Today Jisc welcomes a new policy briefing from innovation charity Nesta and Universities UK (UUK), which is designed to develop data analytics skills and improve the supply of analytical talent to support the UK economy.
Drawing from two research reports – ‘Skills of the Datavores: Talent and the data revolution’ from Nesta, and ‘Making the most of data: Data skills training in English universities’ from UUK, with input from Jisc's chief innovation officer, Phil Richards – the briefing recognises the growing importance of data analysis and lays down a series of recommendations to upgrade analytical education and skills provision nationally.
Richards comments:
“The ability to process, manage and take tangible meaning from data is becoming increasingly important for all industries and sectors. What this creates is a new requirement to develop a strong analytical talent pipeline, in order that the UK can take advantage of the valuable opportunities that come with smarter data analysis.
"This policy briefing is a timely reminder that effective data analytics can lead to a more productive and innovative nation – but only if we take action to upgrade our skills and training.
"It reinforces much of Jisc’s research and development work, specifically that which looks to embed data literacy across the learning experience for all students and staff, and to create digital leaders who are able to engage, encourage and equip the next generation of analysts with the skills they need to be successful.”
Current Jisc solutions in development that promote data analytics skills include:
Phil added:
“We believe services such as these will be a helpful first step to upskilling students and staff, however we recognise that for wholesale change to happen this needs to be driven from the top down. That’s why we’re also supporting these activities with advice and guidance that will help organisations to understand their requirements at a strategic level and implement suitable policies.
"For example, considerations around data literacy strategies are made both in our learning analytics code of practice and six elements of digital capability framework. I would urge people to refer to these guides."
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James Kieft, learning technologies manager at Reading College, talks to us about how the college is using web-based apps and social media to engage students and equip them with employability skills. He also offers some top tips for enhancing the student digital experience.
If you want to find out more you can hear James speak at our connect more events in Bristol and London.
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Jisc welcomes the publication of ‘The Metric Tide’ - a report on the independent review of the role of metrics in research assessment and management, chaired by Professor James Wilsdon.
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Front cover of HEFCE's 'The Metric Tide' reportAll rights reserved
With our ethos of supporting open and interoperable data infrastructure to make research easier for universities, Jisc strongly supports the report’s recommendations. In particular we commend its emphasis on identifiers being central to a more reliable, less burdensome and transparent research information management system.
Jisc believes these can underpin more open and transparent research metrics and indicators. We fully support the report’s view that there is a balance to be had, and metrics and indicators must be put in context with peer review.
Rachel Bruce, Jisc’s deputy chief innovation officer, said:
“We are already working hard to deliver against many of the report’s recommendations in partnership with universities, research bodies and funders across the sector.”
Initiatives we are leading to deliver include:
Rachel added:
“We look forward to working with colleagues and building new partnerships across the research and education sector to deliver the report’s recommendations.
"We will explore opportunities for making additional strategic investment with funders to improve the research information infrastructure, and particularly to improve the interoperability of research management systems, as well as taking up the opportunity to be part of the Forum for Responsible Metrics and increase the UK’s research position globally.”
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FutureLearn is the UK's platform for online courses, with nearly 70 partner universities and institutions, from the British Museum to University College London.
It recently claimed the record for the course with the most students - more than 440,000 learners enrolled for a British Council course preparing for an English language test. What's the secret behind its success and what does the future hold for massive open online courses (MOOCS) providers like FutureLearn?
It's been nearly two years now since FutureLearn launched – how's it going?
We're delighted with progress. Around a year later we hit our first million people signed up for courses and those numbers are accelerating [now nearly two million]. People who are doing our courses seem to love them and the volume we have who are getting through the courses – our own metric is "fully participating in them" – is very healthy.
We think that the quality of the courses coming from the universities is getting better and better and we have a very strong relationship with our partners where we mutually support each other to keep quality high and raise standards by learning from each other. Our first business models are performing far better than predictions so I can definitely see a clear path of sustainability for the business.
These are business models based around people paying for the statements of participation?
Yes, that's pretty much the only business model we've got at the moment; we also offer exams at the end of some of our courses at physical test centres and that's been slower to get off the ground but our statements of participation are selling in many multiples of what we predicted they would at this stage.
What about the numbers of people who have completed courses?
Our metric is full participation so you need to have done more than half the steps of the course and all the assessments. Our figure is that around 23% of people who start on our courses fully participate in them. If you look at other platforms, everyone measures themselves slightly differently so some people benchmark against people who sign up for the course (although a lot of people who sign up for a course don't actually start it) and if you take our figures against that metric, which is only fair to do, then it's 12% of people who start up who fully participate, which we're pretty pleased with at the moment. The first metric is the more interesting one for us.
And how does that compare with other platforms?
Everyone measures slightly differently and they may measure completion or people who are eligible for their statements of completion. With that caveat, I think the published figures that they put out are around 4-6% on average. We have some courses that have had over 50% full participation and others that have had well under 10%. We think we may start getting more sophisticated in the way in which we report that as there are different durations of courses, different types of courses. But in very crude benchmarking against what's happening elsewhere in the market, we're very pleased with progress.
What do you know about your learners? Who are they and do you know why do some fully participate and others do not?
There's a wide range of backgrounds and motivation driving our learners. Demographically, we have a broad spread from age 13 to 93 and we have a wide range of courses targeted at school leavers, university leavers, professionals in business, healthcare, teaching, international learners who want to develop their English skills and then general interest learners who want to capitalise on this free learning revolution and get back to studying. So there's a huge diversity but the enthusiasm you see among all ages and all demographics is really the key yardstick for us that tells us we're on the right track.
I always tell people to go and have a look at the courses and what people are doing and saying because we put great emphasis on what we call our social learning functionality - we very much encourage debate and discussion within the courses and you'll see it's very passionate, erudite, informed discussion that goes on in there.
How important is that social element in keeping people going, keeping them participating, helping with those full participation rates?
Critical. The two elements that distinguish these types of courses from the type of open courseware that has gone before is the fact that the courses have a start date – a beginning, middle and end – which is a powerful motivator in an on-demand world, and then the social element that means that they go through the courses with a cohort, encouraging and motivating each other to continue, making it feel like it's not a lonely experience but a shared one.
