next step and is keen to explore a range of potential future collaboration opportunities to benefit further and higher education in the use of digital media.”

Jisc appoints new trustee

14 January 2016

We are strengthening our board of trustees with the appointment of Robin Ghurbhurun, chief executive and principal of Richmond upon Thames College who joins this month.

Creative Commons attribution information

Robin Ghurbhurun

At the same time Heather MacDonald, interim principal and chief executive of Loughborough College, will step down after a three year tenure as a trustee.

Commenting on the changes, David Maguire, Jisc chair and vice-chancellor of the University of Greenwich, said:

“First of all I would like to thank Heather for her guidance and enthusiasm as a board trustee and Association of Colleges (AoC) representative.  During her three years with us we have benefited greatly from her insight.

Robin will take over from Heather bringing fresh expertise to our board in particular from the further education sector.  As well as joining us as a trustee, Robin will also act as the representative for the AoC (one of our owners), bringing his expertise as vice chair of the AoC’s technology portfolio group."

Robin is an experienced learning and skills leader with 22 years’ experience in the further and higher education sector.  He brings considerable expertise in managing high value complex skills and training solutions for education and the business community.

He started his career in 1994 as a lecturer in computing at Weald College before progressing his career in a number of colleges including East Surrey, Carshalton, and Lewisham.  He became vice principal at City College Norwich and then moved to Newcastle College as deputy principal.

David said:

“Jisc’s mission is to deliver digital solutions that support the transformation of the education and research sectors, and to help colleges and universities gain the maximum value from their infrastructure and investments. 

Robin’s experience and insight will help build our strategic direction and capabilities.”

Lessons learned: how departmental social media use in universities needs to evolve and grow

7 January 2016

Earlier this year, Dave Webster from the University of Gloucestershire was named as one of our 50 most influential social media users in UK higher education. 

In this podcast he shares some of his learnings about how the university's Religion, Philosophy and Ethics programme has been using social media to engage students. Read the original blog post.

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