image from BPSUSF on Flickr

We heard this week that too many young people lack the social skills needed to get their first job.  The report by the Work Foundation (PDF) doesn’t explicitly mention digital literacy, but perhaps it should. With an estimated 90% of UK jobs requiring some level of IT competency, the notion of digital literacy – those capabilities that equip an individual for living, learning and working in a digital society – is becoming a key requirement for employability.

But will they really make graduates more employable? Why are digital literacies important to institutions and students? Is this something new or the same old skills agenda just repackaged again?

These issues and more are explored in a two part series of JISC on Air radio programmes that looks at how institutions have recognised the strategic importance of digital literacies of all staff and students working in a digital world.

In the sixth episode we are exploring how universities and colleges can help teaching staff, researchers, support and administrative staff to develop their digital literacies – those capabilities which prepare an individual for living, learning and working in a digital society.

One trend I’ve noticed is that when it comes to ‘keeping up’ with their tech-savvy students, institutions are realising that this is no longer a race they can win.  Instead they are looking for approaches that allow them to continue to meet the needs and expectations of learners in the 21^st century.

These issues are explored in a two part series of the JISC on Air radio programme that looks at how institutions have recognised the strategic importance of digital literacies for staff and students working in a digital world.

Find out more about how JISC is investing in the area on our website.

Watch videos showing how different institutions are implementing digital literacies at a strategic level with our funding

To follow the ongoing developments of the JISC funded Developing Digital Literacies projects visit the Netvibes page which collates all the project blog postings and subscribe to the Developing Digital Literacies programme blog for up to date information about the developments in the programme

Join our digital literacy mailing list to contribute to discussions around digital literacy and how it affects your institution.

JISC On Air Podcast Episode 7: Developing digital literacies for working in a digital world
(Duration: 15:48)

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This is the compelling pitch offered to millions of prospective students from a bewildering array of start-ups and initiatives. Building on the open educational resource movement to create immersive online learning courses scalable to a global audience, and then giving them away. It seems like hardly a week goes by without another powerful announcement concerning another Massively Open Online Course (MOOC).

Examples include EdX (MIT/Harvard), MITx, Udacity (Stanford/Independent), Coursera (Princeton, Standford, Michgan, Pennsylvania), OERu (Abathasca), Khan Academy (Independent).

All share a similar business model: free content, free learning experiences, paid accreditation and additional support.  A business model that ALT-C 2010 attendees may find hauntingly familiar.

Click here to view the embedded video.

(video taken from a presentation given by Heather Price and David Kernohan from JISC,  Li Yuan and Sheila MacNeill at JISC CETIS, at the Association of Learning Technologists [ALT] conference in 2010)

Like any buzzword the term MOOC has shifted in meaning as use has expanded, from a specific set of pedagogic assumptions around networks and learning, to a term for any large online course with no initial fee.  These initial framings of the idea drew heavily on concepts around connectivism, and saw the learner as an active participant both in the design and the delivery of the course, alongside a network of peers.

My own experience with ds106 has brought home to me the power and possibilities of this “classic MOOC” model.  As a MOOC on Digital Storytelling, the course is actually taught in a number of locations to paying students, and uses the huge numbers of open participants to support, direct and encourage creativity. For me, the power has been in the community not in the course.

In the UK, the experiments of Jonathan Worth and Coventry University with open online courses around photography (for example PHONAR and PICBOD) have seen similar results.  Students on the PICBOD course spontaneously organised and ran their own well received end-of-course exhibition.

Clearly the power of this form of MOOC works, in ways related to more traditional university outreach activity, to engage and inspire people outsides of the confines of an institution.  And bringing the interested amateur into contact with the ideas and processes of academia can only be a good thing for student recruitment.

A parallel movement, which could be exemplified by Anya Kamenetz’s “DIYu” and “Edupunk’s Guide”, sees the MOOC as a replacement  rather than an enhancement for institutional study. Courses within this tradition, despite the revolutionary trappings and “Education is broken” sloganeering, tend to be far more traditional in structure. Indeed it could be argued that only the zero cost of entry separates them from millennial initiatives like Fathom and UKeU.

The learning itself tends to be more pragmatic, with a skills/mastery rather than an understanding/practice focus, and there is a clear demarcation between tutor as source of knowledge and student as consumer.

To me,  it is this revolutionary strand of MOOCs that is reinforcing the traditional model of education,  and the institutionally-based pedagogic experiments of people like Jim Groom, Jonathan Worth and Stephen Downes that are challenging it.

In February we released JISC Elevator, a beta website designed to allocate JISC funding to ideas based on votes from those working and studying in higher and further education. People could submit an idea to the site via a video pitch and if enough people voted for it JISC would consider it for funding.

We think JISC Elevator is a useful approach for a number of reasons:

• It is driven by what the sector wants. JISC projects are funded after an established review process conducted by experts. Elevator projects still benefit from this review but they also have an initial screening where a much broader range of people get to decide whether an idea is relevant to them or not.
• It establishes demand for an idea. One of the most difficult things for people who are applying for JISC funding to demonstrate is that there is a real demand for the idea they are proposing. The Elevator establishes this right from the start, if you can’t get enough people to vote for your idea then you don’t get funding.
• It supports small, practical ideas. Previous work in JISC has shown that small projects can have a big impact. Small projects also offer a chance to try out new technologies and very innovative ideas that have a higher chance of failure in a way that minimises the risk.
• It promotes ideas that benefit many institutions. To reach voting targets on Elevator ideas have to get votes from a minimum number of institutions so ideas have to appeal to people working in other departments and institutions and not just meet local needs.

In the future we are likely to use Elevator in more specific and targeted areas where small projects can be used to realise elements of the JISC strategy. It is likely that Elevator will be most useful in early stage innovation because it will allow us to support experiments with emerging technologies and practice that could benefit the sector by developing new tools, services and practices. We see this as a specific tool we can use to improve the allocation of innovation funding in certain areas. We don’t expect it to replace existing approaches.

We were very happy with how the trial went. In the 6 weeks the beta was live, we had 26 ideas and there were 2300 votes from 234 different institutions. There are more numbers and detailed analysis in the evaluation report I prepared on the trial.

Naturally as this was a trial, there were lots of things we think we might be able to improve upon. The report goes into some detail on this. We are about to embark on further development on the site to address some of these issues.

Of the 26 ideas, 22 reached their voting target. We then submitted these ideas to an evaluation with expert markers. Based on this evaluation we have decided to fund 6 projects – you can click on the links to see their video pitches:

1. Mobile Reflections – University of Leeds - Using mobile devices to enable students to capture videos of them reflecting on their work while out in the field
2. Interactive Visualisations – Oxford University - Developing an open source and easy to use tool to help researchers produce interactive visualisations that they can use for teaching, for investigating data and for disseminating their research
3. Classy Apps – Kingston College - Developing a guide to using apps on the ipad and iphone for teachers to engage GCSE re-sitters
4. Health CARE – City University -Developing augmented reality apps to support the learning of health care students
5. Open Access Index – Edinburgh University - Investigating the development of a score to denote how engaged an academic is with distributing research outputs via open access routes
6. Mobile app for course data – University of Central Lancashire - Developing mobile apps to enable prospective students to discover information about courses they may be interested in

There is a nice spread of projects here, they come from a range of institutions, address a variety of institutional functions and serve the needs of a number of different user groups. You can expect to see the results from these projects around the end of August.

We are in the midst of planning the next iteration of the elevator site. We see its immediate future as a platform for enabling innovation in specific areas. However in the longer term there are some more intriguing possibilities. Would it be useful to provide a version of Elevator that could be installed and used at universities, colleges and other organisations?  Can we use the Elevator to involve more students in the innovation we fund? How can we involve innovators from outside the further and higher education sector? Lots of questions and we don’t have the answers yet but we hope that by iterating our approach to Elevator we can continue to find new ways to support innovation in the sector.

“Digitisation breathes new life into material from the past, and turns it into a formidable asset for the individual user and an important building block of the digital economy.”[1]

Still, the way we create content online is still in its infancy, and the path from initial funding to long-term sustainability can be challenging. Despite financial investment, some undesirable outcomes have emerged:

• Project leaders return again and again to funders, because alternative revenue streams have not been developed;
• Completed projects cannot always be updated/ungraded once funded has ended;
• Content created may live in silos, be difficult to find and hosted on a variety of platforms;
• Preservation strategies are often uncertain, both for digitised and born digital content;
• Project leaders often rely heavily on the largesse of a host institution
• Some programmes or projects that cease to secure ongoing funding are obliged to stop work altogether

Add to this the challenging economic environment of the past few years and all of these issues are brought into glaringly sharp relief.

Since 2007, Ithaka S+R and the JISC-led Strategic Content Alliance have led the way in examining ways  that the academic and cultural heritage sectors are defining sustainability and helping to make sure that the digital resources will endure and provide value well beyond the term of the grant. In 2012, two years and one economic crisis later, this essential research is more important than ever to answer questions such as:

• What were the key sustainability issues to consider?
• How have project leaders made their resources valuable to users?
• How have project leaders made growth and innovation possible?
• Which sustainability models have been most successful?
• How had budget cuts and other factors affected the projects?

Answers to these questions however are never simple and the process by which projects, both current and previous, consider them are multifaceted and complex. As a first step to traversing the difficult road to sustainability, the following video lecture series has been developed with Nancy Maron (sustainability expert at Ithaka S+R) to consider how universities, museums and libraries can deal with these issues in a challenging economic environment. You may not find all the answers here, but you will certainly find out more about the questions you need to be asking and guidance on how to answer them.

Split into parts or available as full versions, the videos (under a CC-BY-NC-SA licence) allow for individuals or organisations to embed or repurpose the relevant sections for their own specific audiences. As they are in easily digestible ‘bite-size’ chunks with links to the relevant resources referenced, these should help you to think in more depth about the issues raised and to read and research at your own pace. All we ask is that you let us know how you are planning to use them and if/ how these have been useful to you.

Please follow the links below to view the videos most relevant to your sector:

Sustaining Digital Resources for Universities

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sustaining Digital Resource for Museums

Sustaining Digital Resources for Libraries

Image by Loop_oh on Flickr

The issue of making Open Access books discoverable was discussed in nearly all of our focus groups that we held earlier this year as part of the OAPEN-UK project. It’s not just about putting the PDF onto a platform and hoping that readers will find it, it’s about getting metadata out into the web, search and library systems where the users are. The 29 Open Access titles in our pilot are available on the OAPEN Library platform which also provides MARC records for libraries, exposes its metadata and is joining up with library discovery services. But our 29 titles are just a small part of the whole, how then do readers find out about all the other Open Access books available?

