It’s been a while since I attended an event so today I’m dusting off the cobwebs from this site and will attempt to live blog a few sessions from the first annual conference of the recently convened Higher Education Strategic Planners Association (February 2014 at Warwick University)

Strategy Implementation in a changing world is the theme for the two days.

Full programme here

I’ve had some involvement with National Planners and Scottish Planners over the last 4 years through my Jisc work in Business Intelligence. I’m here today to meet members, understand the breath of roles and responsibilities. Understand members concerns and priorities to inform our relationship. I’m talking with the HESPA Executive Committee about their formal involvement in the development of a new Jisc Business Intelligence Service and see the delegates of this event as prime customers.

Session 1
Mary Curnock Cooke, UCAS so a talk on applications to HE and predictions thereof….

Mary highlighted the 2012 picture; the fact that fewer offers were made to fewer applicants. The net result was 50K fewer HE starters. In 2013 significantly more offers (up 8%) to slightly more applicants. Based on exam performance 95% got an offer 50% got four or five offers with BTEC making an impact (ABB were up 6% with 26% from BTECs while non ABB were 26% up so a quarter of ABB offers were to BTEC holders). The BTEC impact is a very significant impact. Nearly all institutions had offers available through clearing. The UCAS end of cycle report panted a very positive picture with 7 – 11% increases across recruitment, Widening Participation, no change in ABB entrants but significant rises in BTEC as mentioned.

UCAS are forecasting a 4% increase in overall applications in 2014 over 2013.

UCAS handled 92K applications in the last 48 hours of clearing. So best not to expect a quick response during those times!

Interestingly the recovery rates are lowest for those HEIs charging the lower fee rate, though UCAS believe this is more due to the economic state of the nation and employability rather than fee rates.

Some interesting regional variations in application rates with Yorkshire and Humberside topping the league being up by more than 7%, others flat.

A good deal of detail presented on the widening participation agenda. Applicant by women exceed men by 84K. Overall achievement in primary and secondary education being significant. The underperformance of boys vs girls is a concern UCAS are flagging. I wander how effective analytics could be in informing students, parents and teachers on the significance of school level learning indicators and likely entrance to higher education. Is there an opportunity to work cross sector on this? Are the indicators simply grade point averages or can we be smarter in these days of big data exploitation? For example UCAS note that applicants have lower GCSE attainment. The inference here is to look at level 2 (GCSE) attainment as a good indicator for success at higher level and therefore admissions should look closer at these.

On predictions only 60% ABB predictions achieved these. UCAS therefore recommend looking to GCSE attainment as a predictor. UCAS offer predictions up to 2018 – the big change in the pool form which HEIs recruit is a significant increase in vocational qualification entry with a drop in A level acceptance with the least advantaged groups holding the most vocational qualifications. It’s therefore getting harder to accept poor bright kids if looking to A Level only.

Next up the effect of lifting the cap on entrants to Higher Education. UCAS believe 20-25K more is achievable. The Government predict 60K. UCAS do not support this expecting maybe 30K more citing the requirements to help this as being extreme such as men to equal women applications, equalising across ethnic groups (white to achieve asian) a 50K increase, all regions to meet London increases etc. UCAS note a large number (>100K) applicants not accepting any offer. Is this an area to examine? Jisc has done a good deal of work on improving the student experience during pre to post admission phase (through to alumni) See our Relationship Management work for more on this (http://bit.ly/jisc_rm).

Some demand here for benchmarking opportunities against competitor HEIs. Jisc worked with UEL on Business Intelligence and created some excellent dashboards based on HESA data to achieve this. It’s the sort of thing we hope to include in the new Jisc BI Service. See http://bit.ly/jisc_bi and the Flikr collection for dashboard examples.