Increasingly, we're trying to bring interesting approaches to how people learn from each other and collaborate in their learning. We're early days in this but we've built the foundations effectively for a social network for learning. I hasten to add that we've only built the foundations so far! But we think it's going to be a really interesting area for where learning goes over the next few years.
And the use of mobile technology?
Again, it's very, very important. So we make sure that we've built a product that is responsively designed so it recognises the device you're on and optimises for it – our platform works beautifully whether you're on a mobile or a desktop. We don't have an app but that's definitely something we'll be looking at in future.
Which have been your most successful courses and why? Are you discovering what doesn't work?
There's no course that we point at and say "that doesn't work" though there may be elements that need improving. One of the beauties of this market is that because it's such a dynamic medium you have the opportunity to be driven by a wealth of data that is almost unparalleled in a learning context. But there are courses that have stood out for us.
Until recently our biggest course was one called Exploring English Language and Culture with the British Council, which 123,000 people signed up to on its first run. This area of social language learning is a very interesting journey for us. We also have a course on building your first mobile game, from the University of Reading, and that's been big, and we're on the second run of an introduction to forensic science from Strathclyde. We've had three very good forensic science courses, all very popular and all with great participation rates.
We've had fantastic courses in Irish history and ancient history, based around archaeology and Hadrian's Wall, and they get very high levels of engagement. Personal health and wellbeing feels like a very strong category – there's a focus on mental health, for example. We've got quite a healthcare portfolio, aimed at professionals as well as more general interest and sufferers. So we have courses on medicines adherence – how do you get patients to take their medicines – and courses on falls among aging patients. We have courses running soon on dysphasia and obesity. Then, of course, business and entrepreneurship is a very hot area for us.
In terms of the portfolio of courses we cover quite a broad waterfront quite thinly and my priority is to try to add depth into those categories because we know that people get to the end of the courses and they've had a fantastic experience and they say so, where next? We want to have somewhere for them to go next, either on FutureLearn or, potentially, into the core business of our university partners either online or on undergraduate or postgraduate courses.
For that to happen would there have to be a way for these courses to give points or credentials so that people can go on to those university courses?
That's something for the universities to deal with themselves, really; it's not an area we particularly focus on – we don't see ourselves as a university, we don't want to be a university and, for many of our learners, credit is not the kind of thing they are looking for. They are looking for different types of recognition, they are looking for things that are valued by their employers, or things that help them develop new skills, things that will help them gain professional qualifications or just personal mementoes so they can say "yes, I did that".
We're doing a lot of work and a lot of thinking on understanding those different motivations at different life stages but credit and the complexities of credit, that's core university business so we leave it to them whether they want to offer credit but, if they do, we want to make sure that our platform is a robust solution for them to do that.
Have any courses been a surprise success for you?
There's a course running on ebola at the moment that's been very successful but that doesn't surprise me. Forensic science did, actually, I didn't see that coming though a couple of people in my team did. All the forensic science courses have stood out. We've had a few courses on Shakespeare that have been extremely popular and with great engagement levels.
What have you learned and changed since launching?
In terms of the development of the platform I guess it's still amazing how much you can get done in a launch phase. I still can't quite believe we hit what felt like insane deadlines! The complexities of running a live service is a constant challenge as well and trying to balance innovation in content and pedagogy against the need to grow and drive audience, and the commercial business.
It's the first commercial business that I've run - my background is the BBC. Just how to balance an appropriate development of business models without overly skewing the rest of the business, which is driving our take-up and awareness. We're a team of 50 now and so as you grow – and we've had to grow very fast – you identify roles you hadn't thought you'd need and roles you thought you needed you no longer need and areas where you put a whole load of focus turn out to be a blind alley.
Such as?
We put a lot of effort at the beginning into understanding how to work with other content providers and other cultural organisations etc. We've been on a bit of a journey on that one and we've got to a very good place. We've got courses coming out from the British Library, the British Council has turned out to be one of our most powerful; partners, the BBC – it took a while to reel them in but we got them in and we've got real commitment from them in a whole range of areas which has been thrilling. But there were a number of other grander visions, for example around opening up and unlocking the archives of some of these great institutions but we just need to focus on the core business while trying to move forward the conditions for that bigger, grander vision.
Another thing we've changed is that at the beginning, because we were a brand new start up which had to persuade universities to join us – universities who frankly didn't know if we could do what we said we were going to do and were taking a leap of faith – the relationship with those universities has developed just about every month we've been in existence. In the beginning I think they were quite nervous about whether we'd be able to deliver on what we said and every month that's gone by that bond has got stronger and stronger. The dynamic of the overall partnership has changed as well. Whereas at the beginning it was quite competitive between the different universities, now they are starting to increasingly explore collaboration.
Is that just within the UK institutions?
No, internationally as well.
With your partnerships with the British Library, British Museum, British Council and British Film Institute, to name just a few, there's a very British flavour to FutureLearn but you also partner with international universities – Australia, Shanghai, Oslo – what does that bring and are there any challenges with this kind of transnational education?
The web is a global platform and rewards global networks. We're interested in working with the top universities all over the world and showcasing their expertise to the rest of the world using the platform and approach that we've developed. They give us credibility in different markets so by having one of the top Australian universities and top Chinese universities it raises awareness of FutureLearn in those countries and helps us to attract learners. It's really interesting but relatively untapped potential at this stage in how those universities work together. My philosophy has always been that the web is a very big competitive landscape and one that favours scale so to act in partnership with others and create something that's bigger than the sum of your individual parts is a very powerful strategy.
Have Moocs been over-hyped?
Unquestionably there were excessive claims made about the potential of Moocs in the early days – not by us, I hasten to add. But it's typical of any industry I've worked in when the internet hits it. It's what happened when I was in radio, it's what happened when I was in TV, at the BBC, it's what happened in publishing - evangelists overclaiming the potential benefits and also predicting the death or demise of the key institutions in the industry; sceptics moving to the other end of the spectrum and getting further entrenched in a view what dismisses what's going on as a fad and starts to question any of the benefits that may be coming.
This spectrum of debate is often quite unhealthy and the real answer lies somewhere in the middle and that's what I think is happening with Moocs. In some ways Moocs are just one part of a much more exciting and fundamental transformation that's happening in higher education, which is the arrival of the internet and the possibilities that that offers to the existing incumbents, to new entrants, to transform the quality and effectiveness of teaching and learning is something that we prefer to focus on and try to be a catalyst for and a partner for our universities in helping to exploit that.