In the journals market we have the Directory of Open Access Journals to help and now, thanks to OAPEN, we have the Directory of Open Access Books – a central place where users can search and discover Open Access books by publisher, subject area or by keyword search. This is a great step forward for the discoverability of Open Access books.

I’m particularly encouraged that this marks a further step forward in allowing UK researchers a way in to open access resources from across Europe.  During our recent OAPEN-UK focus groups, what was clear in all three groups was the awareness that issues are often at a local level, while in an open access model, it has to work at an international level also. Publishers publish authors from across the globe and authors want to be published by publishers who are based outside the UK. Whatever the model, the need for infrastructure and funding models to take account of this was made apparent by the groups.

Discoverability is just one aspect that will affect the future of the monograph. If you are a humanities and social science researcher interested in that future, can you spare twenty minutes to help us understand your views? You could win one of several £100 Amazon vouchers by completing the OAPEN-UK Researcher Survey.

Search open access books

For more information on the directories or to get involved, please contact Eelco Ferwerda, director of the OAPEN Foundation, e.ferwerda@oapen.org, +31(0)629565168.

“So there I was, with a 100 page screenplay that seemed so close to being finished; but I just couldn’t seem to do it. Something just wasn’t working; or it hadn’t turned out how I’d envisaged it. But I couldn’t figure out what to do to fix it.

Then I came across the Screenwriting Unit by Jane Pugh at the OpenSpace Project, hosted by the University College Falmouth, UK…  I listened to the second unit (“The Principles of Screenwriting”) and it was a revelation! Suddenly knew what was wrong with my screenplay, and why it wasn’t working for me!”

Ed from Notes on Video: A blog about video equipment and video production

Quotes like the one above made University College Falmouth’s journey into open education a rewarding experience. Rewarding , however, doesn’t do the experience suitable justice. It’s something fundamentally intangible. We gave without expectation and what this institution gained is something quite profound. We hoped our pilot project would inspire. That it achieved this objective turned out to be as humbling as it was exciting…and transformative.

UCF’s geographical isolation presents challenges in building tangible networks nationally, much less internationally. Our non-STEM subject portfolio also presents challenges within Higher Education. “openSpace”, our HEFCE-funded and JISC managed creative subject open education repository, has proven to be an excellent bridge and an effective calling card. This bespoke repository allows UCF to share its expertise, knowledge and pedagogic approaches in an organic and transparent manner.

The success of openSpace has had a direct impact on UCF, resulting in:
· A new institutional Intellectual Property Rights policy
· An interest in open education from other UCF courses
· The widening of technology applications in teaching, learning and innovative approaches to teaching practice
· Discussions around a paid assessment model and certificate model – a sustainable UCF open education model
· A positive impact on applications to UCF’s MA Professional Writing course.

“But what’s so special about this [Screenwriting] course is it gives long distance learners an opportunity to learn and gain peer feedback on work. This is a pioneering new scheme and well worth a look.” – Helen Murphy, Step2InspireTV

The secret of success is straightforward. We took our open educational resources (OERs) to the people rather than trying to entice them to come to us. We uploaded our OERs on established, familiar and popular online platforms: Facebook, YouTube, Podomatic, Scribd and Twitter. People felt free to engage with the OERs, experiment with them, play with them….and then follow the links to the relevant courses on openSpace.

We also made our OERs, and our open education courses, easy to find online. The use of standard search engine optimisation best practice and meta tagging protocols ensured the OERs and courses appear at the top of search engine results against common search phrases.

The respected film makers’ website filmmakeriq.com and Celtx, the all-in-one open source media pre-production system, found the YouTube hosted Screenwriting OERs and featured them on their respective blogs. Their Tweets about the free screenwriting course resulted in a flurry of re-tweets and postings to Facebook, Digg and other leading social networking sites.

The result of these word of mouth online coverage was 1,000 people a day accessing the course in the two days following Celtx and Film Makers IQ’s first Tweets. That number rose to 1,700 people a day as social network users continued to spread the word. While they are no longer viral, these OERs remain widely accessed and commented upon. As late as November 2001, they were referenced in the Guardian Careers Blog post Live Q&A: Thinking about a career in screenwriting? by OER user Michelle Goode

The project used Podomatic to host a variety of screenwriting lectures, which have been popular internationally.

Our OERs were always geared towards and pitched to the general public. Comparatively speaking, there are few global institutions with similar degrees. Our OERs were always going to have an appeal to a specific and discrete audience within Higher Education. Understanding who our primary audience was informed our approach to online dissemination and promotion.

Other OER related activity at Falmouth includes the IPR for Educational Environments (IPR4EE) project supported within phase 3 of the UKOER programme, and the new Blogging for Educational Environments project,  funded solely by UCF.

Is open education a transformative process? Absolutely. Through means both predictable and unpredictable. Open education influences institutions, academics and the general public. Has the journey been an easy and straightforward one? No. Has it been rewarding? Most definitely. It continues to enlighten and inform us as UCF plans the release of further OER courses.

Further reading: You can read more about how other institutions have reaped the benefits of open practice in a series of case studies, and find out more about the work of our current crop of OER projects.

For a deeper analysis of Open Educational Practice, the UKOER Evaluation and Synthesis project have produced an online briefing paper.

For those of us who saw Blackboard’s aggressive acquisition of commercial competitors WebCT and Angel, and have seen the patent litigation they unleashed against Desire 2 Learn, the idea of Blackboard pledging to be a good open source citizen may seem a bit … unsettling, if not 1984ish.

But it has been clear for a while that Blackboard’s old strategy of ‘owning the market’ just wasn’t going to work. Whatever the unique features are that Blackboard has over Moodle and Sakai, they aren’t enough to convince every institution to pay for the license. Choosing between VLEs is largely about price and service, not functionality. Even for those Blackboard institutions where price and service are not an issue, many departments persist with some other VLE, for all sorts of not entirely functional reasons .

In other words, the VLE had become a commodity. Everyone needs one, they are fairly predictable in their functionality, and there is not that much between them, much as I’ve outlined in the past.

So it seems Blackboard have wisely decided to switch focus from charging for IP to becoming a provider of learning tool services. As Blackboard’s George Kroner noted, “It does kinda feel like @Blackboard is becoming a services company a la IBM under Gerstner.”

And just as IBM has become quite a champion of Open Source Software, there is no reason to believe that Blackboard will be any different. If only because the projects will not go away, whatever Blackboard does with the support companies they have just taken over. Besides, ‘open’ matters to the education sector.

Interoperability

Blackboard had already abandoned extreme lock-in by investing quite a bit in open interoperability standards, mostly through the IMS specifications. That is, users of the latest versions of Blackboard can get their data, content and external tool connections out more easily than in the past- it’s no longer as much of a reason to stick with them.

Providing services across the vast majority of VLEs (outside of continental Europe at least) means that Blackboard has even more of an incentive to make interoperability work across them all. Dr Chuck Severance’s appointment also strongly hints at that.

This might need a bit of watching. Even though the very different codebases, and a vested interest in openness, means that Blackboard sponsored interoperability solutions – whether arrived at through IMS or not – are likely to be applicable to other tools, this is not guaranteed. There might be a temptation to cut corners to make things work quickly between just Blackboard Learn, Angel, Moodle 1.9/2.x and Sakai 2.x.

On the other hand, the more pressing interoperability problems are not so much between the commodified VLEs anymore, they are between VLEs and external learning tools and administrative systems. And making that work may just have become much easier.

This post originally appeared on the JISC CETIS website

Mark Walport speaks. Photo courtesy of Torsten Reimer

“It’s a complete no-brainer,” said Sir Mark Walport. The director of the Wellcome Trust was responding to JISC’s Digital Infrastructure Directions report into the value and benefits of text and data mining, which recommends that the UK should create a copyright exception for text and data mining for non-commercial research. “It is critical that we enable researchers to maximise the value of publicly funded published outputs. We need to just get on and do it,” he urged.

It was a view endorsed by his fellow experts on the panel, and the majority of audience, who had heard one of the report’s authors explain the rationale behind the study and the key findings within it at an event last night at the Wellcome Trust.

Dr Diane McDonald explained that JISC had commissioned the report because of the need for empirical evidence on the subject – the UK government has stated that policy changes should be based on solid evidence – and that she and co-author Ursula Kelly had used the UK Treasury’s own best practice guidelines to evaluate the research.

The context is that the academic world faces a data deluge. There are 1.5m academic publications every year and two new articles are uploaded to UK PubMed Central every minute of the day.  No human researcher could hope to be able to examine the torrent of data in their field, make sense of it and turn it into new knowledge – but computers can. However, while there are some pockets of data mining within UK higher education, concentrated within the biomedical sciences, the entry and transaction costs to this new form of research are, in the main, so high as to be off-putting.

Panel session. Photo courtesy of Torsten Reimer

The availability of material for mining is limited – most text mining in the UK is based on open access publications – and researchers face legal uncertainty as they negotiate a maze of licensing agreements. In addition, there are inaccessible information silos where different corpora of articles come in different formats with different standards and different metadata, making it extremely difficult to search across them. There is also low awareness among both researchers and publishers of the potential for text mining.

Yet, the benefits of lowering the barriers to such forms of research could be significant, not only for UK higher education but also for its economy and for society as a whole.

Professor Martin Hall, vice-chancellor of the University of Salford, offered an example of how data-mined information could have a real impact on public health. For example, these tools could be used to create a cholesterol map of greater Manchester which would allow public health officials to focus efforts where it counts and make a significant intervention.

Professor Douglas Kell, chief executive of the BBSRC, meanwhile, pointed to research in his own field and the move towards a more inductive, data-driven model where the research begins with the data and finds a hypothesis that fits rather than vice versa. “Integrative biology requires the use and thus access to data and literature that one did not create itself. Without this, biological research will be stalled,” he said.

It was a point picked up by audience member Philip Ditchfield of GlaxoSmithKline. “There are about 7,000 diseases out there and we can cure about 1% as an industry at the moment.  We’re all patients at the end of the day and we need to discover medicines. That’s the priority,” he commented. “We’re a very compliant industry and we want to work with publishers, not undermine their intellectual property. Publishers often say you can mine our content – you just have to ask us. That’s very easy to say and very hard to achieve. It is like in the early days of motor cars when you were allowed to  drive down the road but you had to have a man with a red flag running in front of you.”

Removing this red flag, at least for non-commercial research, in the form of a copyright exception to support text mining and analytics, as proposed by Hargreaves is the key recommendation of the report.

