I’m attending the UCISA Corporate Information Systems Group Conference this week in Brighton (#ciasg13). I’m fortunate enough to have a trade stand in the commercial exhibition area and am promoting a great little initiative, the Jisc Summer of Student Innovation.
So what’s the Summer of Student Innovation? Simply a call for innovative ideas to improve the student experience. Nothing much new there then? Well, yes, this time Jisc asked the students themselves to come up with the ideas. We streamlined the proposal process asking for videos to be uploaded. To be in with a chance of selection each idea has to attract 150 votes from multiple institutions. Between 20 May and 17 June 1013 we recorded over 6.5K votes with 36 ideas submitted. We whittled those down to 21 fundable projects. These were awarded 5K in funding making a portfolio worth 105K. In addition we laid on a series of events to support them. This was a sort of ‘entrepreneurship summer school’ for students. They gained experience of user centred design, marketing, funding and much more.
Of those 21 projects, 20 delivered by November 2013. There were a range of outputs from wireframes suitable for further development to working web services and apps with user bases in excess of 1500. Quite an impressive return on investment already.
Jisc has some funding to move a handful of these projects toward services, shared and offered to Jisc customers. I’m at this conference seeking input as to which of those are of most interest to this audience as a continuation of the ethos we used when developing and running the initiative. Co-Design through collaboration with professional associations representative of common staff groupings. A step to help ensure the services produced meet the needs of the HE Sector.
The 21 projects are described by the students themselves through 1 minute professional videos available here; http://jisc.ac.uk/student-innovation
Scroll toward the bottom of the page and you’ll see we present the project by themes of; Teaching and Learning, Student life and Research.
Of course, delegates may also identify projects they wish to pursue themselves. For that reason I’m encouraging people to contact the students direct, to register their interest, to see whether there’s enough demand to secure alternative funding.
It’s been a great initiative with multiple benefits from being involved. Entrepreneurship is a key graduate attribute. The Jisc Summer of Student Innovation has certainly helped the participants achieve that. It’s also put together some innovative candidate services to improve the student experience, from students themselves. Not a bad result and an approach Jisc is considering for the future.
ENDS
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Here are a couple of random facts I picked up based on analytics and big data.
Sales of Orewll’s 1984 have increased by 337% since the NSA story leaked
The data people create is significantly less than the data created about them
BI was like looking for a needle in a haystack, big data is like turning that haystack into something useful.
The lack of data scientists is a significant barrier to us exploiting big data and analytics for benefits.
In the HE sector it seems the skills of the data scientist are available in roles such as out analysts and planners as well as academics. Perhaps we should be looking to these folks to help out in this well hyped field.