[This article was amended on 30 July 2015 to reflect changes in course numbers since the interview took place]
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Recently Andrew Cormack, chief regulatory advisor, was awarded the Vietsch foundation medal of honour for his outstanding contribution in advancing trust and security within the European research and education sector. In this podcast Andrew tells us what he has learned from 20 years' experience of incident response. Read the original blog post here.
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In this podcast Helen Beetham, co-leader of the digital student project discusses the increasing importance of digital capabilities and digital wellbeing, and the challenges that these pose to universities and colleges. Read the original blog post.
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At 183 years old, Heriot-Watt University is steeped in heritage. It was founded as the world’s first mechanics’ institute in Edinburgh, training technical and managerial staff at the time of the industrial revolution.
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Mike Roch, Heriot-Watt UniversityAll rights reserved Mike Roch, Heriot-Watt University
To this day, it’s still very much focused on technology, science and business - only now it does this across its five campuses in the UK, Dubai and Malaysia, which together host 28,000 students.
Heriot-Watt's director of information services, Mike Roch, describes how he has created an integrated technical infrastructure that works 'invisibly' around the world, how Jisc and the Janet network support his work and why collaboration is crucial.
What were the main challenges you faced when you took on the role?
"My job was created in September 2011, following a review that identified that the IT department and library were working in completely unconnected ways. They had different line management, different budgets and governance yet so many important developments in universities today involve expertise from both fields. We had a very poor technical infrastructure and connections to online resources. We were underdeveloped in terms of supporting research – a field that really needs input from both IT and the library – and lots of things were held back by lack of collaboration between the two.
The university had very poor provision in terms of a central information system. It was outdated and running on poor infrastructure. The core networking needed updating and a lot of reconfiguration. We didn’t tend to have commercial partnerships with trusted suppliers, which is something I very much believe in."
What were your objectives when you started?
"To bring some coherence to the way IT supports the university and the teams across the campuses. We run services worldwide – we are the HQ. They are formally defined as branch campuses, in the context of communications and networking, but we are the design authority as they have no network staff at the other sites. So, we have one student record system and one library collection that works around the world, managed and developed from Edinburgh."
What have you achieved over the last three years?
"I’ve brought together all the customer-facing functions and relationships between information services and schools and remote campuses into one functional team that reports to me. I’ve integrated a package of student and staff courses, which we call the Power Hours. These cover a diverse range of subjects, from finding the material you require and writing an academic paper to using Microsoft Word.
This is a big step for us. The team driving that includes people who were previously in the library and IT department. We’ve had to develop relationships with schools, whether that’s through IT support or library content."
What's your current infrastructure environment like?
"The priority with academic and learning services is to create integrated services, where customers can’t see the join. The Edinburgh campus is part of the metropolitan area network for Edinburgh and Stirling and Janet's taking all of these metropolitan area networks under its wing and will bring it in-house over the next 18 months. I’m very happy with this and don’t envisage any problems.
Janet helps us with connecting wider campuses – particularly in Malaysia, where we have an interim campus. We’ve ended up dealing with local telecomms there, where prices are high and there’s little choice of supplier. We’ve effectively been using 4G!
When it’s completed, the campus will grow to over 4,000 students, so we clearly need a proper connection. We’re looking at 100 megabits per second, which, through Malaysia Telcomms, would cost us around £110,000 a year. Janet has been able to get us a circuit with the same capacity for half the price. And, of course, we have Janet doing the supply and management for us, which solves a big headache."
As the higher education landscape continues to develop, what opportunities and challenges do you see?
"The big one has to be money. That’s another interesting thing about coming to Scotland. I won’t say money flows freely but, over the last two or three years, budgets have been maintained. Whereas I’m conscious that in England many colleagues are under pressure to deliver more for less. Doing more with less is a big theme.
We can teach our 28,0000 students as we’ve got a great virtual learning environment, available 24/7. How can we improve student experience without spending a lot of money, with Windows 365, emails, contacts, calendars, etc needing to be available anywhere, any time? We used Janet’s model contract when working out our contract with Microsoft."
What role do you think directors of IT play in overcoming these challenges?
"The imperative thing will be for organisations to collaborate more and more. Some organisations want to compete but, with the limited resources most of us have, we can achieve more by collaborating. Where there are collaborations to be made, technology is the obvious enabling infrastructure for that to happen."
With this in mind, how does IT look in the future at Heriot-Watt?
"Our goal at Heriot-Watt is that technology just becomes invisible - part of the furniture. But it must be everywhere and it must be totally reliable. There’s no point in having online services if you’re offline! In order to make it reliable we have to find models for acquiring it and managing it, which are sustainable. I have a networking team of four people – I can’t have them working 24 hours a day 365 days a year, so I need to build partnerships and make arrangements that allow my people to be adding value, in terms of the quality of network services and what our students need."
How does Jisc contribute to Heriot-Watt’s vision as a university ‘for business and industry, with a vibrant, forward-looking approach and an established reputation for world-class teaching and research’?
"The short answer is because the Janet network’s as powerful and as reliable as it is. It’s achieved that invisibility – it’s just ‘there’, no one notices it and it doesn’t disrupt or slow down. We have connectivity most industries would die for! The typical student isn’t aware of it at all, so it’s achieved its goal. Jisc has to work hard at that – it’s not magic just because you don’t see it, it’s because it’s working right.
Janet is a trusted partner, and has been for decades, and this is continuing with Jisc. It provides what is, primarily, the UK’s national research and education network. We need it – it’s indispensible to us. And the added-value services it’s beginning to develop are very interesting to us. Speaking for us and dealing with big companies like Microsoft is a big thing. We’re also interested in other commercial opportunities Janet’s identified, such as long-term storage of data."
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From student recruitment to alumni relations, social media has a place at every step of the student journey, says Eric Stoller. Institutions and educators ignore it at their peril.
Communication is at the core of the human experience. How we learn, teach and engage is predicated on our ability to communicate with one another, and technology-based services have added layers of complexity, efficiency, innovation, and disruption to how we do this. How we communicate is ever-evolving, especially with the rise of digital services as a primary method of engagement, and social media is one of the most exciting communication channels higher education institutions can use today.