Session 2
Giles Carden (Director of BI at Warwick) introduced Dominic Shellard the Vice Chancellor of DMU
DMU was in trouble – over recruitment, zero reserves, staff costs highest in sector at 65% turnover. A new strategy was required. Dominic applied Kotters 8 point process to major change with significant success;

Following the success of this, DMU faced An ageing campus, failing ICT infrastructure, break even performance, low applicant to registration conversion. The focus become one of student experience enhancement through investment via a 100 million pound bond.

In summary;
Sensible growth with a focus on quality in all areas (NSS, retention. league tables, employability, research, partnerships) must be the way forward – any institution piling students high to the detriment of quality will get into serious trouble.

Differentiation (new initiatives and innovation to set apart from the competition) is key – DMU are tied to Leicester Tigers, Leicester City, British Airways for #dmuglobal There must be a strong brand with a focus on marketing. Sophistication in attracting home students is already high, but on EU students needs attention. Focus on customer service and the student experience.

Planners are key in advising where to focus resources and effort to make the mo st impact in these areas.

Quite the challenge!

Session 3
The Future of HE: A Policy View by Nick Pearce Director Institute for Public Policy Research
Nick kicked off with a consideration of Government spending cuts expecting 60% further cuts 14/15 to 17/18. Four scenarios were presented on BIS resourcing with cuts of 14.6% to 17.6% on BIS budget depending on the protection of NHS and Schools. Under all scenarios the impact is predicted at 24.8% cut on HE budget. Cuts to date have been somewhat offset by fees but noting that this is a long term strategy. The amount government will have to subsidise student loans is up to 35-40%.

On the expectation to expand on student numbers 720 million pounds is the figure quoted to achieve this. If this is to stand it needs to be funded by increased borrowing, cuts elsewhere, diverting funds or increases in revenue (tax).

A number of short term saving scenarios were subsequently presented. Technology could have a role to play and is perhaps an area for Jisc support.

Key policy challenges
delivering spending cuts to 2018/19
sustainability of loan system
address crisis in part time and pst grad study
expanding access traditional full cost vs low cost / vocational
maximise HE potential to drive growth
respond to disruptive innovation eg MOOCs and Private Providers

Back in March 2013 I created a list of these. Seems about time for an update.

Analytics for HE seems to be gaining interest. In the wise words of Mary Poppins, Here are a few of my favourite things

December 2013 blog post (by me so can’t really qualify as a favourite!) on Learning analytics event at London University

November 2013 Guardian Blog post on learning analytics by my Jisc colleague Ruth Drysdale

October 2013 My colleagues at Jisc Infonet have released their InfoKit on data visualisations. Also note their case studies on learning analytics (see Open University, Derby, Southampton, Bedford and Loughborough) spread across their InfoKits on Business Intelligence and Relationship Management

August 2013 Guardian Article on learning analytics based on Jisc projects and with insights from my colleague Rob Englebright

June 2013 My colleagues at Jisc CETIS have put the finishing touches to our Analytics Series to include a couple of case studies. The series are a set of papers exploring the state of analytics for Higher Education across all areas. I first blogged about it back in January 2013

May 2013 Educause have released their Ethics, Big Data and Analytics Model for Application and cited our Jisc legal and ethics paper

April 2013 I’ve been involved in discussions with Educause, Surf and Contact North about Learning Analytics. Some great discussions. Here are a few resources of common interest we’ve identified:
Jisc Strategic ICT Tools
Edcuause LEARNING ANALYTICS: MOVING FROM CONCEPT TO PRACTICE (2012)
Educause LEARNING ANALYTICS: A REPORT ON THE ELI FOCUS SESSION (2012)
Educause LEARNING ANALYTICS: THE COMING THIRD WAVE (2011)

March 2013 The Jisc Inform has a piece entitled ‘how can I use analytics to benefit my students’

February 2013 The Times Higher Education Supplement published an article covering Jisc analytics

January 2013 New publication from Jisc Protect Your Business, Look after your information

January 2013 Try my own blog post describing our Analytics Series of in depth papers for all aspects of the HE business