Find out more about the report

The second thing I notice is how open education goes across the boundaries of formal and informal, children and adults, across academic disciplines, into professional development and into making and crafting. Universities don’t own the “open education” space any more than any organisation could be said to own “learning”.

This question is explored by Lou McGill and also by Laura Czerniewicz.

The third thing that strikes me is that we really have reached a tipping point in the availability of learning opportunities online. David Kernohan asked on Monday “is open education becoming mainstream?” . The reality of the networked world is webcasts, podcasts, courseware, etextbooks, a huge range of content created by anyone and shared with the world. This is the reality now, but for those of us working in education, we need to make the most of this opportunity. We need to be digitally literate, but more than that, we need to find ways of doing our work online, to become open practitioners and digital scholars.

For a compelling description of this opportunity, see David Wiley talking about “Why Be Open?”

Click here to view the embedded video.

For educational institutions to thrive, we need to explore models for how we can work in this space, with all its opportunities and risks, all its noise and vibrancy. It is here that we see possibilities for new models of collaboration, peer learning and accreditation. To see how some UK Universities are responding to this opportunity, see four case studies on institutional approaches to open education, released this week.

And check out the huge range of activities that are taking place across the UK.

These are not always easy or obvious decisions for institutions to make: the ideas of open education can be a threat to the status quo. Good decisions navigate this space carefully. As Martin Weller wrote in The Digital Scholar, “in education, technology is often talked of in utopian or dystopian terms”, but the reality is often more complex. My colleagues and I have been trying to move beyond this polarisation by sharing our pictures of the open education space. At the core of the discussion are some crucial questions about the economics of openness, which were eloquently described, entirely independently, by Paul Stacey. This storify shows the discussion develop: click the links to see each blog post. Hopefully this is the start of an ongoing conversation.

“Open education” matters because it’s already happening all around us. The fact that the US Dept of Education is teaming up with Creative Commons and the Open Society to launch a video competition on Why Open Education Matters suggests that although it may not be mainstream yet, it is very real. The models continue to grow and combine with the ethos of open access and the methods of open source.The choice for us, as individuals and educational organisations, is in how we respond.

Amber Thomas and David Kernohan

by mhawskey from Flickr

“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”

Writing in Simulacra and Simulation in 1981, Jean Baudrillard could scarcely have predicted the way in which the growth of a global network of computer systems would accelerate and manage the growth of information and meaning. The “information revolution” has led to the co-creation of a massive library of human knowledge made accessible to everyone, and the tools needed to share, discuss, analyse and add to this corpus in order to create meaning from information.

Formal education has slowly begun to embrace this newly created reality, opening up their own stores of information and drawing on the vast stores of resources available to them. But new models are constantly being devised and refined, with a much greater range of actors – bringing in charities and the private sector alongside, or instead of, traditional providers.

JISC has been at the cutting edge of openness in education for nearly two decades. We have pioneered the growth of Open Access to research, we have supported academics and managers as they have embraced new ways of communicating with a wider audience via the internet, and we have supported the use and development of Open Source software.

However, even with strong central support, open education in the UK has always been characterised by diversity. Both from specialist institutions like the Open University, and through work with non-traditional learners in colleges, community centres and their own homes, our Higher Education sector has been committed to sharing the love of learning as it is to educational excellence.

Starting in 2009, JISC and the Higher Education Academy have been working together to deliver a suite of UK Open Educational Resources programmes in order to build the expectation of open release of materials used in learning into the mainstream of academic practice.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This UKOER programme has, to date, encompassed activity in the majority of UK institutions, based around the release and reuse of Open Education Resources. With the thoughtful and strategic use of OER practice, institutions have reported benefits to student recruitment, to their own international reputation, and to the quality of materials used to teach.

An indication of the range and quality of OER activity can be seen from the activities, releases and events planned across the country. We’ve presented a sample of these for you to engage with below.

Open Education Week highlights

Open Education Week provides a perfect opportunity to learn more about the many parts of the UK and global open education community. Here are a few highlights from the UK:

• The UKOER Evaluation and Synthesis project will be publishing a blog post every day this week, offering an overview of findings from three years of funded work. The week starts with a Grand Challenge!
• De Montfort University introduces you to a range of their resources and projects via a video. You can view Vivien Rolfe’s presentation on the biologycourses.co.uk site – as a preview of what Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will see on Tuesday 6th!
• The OER IPR support project is releasing a range of resources to further your understanding of openness, licensing and copyright. These include a range of short films (on lecture capture, reuse in medical education, ethical issues in healthcare and the ACTOR project, an amazing introductory  animation, and updates to their popular “How open are you?” and risk management calculator tools.
• The University of Leicester are running an a series of online seminars examining the global OERu initiative on Tuesday 6^th and Wednesday 7^th March. These are open seminars, available to all.
• The University of Nottingham are also running an open online seminar, covering a range of their OER work. You can read more, and join the session at 3pm on Wednesday 7^th March, on their blog.
• And on Tuesday 6^th March, the “Sustainable Texts” project at UCL are offering an open online seminar introducing you to their work.
• The University of Oxford are publishing a further collection of Great Writers podcasts , building on an already substantial body of material covering the giants of world literature.
• The University of the Arts in London are running a series of internal workshops, starting on Thursday 8^th March in Central St Martins College. Contact John Casey for further information.
• The SCORE team at the Open University are running a seminar on “Sustainable OER” in Milton Keynes on Thursday 8^th March, places are available so please register your interest. This seminar includes presentations from the MEDEV team and from Simon Thompson from Leeds Met.
• SCORE are also using Open Education Week to launch an Open Education Group.  You can read more about this, and sign up to a pledge of openness, at the SCORE website.

This is just a small sample of the UKOER innovation that is happening not just this week but every week in the UK. To keep up to date, you should follow the @UKOER account and the #ukoer hashtag on twitter. This will link you to interesting resources and blog posts, and – more importantly – an active and inclusive community of practice around OER. You can read more about the UKOER programme more generally at the JISC OER pages, which also include links to project blogs.

Three JISC programme managers, and hopefully a host of others, will be  attempting to describe the Open Education space via twitter and personal blogs. Follow the #openedspace hashtag on twitter to join them

Of course, both Open Education Week and Open Education more generally are worldwide. For more info on a wider range of events, please see their website.

Of particular interest may be a live broadcast of a seminar around OER in Europe, led by TU Delft, OUNL and SURF on the 7^th March.

Posted by David Kernohan and Amber Thomas.

If we imagine the history of Wales as a long timeline stretching back to St David in the sixth century AD and beyond, we’re confident that JISC has digitised many, many resources that can help us better appreciate that rich culture.  We’ve picked out four highlights below and hope that students and researchers of Welsh culture and history might discover a nugget here to inspire them.

We begin in the 21^st century, where if you’re in the mood to be inspired by contemporary Welsh art you’ll find students’ work online at Galeri Cymru – unusually you can even vote on their work and leave comments, enriching the learning experience for the Coleg Harlech students.   It’s an interesting example of how an interactive website can bring together community groups who might not yet be fully engaged with one another.

Then – a step back to the 20^th century.  When Cardiff University asked people from across Wales to delve into their attics for family memorabilia from the World War One, they uncovered a host of treasures.  Those precious items have now been photographed, recorded and digitised for posterity so that what started out as individual family heirlooms have now become a shared archive describing the Welsh experience of World War One.  Browsing the resulting Welsh Voices collections is incredibly evocative – I can only imagine the mixed emotions of Albert William’s family after the twenty two year old soldier’s discharge certificate sent him home to Swansea after injuring his knee at the Battle of the Somme in 1916.  It’s soon to be part of the ambitious Theatre of Memory project (PDF) run by the National Library of Wales.  Following on from this, we’re now working to digitise a more complete picture of the Welsh experience of World War One (Rhyfel Byd 1914-1918 a’r profiad Cymreig) including 190,000 pages of printed text, archival pages, manuscript pages and photographs; 50 hours of audio; and 20 hours of audio visual materials.

If you’d like to delve back even further, Welsh Ballads online can help you access 4,000 digitised ballads, mainly dating from the 18th and 19th centuries, from the collections of the National Library of Wales and Cardiff University Library. Ballads were like newspapers for the poor at this time, sung on street corners for all to hear.  The impressive documents will be of particular interest to anyone interested in folk music, the Welsh language or the history of popular art, but these pamphlets also narrate a more widely appealing social history– for example “Y Negroes”, a ballad supporting the abolition of slavery, dating from approximately 1830.

Linking these periods together is some of the very best in Welsh scholarship on Welsh Journals Online which gives people working in institutions free access to scholarship from Wales on topics ranging across the humanities, social sciences, science and technology.

I hope you find something here to interest you – and if you have a useful digital resource for other Welsh scholars, perhaps you would share it below.  Thank you.

The Welsh experience is part of a wider international drive to share our cultural history.  For a whole world of JISC Content on Wales and other cultural history, why not search the JISC content portal

For St David’s Day this post is also available in Welsh:

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi: Ymchwilio i Gymru neu hanes Cymru?

Yn ôl Amgueddfa Cymru, un o’r gwyrthiau mwyaf bythol a briodolwyd i Dewi Sant oedd iddo godi’r ddaear dan ei draed wrth bregethu, er mwyn i’w gynulleidfa allu ei weld a’i glywed.  Mae gan Gymru draddodiad llafar cryf, llinynnau artistig a llenyddol cyfoethog, cerddoriaeth werin hanesyddol a chyfoes ac rydym yn parhau i ddathlu’r wisg draddodiadol (fel sydd i’w gweld yma ar Casgliad y Werin Cymru). Mae Casgliad y Werin Cymru yn dod â chasgliadau digidol y prif sefydliadau treftadaeth yng Nghymru at ei gilydd, ynghyd â chynnwys o amgueddfeydd, archifdai a llyfrgelloedd llai, ac mae’n le gallwch rannu’ch stori am Gymru.  Un o’r heriau rydym ni yma yn JISC yn ei hwynebu yw: sut gallwn ddefnyddio technoleg orau i helpu pobl i weld a chlywed am drysorau hanes diwylliannol pan fo llawer ohonynt yn bodoli ar ffurf hanesion, caneuon, gwrthrychau neu ddogfennau gwerthfawr, yn hytrach na thestunau unffurf?

Os ydym yn dychmygu hanes Cymru fel llinell amser faith sy’n ymestyn yn ôl i Dewi Sant yn y chweched ganrif OC a’r tu hwnt, rwy’n hyderus bod JISC wedi digido llawer iawn o adnoddau sy’n gallu ein helpu i werthfawrogi’r diwylliant cyfoethog hwnnw’n well.  Rwyf wedi dewis pedwar uchafbwynt isod ac rwy’n gobeithio y bydd y rhai sy’n astudio ac yn ymchwilio i hanes a diwylliant Cymru yn darganfod telpyn gwerthfawr yma i’w hysbrydoli.