But, while social media provides myriad conduits for interaction, learning, and communication, it requires nuance, experimentation, and intrepidity. The payback is that this kind of digital communication is multi-directional, almost always available, and provides utility in ways that are constantly emerging.
The importance of technology competency has been increasing for both staff and administration. It's no longer just about being savvy with MS Office, email or the VLE. In addition to those baseline skills/tools, social media has become a channel for individuals to communicate and teach.
Enhancing the digital capabilities of educators is just as important as expanding the digital literacy of students. Learning how to use social media for practitioner-based learning and educationally relevant activities means that today's educator will experience an always-moving digital learning curve. In what perhaps could be considered a true definition of lifelong learning, social media services create opportune locales for learning, teaching, and engagement that are embued with community-generated creativity.
In order to increase the digital capabilities of educators, the number one factor is time. Finding daily moments to progress through cognitive digital dissonance can be challenging. Institutions that reward staff and administrators for taking time to improve their digital capabilities will usually be much more forward-thinking than their counterparts.
Getting digital isn't difficult once time has been taken, apps have been downloaded, and competency has been amplified.
Once an educator has committed to becoming more savvy with social media, it can be difficult to know where to start. Which tools, services, or apps should be tried? Experimentation with digital tools can be a transformative educational experience.
Educators and students learn a lot about communication simply by figuring out the processes, group norms and functionality found within each social service. For example, what works on Twitter might need to be modified to fit in with the communications style found within Slack or Yik Yak. Perhaps an educator is thinking about using Google+, YouTube or Periscope to connect their students to someone via streaming video in another country.
Each channel has pros and cons that can be discussed. In that process, learning takes place via problem-solving, group collaboration, and content creation tactics. Social media is what we make it. Our creative endeavours shape the tools by way of innovative ideas, community-based learning and the tension of figuring out how to clearly communicate in meaningful ways.
From the recruitment of students to alumni relations, student engagement is accentuated and sometimes improved by way of social media. What might start off as mostly marketing-based communications at the beginning of a student's institutional journey quickly becomes a conversation about community, leadership and support. Institutions can use social media as community management interfaces.
Unlike traditional marketers, community managers are student-focused representatives. Connecting with students in a "digital iceberg" style may begin with a tweet, but end in a face-to-face interaction. Social media doesn't replace communications, it adds a needed layer of options.
Combined with traditional communications channels (eg email), staff and administrators can connect with students to enhance engagement. Additionally, student engagement can take place via social media using peer-to-peer digital channels. The ultra-rigid communications hierarchies of the past are flattened.
While that might be a bit unsettling for some, as power structures dissipate, a true sense of overall engagement can emerge due to the expansion of digital learning partnerships.
Who "owns" the student experience at an institution? In practice, everyone at a university is responsible in some way for the student experience. Changes to the enrolment capabilities for UK higher education institutions are bringing about a more focused emphasis on the student experience. Similar to how student affairs/services have become essential to student success in the US, the UK student experience matters.
As enrolment rises, digital communications become the primary outreach channels for customer service, retention programmes, academic advising, career development, and student services. Student experience becomes part of the competitive advantage for an institution: whoever does it best will impact student satisfaction, enrolment, and alumni development.
University leaders who understand the connection between digital engagement and student experience will cause dynamic changes within their organisations. Student-focused efforts, led via savvy social media practitioners, will win the day.
Learning happens everywhere. Learning is part of the constant journey that is existence. Who is teaching university students how to be more digitally literate?
Educators who use digital tools such as social media are showing their students how to acquire knowledge via a variety of global sources. Digital literacy is made up of multiple facets. Regardless of the app, service, device, or reason for connecting, digital literacy plays a vital role in the development of today's student.
Educators are role models in the digital space. Digital balance, communications, search, knowledge acquisition and networking are aspects of digital literacy that are important for students as they move throughout their university experience and beyond.
Students generally attend university for two reasons: to learn and to set themselves up for a future career. Employability may not be a primary concern during the first year, but as a student nears the completion of their time at university, the next step is almost always about employment.
Getting digital at university, as in learning how to lead, connect, and network, is an important part of employability. For example, students should be using LinkedIn for networking and career intelligence and/or learning how to use Twitter for professional development.
Social media channels will evolve over time, but the functionality and value within each site/service/app is what matters in the present. Building a network on Twitter and LinkedIn can lead to a job or at the very least, to someone who can connect you to one. However, social media isn't the be all and end all for employability. It is part of an individual's career development tool kit.
At an institution, it's ok that everyone isn't always available on social media or that some individuals choose not to use certain tools. However, when a campus is focusing on recruitment, retention, and learning, the digital identity of its constituents makes for a community that is accessible for greater levels of connection and access.
It's important for institutions to think about their overall social media presence and how each individual's actions on social media impact the community's identity. At induction, practitioners should lead the way in terms of modelling what it means to use social media in higher education.
It's useful to consider the digital environments that students are coming from prior to attending university. Higher education, in many ways, shapes the future, both online and offline.
Note that what people communicate online matters just as much as what they say in face-to-face environments.
There are enhanced educational opportunities that come from getting digital. Educators who are student-focused will always be ready for the challenges of the present and the opportunities of the future. It's up to institutions to provide support, resources, and rewards to those who are using social media to benefit the learners that they serve. So let's get digital in order to get learning.
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Following the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) Dowling Review into the complexity of current business-university collaborations – which recommended as ‘simple as possible’ interfaces between user and scheme that ‘hide the wiring’ – Jisc is pleased to announce power systems provider Rolls-Royce as the first company to join its high performance computing (HPC) agreement.
Through the brokerage scheme - developed in collaboration with the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) HPC Midlands supercomputing centre of excellence - Rolls-Royce will have easy access to supercomputing equipment worth up to £60m. There are enormous capital costs in setting up HPC centres and this agreement will allow Rolls-Royce to benefit from additional world-class HPC facilities and expertise, thereby supporting the company to be more innovative.
In addition, Rolls-Royce will also be taking advantage of a connection to the Janet network, the high-speed network for UK education and research. Through Jisc’s Janet Reach scheme for industrial connectivity – which leverages £30m of public investment in ultra-fast internet and is supported by BIS – a network circuit operating at 10 Gigabits per second will be installed by Jisc, so that it is able to fully-exploit the HPC centre.