January 2013 Research Analytics article by my collaegue Neil Jacobs of Jisc

December 2012 UNESCO have released a briefing on learning Analytics

December 2012 This months Jisc Inform Has a quick jargon free article on analytics to support learners and refers to the December Jisc report ‘Activity Data – delivering benefits from the deluge

November 2012 Jisc put together an Analytics Briefing for Senior Managers

November 2012 Activity Data is described succinctly in this blog post by my colleague Andy McGregor

March 2012 Jisc report on the Value and Benefits of Text Mining

November 2011 Beautifully designed online Jisc resource ‘Exploiting Activity Data in the Academic Environment
Enough is as good as a feast (Michael)

December 10 2013 and today I’m at a Learner analytics and Big data event in Senate House, University of London

http://cdelondon.wordpress.com/2013/11/07/in-focus-learner-analytics/

#CDEInFocus

Quite a few of the usual suspects here (to me anyway!) such as;

Adam Cooper who co-developed the JIsc CETIS Analytics Series concluding first quarter of 2013
Doug Clow of the OU and the Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK) Community
Annika Wolff & Zdenek Zdrahal, Knowledge Media Institute, Open University who project managed a Jisc initiative I oversaw using engagement analytics for student progression

Another initiative I’m aware of is represented by Michael Moore of Desire2Learn describing the analytics capability in their commercial products (they have a large scale long term field test underway in Canada)

And my old colleague Steve Warburton is our compere for the day. What a treat!

Some new stuff for me here too;
Dr Bart Rientes, Senior Lecturer, Department of Higher Education, University of Surrey
Pamela Wik-Grimm, Manager of Learner Outcomes, eCornell
Ernest Lyubchik, Selflab.com

Unfortunately my train was a touch late so I’m not able to blog the entire day….

Adam Cooper (CETIS)
Adam touched on the perils of data visualisations showing us some poor examples with a plea to delegates to raise the bar and not be drawn in. ALso significance and sample size, and that correlation is not necessarily the root of causation. So don’t ignore statistics in favour of pretty visualisations. Adam pressed home the end goal of analytics being actionable insight and that identifying the insight people want and can action is going to be key.

At Jisc my InfoNet colleagues have an entire InfoKit (October 2013) available on visualisation at

http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/data-visualisation/

Here is Adams summary slide

Next up Pamela Wik-Grimm of eCornell
Using targeted data driven online surveys to improve course design
eCornell sell courses that are learner directed or with course team expert input and teaching assistant delivery. So quite niche.
The analytics begins with a visualisation of the frequency of student access of various course elements asking why do they repeat these (are they great or ambiguous for example). Essentially these patterns provide the actionable insight. The sample sizes underpinning the demonstrated visualisations are very small (17 students) but the inference drawn is applied to the 35K students taking the courses. Which seems a bit unusual. Maybe they have determined that 17 is as good as a thousand responses. One benefit of this approach is that individual students can be asked what inference can be drawn, rather than using analytics to predict.
The insights allow course redesign for optimisation. Nice to hear some learning analytics not based on engagement activity and early warning of drop out.

Bart Rientes Surrey University
Bart highlights that good teachers are doing analytics anyway and asks whether there is anything new going on. He believes that much learning goes on socially (outside the formal classroom) and introduces Social learning analytics requiring visualisation of ‘the invisible’. Social networks play an important role in learning and these can be visualised (with whom do students network and what is the impact on their learning). According to Erik Duval (LAK Community) a problem with leanring analytics is the lack of clarity as to what it is that should be measured.
In summary, the low hanging fruit are not the best – clicks on web pages / VLE data (as the OU will be discussing later) are crude. Social Analytics offers far more powerful insight into actual learning.