Rydym yn dechrau yn yr 21^ain ganrif lle, os oes arnoch awydd cael eich ysbrydoli gan gelfyddyd Gymreig gyfoes, gallwch ddod o hyd i waith myfyrwyr ar-lein yn Galeri Cymru – yn anarferol iawn, gallwch bleidleisio ar eu gwaith a gadael sylwadau hyd yn oed, gan gyfoethogi’r profiad dysgu ar gyfer y myfyrwyr yng Ngholeg Harlech.  Mae’n enghraifft ddiddorol o sut gall gwefan ryngweithiol ddod â grwpiau cymunedol, nad ydynt yn ymgysylltu â’i gilydd yn llawn efallai, at ei gilydd.

Yna – cam yn ôl i’r 20^fed ganrif.  Pan ofynnodd Prifysgol Caerdydd i bobl ledled Cymru chwilota yn eu croglofftydd am bethau cofiadwy eu teuluoedd o’r Rhyfel Byd Cyntaf, gwnaethant ddadorchuddio trysorau lu.  Erbyn hyn, mae’r eitemau gwerthfawr hynny wedi’u ffotograffio, eu cofnodi a’u digido ar gyfer y dyfodol, felly mae’r hyn a ddechreuodd yn drysorau teuluol wedi dod yn archif ranedig sy’n disgrifio profiad Cymru o’r Rhyfel Byd Cyntaf.  Mae pori drwy gasgliadau Welsh Voices yn arbennig o atgofus – gallaf ond dychmygu teimladau cymysg teulu Albert Williams wedi i dystysgrif ymadael y milwr dau ddeg dau oed ei anfon adref i Abertawe ar ôl iddo anafu ei ben-glin ym Mrwydr y Somme ym 1916.

Os hoffech ymchwilio ymhellach yn ôl, gall Baledi Cymru ar-lein eich helpu i ddod o hyd i 4,000 o faledi wedi’u digido, yn dyddio o’r 18^fed a’r 19^eg ganrif yn bennaf, o gasgliadau Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru a Llyfrgell Prifysgol Caerdydd.  Roedd baledi fel papurau newydd ar gyfer y tlodion yn yr oes hon, a oedd yn cael eu canu ar gornel y stryd i bawb eu clywed.  Bydd y dogfennau nodedig hyn o ddiddordeb arbennig i unrhyw un sydd â diddordeb mewn cerddoriaeth werin, yr iaith Gymraeg neu hanes celfyddyd gyfoes, ond mae’r pamffledi hyn hefyd yn adrodd hanes cymdeithasol ag apêl ehangach – er enghraifft “Y Negroes”, sef baled sydd o blaid dileu caethwasiaeth, sy’n dyddio o oddeutu 1830.

Yn cysylltu’r cyfnodau hyn at ei gilydd, mae peth o’r ysgolheictod Cymreig gorau erioed ar Cylchgronau Cymru Ar-lein, sy’n rhoi mynediad rhad ac am ddim at ysgolheictod o Gymru ar bynciau sy’n cynnwys y dyniaethau, gwyddorau cymdeithasol, gwyddoniaeth a thechnoleg i bobl sy’n gweithio mewn athrofeydd.

Rwy’n gobeithio y dewch o hyd i rywbeth yma sydd o ddiddordeb i chi – ac os oes gennych adnodd digidol defnyddiol ar gyfer ysgolheigion eraill yng Nghymru, efallai yr hoffech ei rannu isod.  Diolch.

by Paola Marchionni and Nicola Yeeles

If you have any questions about what JISC is doing to digitise Welsh resources, or to find out more about JISC’s investment in econtent, please email Paola at p.marchionni@jisc.ac.uk

Just weeks into the New Year and already there is a new ebooks revelation that colleges and universities need to digest. January saw the launch of Apple’s new iBooks2 software which grabbed headlines (see the BBC article here) and sparked heated debate across the academic community.

Quietly underpinning the technology of the iBooks software is ePub.  ePub is the ‘defacto’ ebook standard, with the latest version of ePub3 supporting complex layouts and rich media and interactivity for eTextbooks and professional and scientific publications.

Supporting institutions and academics in taking advantage of these new technologies saw JISC fund the creation of a thinktank to explore the potential of ePub for the academic community.  JISC, the members of the thinktank and Edina at the University of Edinburgh, undertook a study on ePub and the current ebook landscape.

Digital Monographs: Technical landscape exemplars and Recommendations peers beneath the eye-catching headlines and provides an important message for institutions and how they increasingly adapt their teaching and support services to an online, interactive and digital future.

Importantly, the report identifies areas where ePub3 can help institutions, students and researchers confront some of the problems they currently face. For example, students face a continued rise in the costs associated with buying print text books.  Researchers too find that they have to adjust to an increasingly open mandate from funders and institutions.

Listen to a podcast about this with JISC programme manager Ben Showers:

Podcast

EPub provides opportunities for institutions to answer critical problems such as those above and others:

• Academics and researchers can publish their work cheaply and easily, benefitting students as well as researchers who may be outside an academic institution;
• It is easily readable on multiple devices (from phones to tablets and desktop) and can be accessed from popular platforms;
• It provides a clean copy of text or data for quoting – essential for the scholarly process;
• ePub3 realises the potential for highly interactive and rich academic content,
• It has no legal restrictions or patents preventing its open use,

The report also provides a picture of the current ebook landscape and the impact that ebooks and mobile access are having on the support institutions provide to their students and academics. In particular there is a lot of talk about student expectations; but scholars’ expectations are changing rapidly.

As the report makes clear: The next generation of scholars will be educated in a context of increasingly-digital learning materials. Their expectations for ease of discovery, format-shifting, mobile access and multimedia exemplars will extend beyond e-textbooks used at the undergraduate level (P. 15).

Increasingly these expectations are focussing around mobile access and consumption: “…mobile devices are ubiquitous, personal and always at hand; even if they are not the locus of sustained content consumption, they are a critical adjunct” (p. 38).

JISC has been interested in the transformations taking place in scholarly publishing and communications for a number of years, most recently with its work on scholarly communications and the idea of campus-based publishing. Indeed, the availability of cheap and easy e-book publishing platforms combined with open licensing is the basis for a growth in open textbooks , often with significant public investment (for example in California).

While processes such as peer-review ensure the quality and value of scholarly outputs, ePub3 could see academia exploit a trend that’s already witnessing blockbuster authors such as JK Rowling withholding digital rights and publishing ebooks directly.

The once high barriers to such a future are being rapidly lowered with ePub and similar standards. Criticlaly, ePub reuses existing technologies wherever possible, for example, XML, XHTML, and has led to ePub being described as “a website in a box”:

Its technology stack is heavily borrowed from web technologies. This allowed a number of ebook readers to be developed quickly using web browsers as base platforms

It also means that the technologies and tools are ones familiar to many in the academic community; this is based on existing technologies, ensuring it is quickly adopted within the academy.

With open standards like ePub3 and the JISC Digital Monographs: Technical landscape exemplars and Recommendations report institutions are in a great position to start taking advantage of these technologies and providing students and their researchers with the tools enhance their learning and research and give UK institutions a cutting-edge in the competitive world of education.

Find out more about the report and its 10 recommendations for the future of ebooks in education.

Amber Thomas, programme manager at JISC, knows the issues well because she works on our open educational resources programme and gave a presentation earlier in the month (see her slides here) which outlined the benefits of content sharing and reuse.  Amber says, “Personally I welcome the provision of easy content creation tools, and the ability to create attractive usable content.”

However, she also raises concerns about the proprietary nature of Apple’s resources, adding, “What concerns me is that Apple control a ‘technology stack’ through devices, software apps, content collections and delivery platforms. I am not sure that the drivers on them to ensure interoperability will be strong enough to avoid their business model being a form of vendor lock-in.”

There are complex issues around intellectual property when it comes to sharing resources.  Amber says, “We all need to be savvy about the ownership of our content and data these days, so that we are at least aware of the trade-offs we are making, and the effect it has on our ability to share content with each other.”

If you’re concerned about these issues you might be interested to consult the advice in our infokit around the legal aspects of OER.

Doug Belshaw, of JISC Infonet, echoes Ambers concerns.  Doug is a practising teacher and  former Director of e-Learning and he welcomes Apple’s new software.

He says, “Yes, it involves significant vendor lock-in, but so long as you go into it with your eyes open there’s potential for really engaging, contextualised content to be produced by both teachers and learners.”

Doug points out as others have done, that “where Apple leads others tend to follow.”  His hope for the future?  “We’ll end up with equally shiny, but more open, versions of iBooks Author.”  That remains to be seen – but it wouldn’t be the first time that Apple’s announcements act as a catalyst.

Which leaves the final say to JISC programme manager and OER expert David Kernohan, who is a staunch supporter of the move.  He agrees with David Riley who blogs about it here that “the announcement is an outright win for advocates of affordability and open textbooks.”

David explains, “iBooks looks like an attempt to prove that the idea of a text book (the single, codified, unmodifiable, static source of information) is still pedagogically and technologically valid.”

However he does have concerns about using the web effectively for learning and is concerned whether we are simply replicating analogue artefacts.

He concludes, “The question should not be how cheap textbooks should be, or how shiny, but whether we need them at all.”

If you’re new to ebooks, you can learn more by joining in the JISC Advance webinar on ‘getting started with ebooks’ http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/surgery

What do you think about the Apple iBooks?  Have you used any in your classes?  We’d be interested to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

What strikes me about the post is that is latches on to some recent synthesis work on digital humanities, extracting some of its findings and treating them as an ideology to be critiqued.

This implies there is a coherent philosophy to the digital humanities. A set of founding ideas, an essential ideology, that will either determine its success or failure.

The trouble is that the Digital Humanities is not reducible to a manifesto. Rather it is the evolving set of humanistic traditions and practices about investigation, analysis, critique, communication and publication that are coming under pressure in the Internet age. The whole practice of scholarship is evolving / being revolutionised (delete to taste) because of the digital realm.

All scholars are affected by this. Are there really any scholars who don’t use emails, mailing lists, JSTOR, digitised resources, Google Search, electronic journals, Wikipedia? Are there really any scholars who’ve not worried about peer review, or taken advantage of open access?

No, of course not. Although they might pretend that this is all mere convenience and doesn’t help come them closer to the ‘explanation of aesthetic works’?