Rolls-Royce’s HPC lead, Dr Yoon Ho says:
“For many years now we have worked with universities and colleges across the UK and internationally, and we partner with a number of institutions on research and development through our University Technology Centres. This agreement was a natural next step to explore sharing facilities more broadly.
We have been impressed by the professional approach that Jisc and HPC Midlands have taken to this project, in particular around our tough information security and export control requirements, and we see a very bright future for our collaboration.”
Jeremy Sharp, Jisc's director of strategic technologies, continued:
“It is no longer the case that academia and industry operate in separate, parallel worlds. In an environment where resources are increasingly constrained, both sectors need to understand how they can work more closely together and learn from one another.
I am very pleased that we have been able to come up with a two such solutions that break down some of these barriers. Rolls-Royce signing up as the first company demonstrates just how valuable these initiatives are to supporting UK business and the economy to thrive.”
The HPC brokerage agreement being used by Rolls-Royce has been developed by Jisc in conjunction with HPC Midlands and other leading UK supercomputer centres. It is part of Jisc’s asset sharing initiative, helping the sector to implement Sir Ian Diamond's report ‘Efficiency, effectiveness and value for money’, which recommends increased collaboration and shared services to improve efficiency and productivity.
HPC Midlands director, professor Steven Kenny added:
"It has been a pleasure to work with Jisc to develop what we hope will become a standardised approach for providing industry access to supercomputing facilities. In years to come we hope that it becomes accepted practice for research and industry to share these kinds of high tech facilities and expertise."
Janet Reach is a Jisc research and design project that will provide companies who join with high-capacity connections to the Janet network, enabling them to benefit from the same superfast and secure connectivity that UK academic organisations already enjoy.
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In this podcast Helen Beetham, leader of the digital capabilities framework project discusses the increasing importance of digital capabilities and digital wellbeing, and the challenges that these pose to universities and colleges. Read the original blog post.
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Thousands of medical, nursing and other allied health profession students in West Yorkshire are now able to seamlessly access free Wi-Fi connectivity when on NHS Trust clinical placements, making it easier for them to complete their work away from their university.
The project by the University of Leeds has seen nine NHS Trusts in the region deploy eduroam, provided in the UK by Jisc, which allows users authenticated internet access through a single Wi-Fi profile and set of credentials, wherever this service has been made available.
Hospitals in the scheme include those at Huddersfield and Calderdale, Harrogate, Bradford, Wakefield, Dewsbury, Pontefract, Airedale and Leeds. Additionally community care Trusts in both Leeds and Bradford have adopted the scheme making eduroam available in many healthcare locations across those cities.
As well as being available to the 1,250 medical students at the University of Leeds, any learner with eduroam credentials will be able to access the internet at eduroam-enabled hospitals and practices.
This means that the work spearheaded by the University of Leeds is of value to all universities running health related courses, where their students or related staff spend time in NHS facilities in West Yorkshire.
Gareth Frith, technology-enhanced learning manager, Leeds Institute of Medical Education, added:
“We see eduroam as being a valuable tool in supporting the learning and development for our medical students as they move between classroom and lecture halls to clinical placements in our hospitals and community”
Unique to this project was that eight of the nine Trusts have been implemented as a ‘visited’ partner members of eduroam, rather than as extensions of a local university’s eduroam service.
This results in user authentications being passed to Jisc's national Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) infrastructure directly and means that the Trusts have the option to enable eduroam for eligible members of their own staff.
The work was funded by Health Education Yorkshire and Humber. It was a collaborative effort with all the NHS Trusts involved, and a dedicated consultant was employed to liaise directly with each site and trouble-shoot any barriers to the installation.
Malcolm Teague, NHS-HE coordinator, Jisc, said:
“For medical students there has previously been something of a postcode lottery as to whether they can get access to free, high quality internet connections while on hospital placements as they are not recognised officially as hospital staff. In some cases they’re unable to access any online services, stopping them from accessing their e-portfolio or completing vital evidence.
In rolling out eduroam across its primary NHS Trusts and other community care sites in West Yorkshire, students are now able to gain easy and secure internet access that supports their study even when they are away from their university.”
Using 802.1X standard-based technology, eduroam provides a secure authentication framework which protects against ‘man-in-the-middle’ attacks. Users are never prompted to enter their credentials onto a web page that could be vulnerable to hijacking.
Instead, before the user’s device is granted an IP network connection, authentication occurs at the user’s ‘home’ institution with the authentication exchange being securely encrypted end to end.
Primarily used at education campuses, there is a growing uptake of eduroam in the health sector to support medical degrees and training. More than 100 hospitals in the UK have deployed eduroam, while it has been adopted by most universities in the UK.
via Jisc news
In this podcast Will Allen, head of Jisc North, is at the Jisc Connect More regional event in Leeds. The event offers delegates from across the education sector, the chance to come together to find out about the latest technology and how it can be used in education.
via Jisc news
SHERPA/FACT, the funders and author’s compliance tool, has been found to be more than 95% accurate when checking publisher policies against funder mandates for open access – significantly higher than even experienced repository managers.
A study by the SHERPA/FACT advisory group compared the information provided by SHERPA/FACT with a control made up of members of UKCoRR (United Kingdom Council of Research Repositories), who manually checked the policies.
Where a discrepancy was identified between the two sets of data, the advisory group made an investigation into which returned the correct result, and found that SHERPA/FACT was correct in almost all of the cases, against 57% of the time for human checking.
For researchers, this should come as clear evidence that SHERPA/FACT can provide accurate results on journal and funder policy alignment on open access, better enabling them to decide where to publish their research outputs to meet funder requirements.
Neil Jacobs, head of scholarly communication support, Jisc, said:
“The transition to open access is exactly that: a transition from an established way of doing things to something completely different. As with any major change, there will understandably be barriers to overcome as people and organisations familiarise themselves with the new world.
"With this in mind it’s hugely positive that SHERPA/FACT has been proven to operate at such a high level of accuracy. It gives assurances that this technology is able to clarify journal and funder policies and help researchers make informed decisions about where they should be publishing, as well as saving time and effort in understanding where discrepancies may lie.”
Mark Thorley, chair of RCUK Research Outputs Network, said:
“I am pleased that an independent test has validated that the information in FACT is highly accurate. The Research Councils support FACT as the authoritative source of information to check if a journal is compliant with the RCUK policy on open access. We hope that all those that we fund will use FACT as the most efficient and accurate way to check journal compliance with our OA policy."
Richard Mollet, chief executive of the Publishers Association stated:
“Clarity in communication of open access policies is clearly vital if researchers are to have confidence that they are complying with funder mandates. Publishers will continue to work with the SHERPA/FACT team to identify ways of better elucidating the sometimes nuanced licence conditions.”
The study was commissioned by the SHERPA/FACT Advisory Board – which includes representatives from UKCoRR, Jisc, Wellcome Trust, Research Councils UK (RCUK), CRC Nottingham, Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), Publishers Association and SCONUL.
SHERPA/FACT works by syndicating information on journal policies on open access and reviewing this against the funding requirements of RCUK and Wellcome Trust. It draws this information from the SHERPA/RoMEO and SHERPA/JULIET databases respectively.
Funded by RCUK, Wellcome Trust and Jisc, SHERPA/FACT is developed and maintained by the Centre for Research Communications (CRC) at the University of Nottingham. To see the full data and study methodology, visit Figshare.
Visit our scholarly communications blog for more information and regular updates.
via Jisc news
In this podcast, Owen White, one the judges of the technology start-ups category of Jisc’s 2015 Summer of Student Innovation competition, tells us about the winning applicants. Read the original blog post.
via Jisc news
In this podcast, Owen White, one the judges of the technology start-ups category of Jisc’s 2015 Summer of Student Innovation competition, tells us about the winning applicants. Read the original blog post.
via Jisc news
In this podcast, Owen White, one the judges of the technology start-ups category of Jisc’s 2015 Summer of Student Innovation competition, tells us about the winning applicants. Read the original blog post.
via Jisc news
After 13 years delivering and sharing content to support teaching practitioners across higher education, further education and skills, Jisc will be retiring its Jorum service in September 2016.
Keith Cole, executive director Jisc digital resources said:
“After careful consideration and to meet the needs of our users we are refreshing our open educational resources approach.
Over the coming months Jisc will be testing and looking into the possibility of: bringing together existing resources and enabling educators to discuss, rate and use items within their own environments; building on our customers and users’ views that they are looking for forums and engagement spaces to be able to share resources peer to peer; and developing and making continual professional development for practitioners available.
We are exploring the desire from our customers to use a Jisc App and Content store, which will still be free to access, a digital platform where our customers can blog, share and discuss challenges and solutions as well as a further education online academy. The idea behind these different approaches is to develop digital literacy and confidence in using technology, bring together existing resources and allow crowdsourcing to promote the sharing of ideas and resource amongst the education and research community.
These changes are in response to the changing digital demands of our community. It is clear that Jorum has helped the sector take great strides towards understanding the potential and also the real challenges to sharing and discovering open educational resources.
We have consulted with stakeholders, users and the Jorum technical team who agree that with the evolution of apps and platforms which give greater user functionality and interactivity a next generation version will be welcomed.
We will now be working to archive the 16,000 resources available through Jorum and ensure that quality content is moved into our new platforms.”
For more information on our open educational resources offer contact our customer services team on 0203 006 6077.
via Jisc news
After 13 years delivering and sharing content to support teaching practitioners across higher education, further education and skills, Jisc will be retiring its Jorum service in September 2016.
Keith Cole, executive director Jisc digital resources said:
“After careful consideration and to meet the needs of our users we are refreshing our open educational resources approach.
Over the coming months Jisc will be testing and looking into the possibility of: bringing together existing resources and enabling educators to discuss, rate and use items within their own environments; building on our customers and users’ views that they are looking for forums and engagement spaces to be able to share resources peer to peer; and developing and making continual professional development for practitioners available.
We are exploring the desire from our customers to use a Jisc App and Content store, which will still be free to access, a digital platform where our customers can blog, share and discuss challenges and solutions as well as a further education online academy. The idea behind these different approaches is to develop digital literacy and confidence in using technology, bring together existing resources and allow crowdsourcing to promote the sharing of ideas and resource amongst the education and research community.
These changes are in response to the changing digital demands of our community. It is clear that Jorum has helped the sector take great strides towards understanding the potential and also the real challenges to sharing and discovering open educational resources.
We have consulted with stakeholders, users and the Jorum technical team who agree that with the evolution of apps and platforms which give greater user functionality and interactivity a next generation version will be welcomed.
We will now be working to archive the 16,000 resources available through Jorum and ensure that quality content is moved into our new platforms.”
For more information on our open educational resources offer contact our customer services team on 0203 006 6077.
via Jisc news
ORCID – a researcher identifier solution which enables a wide range of improvements to the scholarly communications ecosystem – will now be offered to UK higher education institutions through a national consortium arrangement operated by Jisc.
The agreement, negotiated by Jisc Collections, will enable universities to benefit from reduced ORCID membership costs and enhanced technical support. This should accelerate adoption and provide a smoother path to ORCID integration for UK universities.
It will ultimately help to transform the management, re-use, and efficiency of the UK research output by improving the integration of research systems and processes, and enhancing data quality.
More than 50 UK universities have expressed an interest in joining an ORCID consortium in 2015, with a further 22 saying they intend to join at a later stage.
Rachel Bruce, deputy chief innovation officer, Jisc, said:
“Previously it has not been possible to easily associate valuable research outputs - be they patents or papers – with their authors, collaborators and institutions. This has led to extremely inefficient research management and difficulty in identifying what has been produced.
The result? Ineffective reporting and sharing of research, which impacts on both individual researcher’s and universities’ profiles.
Wider adoption and use of ORCID is the solution, helping the UK continue to deliver a first-class research system and offering other benefits, such as additional cost savings and efficiencies.”
Acting as a hub that connects with institutional, funder, publisher, and other researcher identifier systems, ORCID supports the reuse of data through the automation of processes and data exchange.
Feedback from a recent pilot study with eight UK universities showed that organisations that have adopted ORCID expect to see measurable efficiency improvements within two years of implementation - especially in internal data quality, streamlining of publications management, and enhanced reporting to funders – with accrued benefits increasing steadily over the following three to four years.
The importance of this endeavor to research is also demonstrated by the increasing number of funders requesting ORCID identifiers on grant applications. The Wellcome Trust will make ORCID a mandatory requirement from August 2015, while both HEFCE and Research Councils UK (RCUK) have shown high levels of support for the initiative.