But the ‘convenience’ of the digital can drive their work in different directions; a radical reduction in the hours spent travelling to libraries and browsing through print archives changes the research process.

And as the tools created by digital humanities projects grow in their scope and functionality – projects in 3D scanning, data mining, textual analysis, crowdsourcing – these too will change research practices.

I don’t disagree with Fish that we need to measure the contribution of digital tools to scholarship, but this should be with the aim of refining these tools, not just throwing them all away.

Arguing against the Digital Humanities is a little like arguing the Internet itself. It’s there, and it surrounds you. It won’t go away.

This post originally appeared on the JISC digitisation blog here.

Flickr: peterkaminski

Is your institution adapting and responding to the fast changing marketplace as quickly as it might?

Changing demographics, government policies and shifts in economic pressure are all taking their toll on education organisations and now, as the UK seeks to strengthen its world-class reputation in teaching, learning and research, leaders in our universities and colleges need to ensure they maintain their competitive advantage.

To keep pace with the challenges, institutions need to be flexible and adapt quickly to change, so that every member of staff understands, identifies with, and contributes to, the vision, mission and values of the whole organisation.

Much of the potential in university and college people and processes can be lost through ineffective use of ICT, especially in communication and information sharing.

However, much can be gained by ensuring ICT is completely integrated and aligned with the institutional strategic planning, decision-making and delivery of business goals and that every resource, person and process is pulling its weight.

Studies undertaken by JISC in partnership with Nottingham University have shown that institutions differ widely in the maturity of their strategic ICT use and in the way ICT adds value strategically or operationally.

I recently watched a JISC webinar that introduced a new Strategic Information and Communications Technology (S-ICT) toolkit and it seems to me that it could add real value in measuring the strategic ICT maturity for an organisation, ie how well ICT is integrated into the institutional strategy and how well it is able to deliver maximum value and agility in reaching business goals.

Listening to the webinar as someone with a general interest in the subject rather than as an ICT specialist, I found the case study from Lucy Nelson at University of Central Lancashire really highlighted the instant impact S-ICT could have on an institution, showing the business benefits from a practical viewpoint.

She also gave a clear picture of the huge scope of the toolkit – its ability to quickly pinpoint gaps in understanding and in areas such as communication and engagement.

S-ICT produces a results profile, which gives ratings on operational, strategic and transformational levels, then assists leaders in using ICT to support decision making and planning and engage staff in working together more effectively and productively for the benefit of the organisation as a whole.

Part of the challenge of making decisions is having a clear and truthful picture of how your organisation is performing, its strengths and areas for development. It was really interesting to see how the case studies were being proactive, turning strategy into action and responding to the challenges of growth, diversification and mergers.

S-ICT developers have taken into account the unique qualities of every institution acknowledging that each department needs to be aware of attributes and values that set them apart in order to be able to positively contribute to the organisation as a whole. This versatile toolkit also has the scope to focus down on a particular faculty as well as a particular need or ambition.

S-ICT is available for downloading here.

Watch the webinar recording.

This was the question that JISC set out to answer by funding 9 experimental projects to analyse and exploit activity data to provide new services to researchers and students or to improve existing services. These projects covered recommendation services for library and repository content, access grid usage patterns, analysing data for student retention, virtual learning environment usage data, the link between student attainment and library usage and the possibility of taking a user centered approach to activity data.

The simple answer is yes, there are lots of ways that working with activity data could be useful. But there are many technical, legal, skills and policy issues that need to be addressed in order to do so. To enable others to learn from the experience of these projects and to copy the technical and legal solutions they developed we have produced a site that summarises all that was learned in the programme. The site is live now. It provides a high level overview of what activity data is, why it is useful and how it can be exploited and also contains detailed recipes for anyone who wants to start the process of exploiting activity data at their institution. You can also read more about the projects that made up the programme.

The site was produced by Sero Consulting working with Tom Franklin and Mark van Harmelen.

One interesting question about activity data is should it be made openly available? There are plenty of challenging issues here to do with anonymisation, compliance with data protection and ensuring that the users are appropriately informed and it is what they want. But there are also benefits to open data. A good illustration of what can happen with open activity data is the Book Galaxy app below that uses the library circulation data released as part of the JISC Mosaic project to provide an innovative interface for exploring the relationship between books. The activity data guide includes resources that address the question of open data and links to open data released by some of the projects.

Here’s the Book Galaxy – move your mouse around the galaxy to see the titles. Blue dots are books, yellow dots are courses. If nothing is appearing, you might not have Java installed. Download Java

It seems to me that there is likely to be appetite for further innovation with activity data as it offers the potential for more efficient institutional services and new functionality that can enrich the research and learning experience. Both of which are important drivers in the current climate. We will be funding further work on 4 of the 9 projects to explore whether they can develop further answers or produce useful services. There is also a programme of projects on Business Intelligence managed by my colleague Myles Danson, these projects are building solutions for storing and analysing data about the business critical operations within universities. You can read an overview of the projects on the JISC website and there is a useful JISC Infonet Infokit on the topic of business intelligence. Within JISC we are also starting to think about the bigger picture of business intelligence for universities and what we can do to help universities exploit emerging opportunities so look out for future work in this area.

Find out more about this work and that of the digital infrastructure team on their blog.

Image from The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, University of Oxford www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit © The Imperial War Museum

The legacy of World War One in terms of social, economic and political global change cannot be overstated; it changed the individual’s view of society and their place within it with far-reaching effects into their future and our past. In the words of H.G. Wells: ‘This is the end and the beginning of an age’.

To mark this event in international history is therefore a key priority for custodians of heritage and educators alike.

We’ve already made considerable efforts to preserve online the memories and writings of those active during the First World War.  The popular Great War Poetry Archive was funded by JISC to digitise precious documents relating to the poetry of the Great War – including Wilfred Owen’s original notes for the well known poem Dulce et Decorum Est.

It also includes podcasts with eminent historians and veterans including the writer and broadcaster Ian Hislop talking about his grandfather’s experience in action and why he is so ‘obsessed’ with the First World War.  The Serving Soldier collection might also interest you as a way of finding out about the lives of soldiers from 1899 to 1918, a period which spans the Second Boer War, Younghusband Expedition and World War One.

But now it’s time to commemorate the 2014 anniversary.  Higher and further education has a  unique part to play in the WW1 commemoration because it can offer an academic appraisal and reappraisal of themes, events and perceptions.  To help people in education who are studying the period, we are promoting a joined-up approach across many different organisations that currently hold audiovisual, images, text based works and film relating to the First World War. JISC wants to explore how providing this in a more seamless way could help those working in education and research to access the resources. So as a result we’re planning two activities:

• JISC WW1 Discovery programme- to aggregate digital content such as films from a range of digital collections and find new and innovative ways of presenting this content for the benefit of education and research on WW1.

• JISC WW1 OER project- to create innovative Open Educational Resources around WW1 relevant across disciplines for embedding in teaching and learning using a range of content pertaining to WW1 in the UK and internationally, ready for release in March 2012

JISC’s overriding goal for both activities is to work for researchers, teachers and students to produce digital content and resources that are comprehensive, open and sustainable, but that answer differing, specific needs within higher and further education.  The plans are underpinned by a common strategic ‘direction of travel’ which is outlined most clearly in the JISC Statement of Intent.

I look forward to updating you further as these projects progress.

To find out more about what’s planned visit the blog.

With the uncertainties of a new funding model to deal with, it is becoming harder than ever to convince institutional managers to support nice-to-have projects. Everything needs to be justified, both on a balance sheet and within a wider battle for hearts and minds. But the way in which open educational resources (OER) allow institutions to meet their strategic goals alongside making the world a better place means that it is moving from being nice-to-have to becoming an essential component of academic practice.

More than 10 years on from the formal establishment of the OpenCourseWare project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the casual observer could be forgiven for assuming that the case for OER (materials suitable for learning and teaching, made available for reuse under an open licence) had been made and accepted. MIT, alongside many other institutions, both great and small, and including Nottingham, Oxford, University College Falmouth and the Open University in the UK, is currently supporting the ongoing release of resources with their own funds. The likes of YouTube and iTunes are establishing themselves as platforms for the discovery of learning material, and institutions are beginning to see open resources as a major component of their student recruitment strategies. But it can often feel, as Javiera Atenas described last week, as if we are going round the same discussions without building on what already has been discovered.

To try and condense some of the vast amount that has been learnt about the benefits of OER releases in the past 10 years, the Higher Education Academy and JISC have developed an InfoKit. This now includes materials specifically aimed at advocacy to senior institutional staff, talking about business models for openness and making arguments around institutional ethos, alongside sound evidence-based advice about every aspect of getting to a stage where releasing materials openly online is as natural as creating them. We also have an interactive tool – how open are you – which uses your responses to make a recommendation concerning how much openness your institution is ready for.

Jorum, the UK’s national learning repository, is refocusing itself around OER, introducing new features and tools to aid the deposit and discovery of resources. It is now as easy, – and increasingly, as expected – to deposit in Jorum as it is to upload to Youtube, WordPress or Twitter.

There are parallels between OER releases and the ways in which universities and colleges have begun to make more intelligent and active use of social media. For example, in following major political stories readers, bloggers and professional journalists are increasingly making use of sites such as British Politics and Society at LSE, Nottingham University’s Ballots & Bullets and the University of Oxford’s Politics in Spires to understand the background and meaning of news stories, drawing on the passion and expertise of academic specialists to further their own understanding. Strictly speaking, only the last of these is available under an open licence allowing for reuse, but all of these bloggers expect to be retweeted, quoted, referenced and their work drawn upon. It’s the point of blogging, and in many ways the point of academic practice.

One theme emerging from the research around OER is the idea of open academic practice – it comes out strongly from our ongoing evaluation and synthesis of the UKOER programme, and from other linked research such as a recent Oxford University study into the practicalities of academic reuse. Open academic practice draws a link between OER, open access to research outputs and research data, and the general practice of “professing” (in the late-medieval sense) a subject, by what we now call a “public intellectual”. By seeing OER as a component of what is traditionally expected of academia, rather than as a new imposition, we are arguing from a much stronger foundation based on what many in the sector see as their primary motivation – to explain to people the importance and relevance of the subject specialisms they have devoted many years to understanding.

Evidence is increasingly being identified that students, both traditional, and wider open learners, are getting a lot of benefit from openly available materials. From on-campus students having access to a range of supporting materials (as reported by Steve Carson at MIT), to prospective students using OER to think more clearly about subject and institution choices, there are a range of benefits that can be accessed. A recent literature review highlighted these issues, but also alerts us to gaps in our understanding where further research would help improve our understanding.