In addition, the envisaged enhancements to systems and processes integrating ORCID should also play an important role in helping universities respond to funders’ open access (OA) policies, for example as part of the next Research Excellence Framework (REF), supporting the move towards an open culture.
Universities see ORCID as a crucial service, easing the workload of their researchers in ensuring compliance with OA mandates, making research more visible and discoverable, and creating opportunities for international and cross-disciplinary collaboration.
With the launch of the consortium, underpinned by increasing buy-in at a policy, as well as practical, level, the adoption of ORCID in the UK has reached a tipping point. Rachel Bruce continued,
“As part of our work with UK universities and funders, there is now a consensus that ORCID is the optimal researcher identifier system. These discussions have also identified a strong demand for Jisc to establish a UK consortium to ensure that the inherent benefits of widespread ORCID adoption are realised.
I’m extremely pleased we are now able to offer this arrangement that will contribute to better research information management in the UK.”
ORCID is a global, open, not-for-profit, community-driven effort developed closely with and for the research community.
ORCID provides additional use cases and detailed documentation on implementation in university or research institution research information systems.
Josh Brown, ORCID’s regional director for Europe, said,
“This agreement is a tremendous step forward for ORCID and all our partners in the UK. We are very excited to welcome the new members and integrations to our global community.
As well as webinars and workshops to help UK HEIs to make the most of this opportunity, we will be helping to develop new services for researchers and research data via our European projects and Jisc’s research data spring.”
To find out how to sign up for national consortium membership visit the Jisc Collections website.
via Jisc news
ORCID – a researcher identifier solution which enables a wide range of improvements to the scholarly communications ecosystem – will now be offered to UK higher education institutions through a national consortium arrangement operated by Jisc.
The agreement, negotiated by Jisc Collections, will enable universities to benefit from reduced ORCID membership costs and enhanced technical support. This should accelerate adoption and provide a smoother path to ORCID integration for UK universities.
It will ultimately help to transform the management, re-use, and efficiency of the UK research output by improving the integration of research systems and processes, and enhancing data quality.
More than 50 UK universities have expressed an interest in joining an ORCID consortium in 2015, with a further 22 saying they intend to join at a later stage.
Rachel Bruce, deputy chief innovation officer, Jisc, said:
“Previously it has not been possible to easily associate valuable research outputs - be they patents or papers – with their authors, collaborators and institutions. This has led to extremely inefficient research management and difficulty in identifying what has been produced.
The result? Ineffective reporting and sharing of research, which impacts on both individual researcher’s and universities’ profiles.
Wider adoption and use of ORCID is the solution, helping the UK continue to deliver a first-class research system and offering other benefits, such as additional cost savings and efficiencies.”
Acting as a hub that connects with institutional, funder, publisher, and other researcher identifier systems, ORCID supports the reuse of data through the automation of processes and data exchange.
Feedback from a recent pilot study with eight UK universities showed that organisations that have adopted ORCID expect to see measurable efficiency improvements within two years of implementation - especially in internal data quality, streamlining of publications management, and enhanced reporting to funders – with accrued benefits increasing steadily over the following three to four years.
The importance of this endeavour to research is also demonstrated by the increasing number of funders requesting ORCID identifiers on grant applications. The Wellcome Trust will make ORCID a mandatory requirement from August 2015, while both HEFCE and Research Councils UK (RCUK) have shown high levels of support for the initiative.
In addition, the envisaged enhancements to systems and processes integrating ORCID should also play an important role in helping universities respond to funders’ open access (OA) policies, for example as part of the next Research Excellence Framework (REF), supporting the move towards an open culture.
Universities see ORCID as a crucial service, easing the workload of their researchers in ensuring compliance with OA mandates, making research more visible and discoverable, and creating opportunities for international and cross-disciplinary collaboration.
With the launch of the consortium, underpinned by increasing buy-in at a policy, as well as practical, level, the adoption of ORCID in the UK has reached a tipping point. Rachel Bruce continued,
“As part of our work with UK universities and funders, there is now a consensus that ORCID is the optimal researcher identifier system. These discussions have also identified a strong demand for Jisc to establish a UK consortium to ensure that the inherent benefits of widespread ORCID adoption are realised.
I’m extremely pleased we are now able to offer this arrangement that will contribute to better research information management in the UK.”
ORCID is a global, open, not-for-profit, community-driven effort developed closely with and for the research community.
ORCID provides additional use cases and detailed documentation on implementation in university or research institution research information systems.
Josh Brown, ORCID’s regional director for Europe, said,
“This agreement is a tremendous step forward for ORCID and all our partners in the UK. We are very excited to welcome the new members and integrations to our global community.
As well as webinars and workshops to help UK HEIs to make the most of this opportunity, we will be helping to develop new services for researchers and research data via our European projects and Jisc’s research data spring.”
To find out how to sign up for national consortium membership visit the Jisc Collections website.
via Jisc news
Teams of apprentices from Training 2000 and Sparsholt College have been named as winners of a national competition to come up with ideas for new digital tools and apps for work-based learning.
Both teams have been given £20,000 funding and will receive support from Jisc experts and the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP) after winning the apprentice-led ideas category in the Summer of Student Innovation, an annual competition that gives learners the chance to create solutions that could change the education and training landscape forever.
The winning ideas are Licence to Learn and Connected Apprentice.
Licence to Learn is a game-based app designed by a group of apprentices at Training 2000, a UK training association for business apprentices. It offers a more creative and entertaining way of studying by gamifying revision and rewarding students with incentives such as free drinks, prizes and vouchers for successfully completing tasks.
Connected Apprentice is a social networking-type platform from learners at Sparsholt College in Hampshire, which allows apprentices, employers and learning providers to connect and communicate with each other. It is thought this should help reduce apprenticeship drop-out rates by allowing them to easily ask questions and get support.
Jisc and AELP will also work to support the projects at a series of workshops? to help make them a reality before inviting both teams to present at the AELP Technology Conference in November – anything else?
Paul Bailey, senior co-design manager, Jisc said:
“The apprentice-led ideas challenge was created to go direct to apprentices and trainees, to find out how they think technology can improve their learning experiences and help them develop tangible solutions.
The two winning groups both evidenced excellent understanding of some of the major issues facing apprentices today. They put forward innovative ideas using digital technologies which could offer real benefits to apprentices, employers and learning providers.