JISC and the Academy have recently supported a range of new projects (under UKOER phase 3, details to be announced soon), investigating ways in which we can use the approaches and affordances of OER to meet other key societal goals. Goals such as supporting alternate forms of delivery, making meaningful links with employers and publishers, working across sectors even preserving subject areas and teaching approaches that would otherwise be lost.

The world of OER may not be as new and as ground breaking as it was 10 years ago but for such a radical idea to survive for 10 years, and to become almost mainstream in the process, is an incredible achievement of which the global OER community, and in particular those working in the UK, should be proud.

This blog post first appeared on the Guardian Higher Education Network on 28 October 2011.  Visit the Guardian site

First, a question: how much are resources re-used? The Value of Reuse report pictures our knowledge of re-use as an iceberg where much use is invisible.

That suggests that a better question might be: why so little visible reuse of educational resources? I think it stems from how we measure re-use. The e-learning world has been so focused on repurposing that we are expecting to see the content being copied/changed. But reading is use too. Interestingly, there is a strange discomfort with talking about tracking/measuring the use of open content, which I’ve started to explore. Perhaps it stems from an anxiety that measurement means metrics, and that metrics are at odds with the “long tail” nature of academic work. But I have a lot still to understand about how to provide meaningful evidence of digital impact that supports individual and institutional drivers.  So perhaps the right question to ask is around what reuse might look like in different contexts.

To encourage reuse, we need to be clear on what might motivate people to share their resources. Attention is reward, as is intrinsic motivation. People who share blog posts, tweets, slides, images on the web know it is rewarding in its own right.

Should that translate into official recognition by the employer of the academic? I guess there are different ways of carrying out the role of an academic. We see that variation in openness in the research process: different attitudes in different discipline areas and different points in their career, and probably different personalities. So I agree that no-one should be forced. It should be choice, and at the moment, most institutional reward structures are neutral on OER: the reward is individual and social.

However, the HE sector is changing. Maybe academics do need to do more of their thinking in the open. Researchers are being encouraged to think about impact and engagement. Then there are the economic and ethical arguments for open access for research, which are perhaps starting to raise expectations about opening up other academic outputs.

My biggest interest at the moment is how technology can support the changes in practice of the early majority, which I think is happening, even if it’s off the radar. Making use visible is important, connecting content and people. Of course to make use of this, as others have commented, we need to support digital literacies.

We’d love feedback on how services like Jorum and innovation programmes like the joint HEAcademy/JISC OER Programme can help keep moving open academic practices forward. And if you’re new to the concept, visit the OER Infokit to get started.

You can participate in the discussion on the oer-discuss list which we run with the UK OU: please join in!

• Recommendation 1 – the need to take steps to enhance the transparency of costs of operational activities within higher education in order to help demonstrate where and how value for money is being delivered.

We’ve developed two tools that can help here. Firstly, the JISC IT Service Costing Toolkit that was funded under the JISC Flexible Service Delivery programme is designed to help universities calculate the cost of their current IT infrastructure and future investments. It can also help managers make the case for alternative service models by allowing you to weigh up investments in new infrastructure versus shared services or hosted services. The toolkit is now used by Oxford University Computing Service in order to provide a sound method for costing their legacy IT Service provision

Under the Digital Preservation programme the JISC Impact Calculator was funded and is available at JISC Infonet. This allows HEIs to baseline and forecast the quantitative impact (including costs) of investing in new ICT solutions. Although the impact calculator’s genesis is in information management it can be applied more widely.

• Recommendation 3 – The report also helps to articulate the sophisticated approach that needs to be taken to the adoption of shared services; that is that shared services are more effective if work is done on streamlining processes prior to implementing changes to shared services.

Within a number of shared services that JISC has worked with the sector on, we’ve examined processes to define where these can be better supported and streamlined. For example JISC has worked with SCONUL as a precursor to taking forward a shared electronic resource management support service on the examination of processes within university libraries. After significant prior work JISC Collections is now managing the establishment of a shared service to support the management of electronic library resources in colleges and universities.

If you’re looking for examples of how other universities and colleges have handled changes to their service delivery, JISC’s Flexible Service Delivery Programme supported the production of some “Process and Service Improvement” case studies. These case studies demonstrate how that with mapping and costing legacy service provision, HEIs can plan for change across a range of business and academic areas.

• Recommendation 10: Developing and implementing new ICT systems and facilities can play an important role in reducing energy costs and lowering carbon emissions, with energy savings from more efficient ICT solutions (including outsourcing)

Through our investments in greening ICT JISC has developed a wealth of knowledge in this area, and this agenda is being further explored with European infrastructure partners through the e-Infranet project.

It is pleasing to see the report note that JISC’s work adds value by developing shared practice, and of course in particular by providing shared services. On page 44 of the report the role of JISC Collections, innovation programmes and other services are noted in terms of offering value for money.

As is highlighted on page 55, JISC is working with HEFCE on the development of University Modernisation Fund (UMF) cloud services, for example the development of a shared cloud brokerage service for universities via Janet. Recommendation 11 mentions the need for procurement expertise and JISC Advance is already taking forward plans, also via UMF, to establish a service to help universities procure the best value administrative systems. The businesses cases for these activities clearly show that they will help drive efficiencies in universities.

JISC welcomes the report and UUK’s leadership in undertaking this work. We look forward to seeing UUK’s plans on implementation, and in particular working with UUK on recommendation number 6, where an ‘efficiency hub’ is proposed to promote relevant services to the sector and to share good practice and innovative developments.

Before I go I have to acknowledge that colleagues Craig Wentworth, Alex Hawker, John Chapman, Neil Grindley and others helped provide information to UUK to show examples of how the sector is working on achieving change and efficiency.

This is part two of a two-part series in response to the UUK report – you can read Rachel’s first blog post commenting on the overall direction of the report here.

I think the report gives a really useful overview of the terrain and sets out the evidence that shows how the university sector is already addressing the agenda but also states how the higher education sector might start to better address efficiency into the future. The report’s  findings are set out against a backdrop of the reduction in the amount of public funding directed at the learning and teaching grant in England alongside the drive across the UK for better value for money.

I was fortunate enough to be involved in the Sub Group that UUK established with representatives from relevant sector agencies and organisations. The Sub Group helped to identify issues and highlight relevant activities for the UK Efficiency and Modernisation Task Group, which was chaired by Professor Ian Diamond, and UUK, to take into account in their deliberations and research.  There’s an overview of the task group’s work here (PDF).  When the work began there was, as you’d expect, quite a focus on shared services, but quite quickly a richer picture emerged of activities that needed to be addressed in order for the sector to move further forward.

As the report states the UK university sector is already pretty effective in its contribution to the economy. As calculated a few years ago, it contributes £59 billion of output to the UK economy, and generates £5.3 billion of export earnings annually.  But UUK recognises the need to do more.  The report shone a light on a wealth of good work already underway, which is heartening.  It states that  perhaps the biggest hurdles to overcome in becoming more efficient lies in the fragmentation of good practice and that there is need for more coordination around solutions and sharing of good practice required.  In his foreword Professor Diamond says,“The sector has been remarkably good at hiding this progress… it will be important that [the many good examples of efficiency are] promoted more widely.”

So key issues that the report says need to be addressed include: further transparency around costs; sharing of good practice and solutions; streamlining internal processes prior to any shared service identification and implementation; further coordination of higher education procurement at a national level and improved frameworks for benchmarking so it can be used as way to drive efficiency.

The report places efficiency in a strategic context and a long-term view of a diverse sector. This takes us to that often mentioned tension around collaboration and competition; this is something that I think the sector already handles in a number of areas and I think the recommendations that UUK set out are a good basis for understanding where efficiencies and collaboration can take place in order to allow for difference and competition to flourish where it makes sense.

So in short this is a useful report, one that looks more broadly than JISC’s mission, but shows how JISC can be part of a more effective and efficient sector through partnership with other agencies, UUK and universities.  I look forward in anticipation to the follow up to the report.

On Monday I’ll share with you the specifics of how we believe JISC can help organisations respond to UUK’s recommendations.  We’d be interested to hear what people think of the recommendations and how JISC can respond. 

This is the first post in a two-part series responding to the UUK report on efficiency and effectiveness in higher education. 

Read Rachel’s second blog post commenting on specific recommendations on Monday.

Discuss the issues raised here on the Guardian Higher Education Network online today at 2pm where the topic of discussion is “Do universities need to become more efficient?”

Through the Open Access Implementation Group we have been both gathering evidence of the case for open access, and exploring practically how it can be implemented.  There remains a gap, however, in our evidence of how open access can benefit the estimated 1.8m knowledge workers in the UK, and thereby enable full exploitation of the public science base. Three research studies have been commissioned by the OAIG and funded by JISC to look into this, and will report in the next few months. We are also looking forward to the release this autumn of the findings of the study, co-funded by JISC, RIN and the Publishing Research Consortium, to see where there are gaps in the provision of articles and conference papers. So, while evidence of the need for OA is now strong and widely accepted, it could be stronger still by the end of the year.

However, there are a number of thorny questions to be answered before OA will be widespread, either via repositories and/or journals.

For repositories, these questions include how researchers can get more value from their repositories. Several JISC projects are developing solutions, and the best of these will be rolled out over the next year, and are likely to include improvements to the ways in which repositories work with other systems. JISC is supporting shared repository services, and a new community-driven set of guidance on how this can be achieved.

There are a number of challenges facing OA journals, summarised in Neil Jacobs’ recent blog post, which include the different costs faced by diverse universities under subscription and OA models. JISC funded work to model the costs and benefits of OA to universities in 2010, with similar raw findings to those quoted recently by the THE. However, it is important to remember that, for much journal publishing, the costs of OA can be covered from research grants. The administrative processes for this need improving by universities, funders and publishers. The OAIG has commissioned work that will chart ways forward, and this will report in the next few weeks.

Members of the OAIG have had constructive discussions with representatives of the publishing industry, and look forward to working together on our numerous areas of common interest in implementing OA. Expect more news on this during the autumn.

Some of the casualties of the current system can be smaller journals, outside the “big deals”, and research monographs. Small learned and professional societies are communities of scholars who often publish a journal. Increasingly, they turn to commercial publishing houses to run their journal for them. The OAIG has funded one professional society to use its own experiences to develop guidance for others on how to manage this, and how to consider the role of OA for their journal. Furthermore, responding to a groundswell of interest, JISC has funded a number of small “campus-based publishing” projects, allowing researchers to use new technologies to run their own journals.