The next stage will involve working closely with the successful teams to help hone their products. I look forward to seeing how their concepts develop over the coming months.”
Chris Swingler, AELP associate said:
“This is the first year apprentices have been invited to submit their ideas to the Jisc challenge and we’ve been delighted with the range of innovative and creative ideas from all the teams clearly demonstrating how effective technology based tools and aids can support their learning experience and benefit the whole sector.
AELP is looking forward to working with the winning teams to develop their ideas further and to showcase the projects later in the year.”
The winners will be announced at the AELP national conference, which takes place on 22 and 23 June.
For more information visit the Summer of Student Innovation web pages.
via Jisc news
Teams of apprentices from Training 2000 and Sparsholt College have been named as winners of a national competition to come up with ideas for new digital tools and apps for work-based learning.
Both teams have been given £20,000 funding and will receive support from Jisc experts and the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP) after winning the apprentice-led ideas category in the Summer of Student Innovation, an annual competition that gives learners the chance to create solutions that could change the education and training landscape forever.
The winning ideas are Licence to Learn and Connected Apprentice.
Licence to Learn is a game-based app designed by a group of apprentices at Training 2000, a UK training association for business apprentices. It offers a more creative and entertaining way of studying by gamifying revision and rewarding students with incentives such as free drinks, prizes and vouchers for successfully completing tasks.
Connected Apprentice is a social networking-type platform from learners at Sparsholt College in Hampshire, which allows apprentices, employers and learning providers to connect and communicate with each other. It is thought this should help reduce apprenticeship drop-out rates by allowing them to easily ask questions and get support.
Jisc and AELP will also work to support the projects at a series of workshops to help make them a reality before inviting both teams to present at the AELP Technology Conference in November.
Paul Bailey, senior co-design manager, Jisc said:
“The apprentice-led ideas challenge was created to go direct to apprentices and trainees, to find out how they think technology can improve their learning experiences and help them develop tangible solutions.
The two winning groups both evidenced excellent understanding of some of the major issues facing apprentices today. They put forward innovative ideas using digital technologies which could offer real benefits to apprentices, employers and learning providers.
The next stage will involve working closely with the successful teams to help hone their products. I look forward to seeing how their concepts develop over the coming months.”
Chris Swingler, AELP associate said:
“This is the first year apprentices have been invited to submit their ideas to the Jisc challenge and we’ve been delighted with the range of innovative and creative ideas from all the teams clearly demonstrating how effective technology based tools and aids can support their learning experience and benefit the whole sector.
AELP is looking forward to working with the winning teams to develop their ideas further and to showcase the projects later in the year.”
The winners will be announced at the AELP national conference, which takes place on 22 and 23 June.
For more information visit the Summer of Student Innovation web pages.
via Jisc news
A project by The Open University that’s revolutionising the production and use of audio/visual material was last night named a winner in the Times Higher Leadership and Management Awards 2015, at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London.
The university won in the Digital Innovation of the Year category – which celebrates excellent use of digital technology to improve the administration or management of an institution, sponsored by Jisc – for its flagship production portal.
The portal has been designed to make it easier to discover and re-use material, while also simplifying the workflow associated with re-use, such as costings and rights clearances.
Approximately 200 production staff use the cloud-based production portal to manage the vast body of audio/visual material available to students and the general public. Over 40 years’ worth of the university’s archive material has now been migrated to the portal, and more than 2,000 projects and 38,000 third party clearances logged.
Martin Hamilton, futurist at Jisc and judge of the award, said:
“Rights management for audio/visual content is a major issue for all institutions, given the enormous growth of digital media in teaching and learning.
It’s great to see how The Open University has exploited technology to simplify these processes and also control the risk of litigation and reputational damage that might arise from inappropriate re-use of third party material.”
The judging panel was particularly impressed with the rights management aspects of the portal – an issue that was becoming increasingly important for universities delivering online content and MOOCs.
Martin added:
“At Jisc we are seeing institutions moving more and more towards online education and blended learning. The production portal has great potential for transferability, across both higher and further education.”
Alma Hales, head of intellectual property at The Open University said:
“We are absolutely delighted to have won the Digital Innovation of the Year award, and to have our production portal recognised by the sector as a game-changer.
As a world-leader in flexible distance learning, with over 40 years of video and sound content, the portal has provided The Open University with an invaluable way to both organise our content and to track our intellectual property.”
Visit the Times Higher Education Leadership and Management Awards website to see the full list of winners.
via Jisc news
A project by The Open University that’s revolutionising the production and use of audio/visual material was last night named a winner in the Times Higher Leadership and Management Awards 2015, at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London.
The university won in the Digital Innovation of the Year category – which celebrates excellent use of digital technology to improve the administration or management of an institution, sponsored by Jisc – for its flagship production portal.
The portal has been designed to make it easier to discover and re-use material, while also simplifying the workflow associated with re-use, such as costings and rights clearances.
Approximately 200 production staff use the cloud-based production portal to manage the vast body of audio/visual material available to students and the general public. Over 40 years’ worth of the university’s archive material has now been migrated to the portal, and more than 2,000 projects and 38,000 third party clearances logged.
Martin Hamilton, futurist at Jisc and judge of the award, said:
“Rights management for audio/visual content is a major issue for all institutions, given the enormous growth of digital media in teaching and learning.
It’s great to see how The Open University has exploited technology to simplify these processes and also control the risk of litigation and reputational damage that might arise from inappropriate re-use of third party material.”
The judging panel was particularly impressed with the rights management aspects of the portal – an issue that was becoming increasingly important for universities delivering online content and MOOCs.
Martin added:
“At Jisc we are seeing institutions moving more and more towards online education and blended learning. The production portal has great potential for transferability, across both higher and further education.”
Alma Hales, head of intellectual property at The Open University said:
“We are absolutely delighted to have won the Digital Innovation of the Year award, and to have our production portal recognised by the sector as a game-changer.
As a world-leader in flexible distance learning, with over 40 years of video and sound content, the portal has provided The Open University with an invaluable way to both organise our content and to track our intellectual property.”
Visit the Times Higher Education Leadership and Management Awards website to see the full list of winners.
via Jisc news
This week, Eric Stoller, student affairs and technology blogger for Inside Higher Ed, returns for his second guest podcast and blog on how effective use of social media can improve the student experience. Read the original blog post.
via Jisc news