Research monographs are widely seen to be in crisis, with library budgets for them being squeezed by the rising costs of STM journals.

This is important, as there are many disciplines where a 7000 word article is simply inadequate to develop a nuanced and detailed argument, especially in the humanities and social sciences. JISC is among several organisations (including the publisher Bloomsbury Academic) investigating whether OA monographs might be a route forward.

In summary, there is now a consensus that OA is both viable and here to stay. The discussions now are practical, about how to make it work for the research community, with its interests in dissemination, quality, and cost-effectiveness, and for the UK economy and society more broadly.

How universities and researchers manage the issues around research data varies massively – and of course will depend on the type of data they hold – whether sound recordings of bird songs, text mining results from Shakespeare’s plays, thousands of measurements provided by space probes, hours of rare film recordings, DNA sequences or qualitative data from psychological research interviews.

JISC is live streaming its conference next Tuesday 13 September around research integrity – specifically on the importance of good research data management.  Our aim is to bring together the current thinking on effective practice and give senior staff and researchers an opportunity to debate the thornier issues, like whose responsibility this is and how to manage freedom of information requests.

We welcome your input: submit your questions via twitter by using #jiscres11 and we’ll put them to our panel.  You can also watch the keynote speakers live on Tuesday, who alongside me include:

• Professor David Baker, deputy chair of JISC
• Professor Dave De Roure, professor of e-research, Oxford University e-Research Centre and national strategic director of Digital Social Research
• Professor Sir Tim O’Shea, principal and vice chancellor of University of Edinburgh and chair of JISC
• Professor Kevin Schürer, pro vice chancellor (Research and Enterprise), University of Leicester

During the conference you will:

• Learn why research data management matters and who should be responsible for research data management in your organisation
• Read recommended reports and resources as they are referred to by the speakers
• Understand from case studies what success might look like
• Watch key experts describe the routes to successful data management
• Participate on Twitter and ask questions of the speakers using #jiscres11

It’s the kind of discussion we think could be helpful to professionals in the UK and internationally so if you know people who you think would be interested I’d really value you sending this information on.

There’s no need to register – simply add a date in your diary for 10am on 13 September 2011 and join us online here.

Watch a video about how JISC can support your research reputation:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Visit JISC’s Youtube channel to watch similar videos on research efficiency and collaboration

In addition, the rapid growth in personal ownership of new and more powerful technologies such as mobile phones and tablet PCs, along with the pervasive use of social software is changing the way we work, socialise, communicate and collaborate.  It is only natural that students will expect to see the powerful benefits these technologies offer – technologies that are common-place in many aspects of our working lives – used to support their learning ambitions as they endeavour to balance the competing pressures of study, work, caring and social responsibilities.

So how are colleges and universities responding to these challenges and preparing for the future?JISC’s new guide on Emerging Practice in a Digital Age shows how colleges and universities are continuing to embrace innovation in use of mobile technologies, social software and virtual worlds despite constraints on public funding.  The guide shows how they are harnessing new and emerging technologies to enhance the learning experience and respond to changes in economic, social and technological circumstances in a fast-changing world.
Through the three themes of: working in partnership with students, developing students’ employability potential and preparing for the future, the guide demonstrates how considered and innovative use of technology can enhance learning. It highlights opportunities to transform practice and explore some of the benefits and challenges using written, video case studies and podcasts of expert voices from the JISC 2011 Emerging Practice symposium.
For me, key messages include the need to go beyond listening to students to working with them as co-collaborators of their own learning, the need to focus on learning design as an integral aspect of introducing new technologies, the importance of working with employers and the need to develop digital literacy skills for both staff and students.

The change in culture and shifting locus of control from institution to learner is something that David White, Co-manager, Technology Assisted Lifelong Learning (TALL), Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford highlights: “I think we need to accept that the culture has changed, that institutions don’t need to own or control that culture but they need to take advantage of it and to equip their students to engage with it in new forms of literacy. We can’t just slide across traditional forms of literacy, and I think that is where the challenge is set.”

With an emphasis on emerging practice, the guide makes the case for strong leadership at a senior level to ensure the vision and opportunities presented by these emerging technologies are realised with due consideration to the support mechanisms necessary to make their introduction successful.  The need to look ahead, embrace change and create the right culture by developing strategies that engage staff and students is something that Clare Killen, the author of the guide suggests is likely to lead to longer-lasting transformation, “in the longer term, efforts to create the right culture and to engage others in the process of change may prove to be more valuable and lead to more sustainable and responsive practice in a world of rapid change”.

For information about the JISC e-Learning programme, visit: www.jisc.ac.uk/elearningprogramme

In short, the University of Lincoln undertook a four month project for JISC called ‘Linking You’, which surveyed 40 different websites across the .ac.uk domain – ten from each university group – and compared the similarities between the URLs (location addresses) of those websites. The project found there was a lot of inconsistency in the representation of information for graduates and undergraduates. However, there were also good conventions that have emerged across the sector and out of all this, the ‘Linking You’ project proposed a common set of URL syntaxes that could be used in principle across multiple corporate institutional websites:

http://lncn.eu/toolkit/model

Before you get upset and think that we are suggesting you change your current URL structures, you should know that we are NOT suggesting anything of the sort! Rather we are suggesting that via a transparent mapping exercise (using 303 or 301 redirects) you can mint all the suggested URLs that the ‘Linking You’ project proposes and then link them to the actual URLs that have grown up as part of your organic system. For example,

If you use: http://foo.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/courses

You could follow the ‘linking you’ recommendations and mint a new URL that points to the above URL using HTTP code 303 or 301 to:

http://foo.ac.uk/courses/

In short, you’re just mapping what we hope will become a common URI structure (the compact sequence of characters that identifies an abstract or physical resource) to your current link architecture, which means you can continue to change and add more links to your architecture as the organisation changes and you would just continue to redirect the ‘common’ link as recommend by ‘linking you’ to the underlying link. This process need not affect the design or apparent structure of your website.

So why should you mint the suggested set of ‘linking you’ URLs for your institution? We recognise this work of minting and maintaining the redirects would be ‘yet another thing to deal with’ across your complex and growing .ac.uk websites, however we think there is potential value both in time savings and value add we could all communally benefit from in considering these URL conventions.

Below we list ten reasons that we think will result if we can get multiple institutions to start adopting this syntax and vocabulary:

1. Better search engine optimisation: As a sector we can go to Google and say, “Hi we are the University sector and we think you should give priority to these URLs when people are searching for things like courses.”

2. robot.txt: If a group of Universities started adopting these URL syntaxes, we could save time and money by generating a common robot.txt for all of us so to use so we don’t have to each write a robot.tx file, this would also make doing analytics across the sector enhanced as we could understand patters of clicking across all .ac.uk websites.

3. A simple mapping tool: An apache mod_rewrite (or IIS, nginx, etc. equivalent) tool that will do most of this work for you that could be written once and support many!

4. Improve discovery: Clear human-readable URLs are now integral to browser search and lookup technology and becoming essential if you want to enable ease by a student experiencing your website.

5. Predictable, consistent, aggregations: It will be easier to build tools on behalf of the entire sector because people will know where to go for the data. See the below reasons (no. 6, 7, 8 ) for immediate experimentation JISC is already undertaking and just think what else could be leveraged if we could bring our data together:

6. A course catalogue: As many of you know JISC is actively encouraging universities to create XCRI feeds for their courses. If everyone producing an XCRI feed put it at the following URL foo.ac.uk/courses/xcri we’d lay the groundwork for persistent, structured course data that developers (many of them students) could use to build new and engaging apps and websites that we could all benefit from.

7. A news feed: If we all knew where all the corporate news feeds were e.g. http://foo.ac.uk/news/rss we could create a University News App where the sector could have their news published on demand, let alone text mining goodness and other filters for highlight key news developments across all higher and further education institutions.

8. A sector wide directory: Common information such as institutional policies, contact information, news, about, events, etc. could be aggregated into a searchable directory; useful to both the public and higher education institution data geeks.

9. Know your assets: Your .ac.uk addresses can be understood as your ‘virtual real estate’. Adopting a well-formed, widely understood and persistent ‘portfolio’ of core web addresses will help web managers manage these increasingly valuable assets.

10. Cool URLs: Simple, stable, manageable URLs make sense. They are recommended by the worldwide web consortium or W3C, to make web managers’ lives easier and keep users happy, too.

Those are some of the reasons we can think of and we think there are many more if even a little imagination is implied. We’re convinced that if we all worked together as university web managers we could achieve more than the sum of our parts by producing this URL structure for each institution.

What kind of idea do you think you could achieve by adopting the ‘Linking You’ toolkit? We’re thinking of funding a several short projects to review and standardise the toolkit, put it into practice and then write up your case study for the sector on how it worked for you and what value you see in doing this work. Are you interested? What are your thoughts on all of this?

Prompted by a recent JISC mobile infrastructure for libraries funding call, I wanted to outline some of the challenges for institutions, and in particular academic libraries, in coming to terms with ‘mobile’:

Re-conceptualisation of services

Hardly a day passes where we’re not confronted by yet another paradigm breaking technology or event.  Yet, mobile offers organisations, and academic libraries in particular, an opportunity to re-conceptualise services,. Not just taking existing services and relationships to make them accessible on mobile devices but how new services can be built specifically with the mobile device in mind.

Mobile helps to refocus the potential inherent in the physical space, services, systems and collections of the library, and to transform relationships away from purely service delivery to a more social context.  The librarian and library become facilitator and enabler: providing personalised information at the right time and in the right place.

Changing our relationship to space

Mobile services and devices force a reconsideration of concepts like ‘library’ and more interestingly ‘digital library’.  There is an obvious impact on the physical nature of the library, but one that has yet to be fully thought through: the re-prioritisation of space, with a move away from the physical and static (books, desktops, desks) to the mobile, interactive and social.  A library in your pocket.

For a long time the ‘library’ has transgressed beyond the physical boundaries of the buildings within an institution.  But the digital library hasn’t, in general, had a fundamental impact on the design, focus or existence of those buildings.  Mobile, it might be argued, will necessitate the re-examination of physical space.

Similarly, the digital space of the library will need re-examining.  There is no longer a separation between the physical and the digital; rather the two bleed into each other and the boundaries between the two are constantly exceeded.  What does the inherent functionality of the device bring to the discoverability and accessibility of content and services? Augmented reality (where a view of the physical environment is modified by a computer) and near field communication (transactions at a touch: such as barcodes and QR codes) are just two examples of how mobile is challenging the user’s relationship to information and services.

Changing institutional support strategy
The implications for institutions supporting hardware and software that is not owned or managed by the university or its library has huge implications.  Mobile devices are owned by and managed by the user.  How do institutions manage the support expectations of users who have a problem with their personal device?  What role will libraries or departments play in the loaning of devices to ensure equality of access?

This change requires a radically different support policy; the intensely personal and one-to-one nature of most mobile devices has significant ramifications.

Legal implications
The implications of confidentiality and privacy lurk in the background of any discussion around the institutional management of mobile hardware and software.  A major challenge for institutions is the confidentiality and privacy of the user.  The implications of data breaches and privacy make institutionally owned and managed devices less attractive; it is difficult to loan such hyper-personalised hardware and software.

Recent policy briefings from organisations such as Educause in the US on Data Privacy Legislation and the EU’s exploration of data breach rules highlight the significance of these challenges.

Not waving, but drowning
In a field as rapidly evolving as mobile, not having a clear focus and direction is likely to result in mobile provision being caught in a maelstrom of new developments and competing devices.  To realise the potential and ensure sustainability it is essential that institutional investment is ‘built upon a commonly-understood foundation and within the scope of a wider digital strategy’ (Mobile and Wireless Technologies Review).

The implementation of mobile services currently suffer from a fractured and ad hoc roll-out  within many academic institutions.  While there will undoubtedly be pockets of excellence across universities and within departments, there is rarely a coherent institutional strategy when it comes to mobile.

New opportunities…
The potential of mobile devices to transform and enhance the student experience has been demonstrated by innovative projects such as Bristol’s Mobile Campus Assistant and Edinburgh’s Walking through Time.

But I think it is now time to fully realise the opportunities that mobile offers to institutions, and ensure that these innovations are embedded in institutional strategies and services.  The mobile infrastructure for libraries funding call is an occasion to realise those opportunities and to put ideas into action.

There now are a range of projects that have been developing  and delivering shared infrastructure services to support people managing these repositories – such as Sherpa Romeo, Open Access Repository Junction and PIRUS2.  But to help further this, with particular focus on research papers, JISC has recently awarded EDINA funding to deliver key shared infrastructure services that meet shared needs, such as usage statistics, copyright management, search, preservation and deposit facilities.

The aim of this work is to make our repositories more coherent by bringing together key services and providing  them at a national level.  Neil Jacobs, Programme Director, Digital Infrastructure, comments that, “this work will build on the successful and widely used innovative shared infrastructure projects.”

What does this mean for universities? It means institutions and research organisations will be able to run their systems and processes more efficiently and effectively to better manage their textual research outputs.  This will support university requirements, such as reporting around the Research Excellence Framework and make the related outputs more accessible and reusable.  Rachel Bruce, Innovation Director, Digital Infrastructure says that, “this work is an opportunity to further enhance JISC Services to meet sector needs.”

In order to deliver a successful service environment for repositories, we’ll need to address sustainability issues and this is particularly challenging in our current shifting financial environment. I am aware we also need wide engagement with the university sector and other stakeholders such as the Research Councils and funders in the UK, and where appropriate with international initiatives. The benefit of working internationally is that there are some aspects of the service infrastructure that are also relevant to others outside of the UK; after all research is global.

I know that this latest investment in services will provide an opportunity for stakeholders to work together to meet common goals such as better research management and increased access to research findings. This phase of funded work will complete by March 2013 and more information will be available soon on the JISC website.

See resources and tool-kits on how JISC can help you with your research excellence.

The committee’s report, now available online, describes access to data as ‘fundamental’ for researchers to reproduce, verify and build on each other’s results.  It highlights that reproducibility should be the gold standard that all peer reviewers and editors aim for when assessing a manuscript. This spirit of openness is something JISC supports, through its work with the UK Research Councils.But researchers will also be aware of the challenges of making their data sets available to reviewers.  In the longer term, there are technical and economic challenges associated with making data available, especially as different types of data require different treatment. A lot of social data that is created through longitudinal studies makes sense only if the entire length of the study is available. Other data, such as environmental data, must be kept permanently available – you can’t repeat an earthquake.

Keeping data like this available in perpetuity is expensive and could end up as a cost that universities across the world simply cannot afford.  JISC is funding Dryad-UK which mirrors a US initiative to help researchers control who sees their data and when.  Researchers can deposit their data in a secure environment and then give privileged access to reviewers, for example, and then make the data available more widely once the article is published.

However, in some areas of science the data is produced by computers and programs and is correspondingly huge. Storing indefinitely the mass of outputs of Large Hadron Collider experiments is unfeasible. So we have to make it possible for people to re-run the programme, something that requires you know quite a lot about the machine and the environment it is running on in order to understand the data.  As long as the researcher defines the input conditions, and what the program is designed to do, you should be able to trust the outputs. And if we ensure that authors make clear the nature of the program they are running and the algorithms then people in the future should be able to re-run the program to retrieve the data.  I’m hinting of course that beyond the software or statistical test is something much more fundamental – the accuracy of the data itself.

As part of the report’s consultation process I was asked to comment on whether, in some cases, peer review might encourage a tendency towards conservative judgements among reviewers. But peer review in one form or another has been an underpinning aspect of research arguably since before journals as we know existed. As the report highlights, journal editors are well-placed to find the right experts to review unusual research, so the process itself cuts against the conservatism. Online publication affords us a great deal more flexibility in how the peer review process works.  In the past, two different forms of assessment have happened as part of a single process.  Both the technical assessment and the impact assessment have happened after publication of a research paper.  But separating the two processes is important because of the longer time scale over which you get your answer – so it’s encouraging that the committee’s report recommends a pre-publication technical assessment.

Another criticism sometimes levelled at peer review is that it is a burden on academics who have to do this in their own time.  But few researchers feel they have a nine-to-five existence anyway. In my experience reviewing manuscripts outside of a regular working day is part of the mentality in the research community. The situation would only become worrying if researchers had to spend more time on peer review proportionate to their own research. Greater transparency in the process might also help garner more recognition for peer reviewers, by ensuring that an individual reviewer’s work is known to their peers.  The committee report rightly highlights that we need to encourage researchers to deposit their data, rather than enforce it. Researchers deserve credit and recognition for working in an open way. It’s a complex situation, so a blanket mandate on open data might not be feasible but we need to create the right conditions so it is easier for researchers to make their data openly available.

This blog post first appeared in Research Information.

It is becoming evident that the conflicts and indeed the events of the 20th century can be fully investigated only when today’s historians have the equivalent relationship to the moving image as they have to the recorded text.

This short video by the JISC Film & Sound Think Tank highlights the issues involved in opening up access to film archives.

Film and television archives, delivered over the web, are as essential for learning today as libraries of books. Students already expect to use the full gamut of rich media in their education, and by 2014 video will account for 91% of global consumer traffic on the internet.

However, a recent report from the JISC Film & Sound Think Tank identifies what it refers to as the “AV gap” (the Audio Visual gap) between the expectations of learners and the reality of education today.

The report says, “The engines of our screen culture – film, television, and radio – were the dominant media of the 20th century, and many of the most important and most memorable messages of the 20th and 21st centuries have been expressed in moving images and sound. Yet education has far to go still to incorporate them systematically in teaching and learning.”

The Film & Sound Think Tank was convened with the aim of advising  JISC on all issues relating to the creation, discovery, use, delivery and preservation of film and sound resources in education and to input into relevant strategic and policy areas.

Contributors came from a broad set of organisations within broadcast, production, archives, research and education.  Those who contributed to the work clearly recognised that there was an opportunity to work in partnership to enhance film and sound archive provision – and all were interested in the challenges and opportunities around enhancing usage for education, research and beyond.

The report marks the culmination of the group’s work and proposes a series of strategic recommendations aimed at promoting current audiovisual collections and making them easily findable and usable for educational purposes.

The recommendations include, among others, strategies for improving resource discovery, clarifying licensing information, allowing more sophisticated manipulation and citation of moving images, and partnership work between Higher Education institutions and producers and broadcasters.

These high level approaches echo the more practical, every day, barriers to embed sound and moving images in education also identified in this blog post.

We are currently exploring how the recommendations made by the group can be taken forward in collaboration with JISC Services and other organizations working in this area. For example through enhancements to relevant JISC Services such as BUFVC, JISC Digital Media and MediaHub as well as through forthcoming projects to commemorate the anniversary of the First World War and activities around the BBC-led Digital Public Space.

The report was written by Paul Gerhardt and Peter B. Kaufman and can be found here together with a range of video resources and podcasts.

A summary downloadable pdf version of the report is available here.

Planning and designing the curriculum involves every aspect of the business from market research and course development to quality assurance and enhancement, resource allocation, timetabling, recruitment and assessment.

During the past two year I have been working  on the Transforming Curriculum Delivery through Technology Programme which funded 15 projects based in universities and colleges  with the aim of enhancing curriculum design and delivery through innovative uses of technology.

This work has focused on some of the key challenges that universities and colleges all face such as: improving  motivation, achievement and retention;  managing large cohorts; supporting remote and distance learners; engaging learners with feedback; ensuring ongoing responsiveness to stakeholder needs and delivering resource efficiencies which enhance rather than reduce the quality of the learning experience. By exploring new, creative and flexible models of delivering curriculum we have learned more about how and where technology can  add value and even transform the way in which the curriculum is delivered in different contexts.

We’ve found, for example, that students’ learning can benefit from efficient, integrated systems. At Lewisham college, for example, students on the new 14-19 diploma course are no longer dealing with printouts but getting instant access to their timetables, attendance and punctuality records through the college’s new learning portal.  The result is more motivated students who are more in control of their own progress, as student Sherrane Scott highlighted, “I use [the portal] for many things. The main use for me is to check my work in the courses section of the site. I use it because it is useful and convenient. It is also set out in a clear and understandable way.“

If you are interested in finding out more about this project, and the other work in the programme and want to understand more about the potential of technology-enhanced curricula on , our new guide Transforming curriculum delivery through technology: Stories of challenge, benefit and change is now available. This guide provides an overview of the outcomes from the programme and offers some insights into the ways in which institutions and individual curriculum areas can make use of technology to respond more robustly to the demands of a changing world. Copies can be downloaded or ordered from www.jisc.ac.uk/curriculumdeliveryguide (allow 2 weeks for delivery). For further information about the work of the projects and access to all our programme-related resources, please see the Design Studio. A recording of a presentation I gave recently providing an overview of the programme and its achievements, is also available.

Accompanying the guide, our latest radio show in the ‘JISC On Air’ series looks at how technology can deliver curriculum changeand  includes interviews with representatives from projects involved in the programme whodiscuss the impact achieved in two very different contexts and disciplines.