Next up George Mitchell, Selflab.com
Delivering the learning ecosystem
A contact agnostic adaptive learning and analytics system
A system to deliver a truly personalised learning experience. So providing appropriate materials to them at an appropriate time emulating a good teacher but remaining subject and content independent. Which all sounds a bit sci-fi.
Three components are identified;
1. Target Knowledge. A model showing linkages including pre-requisites, required competencies and navigation through elements to evidence these. This identifies where a student is coming from (prior knowledge) and where they need to go to (required competencies).
2. Intelligent Engine. To provide the individualised learning path measuring and predicting ability. The system determines pre-knowledge and provides a path that fills the gaps required to demonstrate the required competencies. Varying learning styles are also catered for in terms of content offered. So content is also profiled and effectiveness of that content is provided to the learning designers.

The system has been used as; 50K students, 75K course enrolments, 18 million questions developed and delivered, 317K practice and revision interactions, across 60 courses. So pretty impressive.

Key here are;
Personalised approach respecting student prior knowledge
Automated appropriate content generation and delivery
Analytics to feedback on content performance

Next up it’s Annika Wolf
Annika is presenting work Jisc funded and I oversaw based on student progression / retention, demographics and VLE clicks. Here’s their case study.
The OU has very large numbers of student so accuracy and timely prediction of likely student failure allows smarter targeting of OU resources to intervene. The work here is moved on, the underpinning models are drawing on prior student behaviours across multiple learning activities including assessments. They found that VLE data (interpreted as engagement) or assessment data alone weren’t as accurate predictors as when combined. They determined that the first assessment outcome (not submitted or less than 40%) was the most accurate predictoin of course failure. So this was targeted as the actionable insight. Mashing in demographic data with VLE gave reliable predictions.

Next up it’s Doug Clow of the OU and the Learning Analytics and Knowledge community
Doug is into MOOCs and explains why analytics for MOOCs is hard. We know that people drop out of MOOCs a lot (93% from MIT) but the reasons for why are very complex. Hard and complex with large drop outs, that’ll be the MOOC then. Doug presented some fab graphs of MOOC completion rate. As ever he’s so organised and has posted his slides here, so do go look.

Doug has drawn a parallel with the marketing funnel;

Awareness
Interest
Desire
Purchase

and that this can be applied to higher education in terms of learning opportunities and the steep drop off in terms of participation toward achievement (hence a funnel). It’s in his slides. As are some notional completion rates (90% for an elite university right down to <15% for MOOCs and noting that 12 MOOCs might be required to be equivalent).

Last one today is from IBM and the University of London on learning analytics based on augmented Moodle VLE data
Richard Maccabee (Director of UoL ICT) and Uri Barran (Predictive analytics solution architect)
Quite a complex approach this one. Seems to be attempting to cover the entire student lifecycle from pre-admission to alumni. Today they are focusing on

1. Identification of a first term high risk of drop out model
2. A decision management process
3. then on to the delivery of the insight so someone can take action

This is a real ‘under the bonnet’ look at underlying data, models and decision trees. It’s a yomp around a toolset for a practicing analyst. Certainly not the sort of tool you’d ever offer to a teacher or a manager. The outputs are graphs showing student population performance prediciton based on subjects, a list of high risk students, a view into the different aspects of their course performance(behaviours perhaps) along with a set of suggested actions.

A nice day and put on for free. My thanks to presenters and organisers and congratulations to Steve Warburton on his recent elevation to Professorship.

BME are a re-seller of QlickView by QlikTec. They claim to have sold 24 of the 30 licenses held by UK Universities. I’m attending their Higher Education User Group today to hear what’s possible, what people are using the product for, what insight and edge it’s giving.

Full programme here

BME Solutions sell more than QlikView; Quantrix (forecasting and modelling), F9 (financial reporting and consolidation), XM Pro (business process management) and associated consulting services to ‘pretty up your models, run training courses, upgrade client hardware, help out with planning).

QlikView allows quickly customisable visualisations of data sets held in existing information systems. The active users I have spoken to are, not surprising given they made time to attend, positive about the product. There are also newcomers here as well as people considering a purchase. We’re being shown as series of active visualisations delivered by client or browser. You can view plenty of these at http://www.he.bmesol.com

BMI sell a product to allow visualisations based on geographical data layers and using QlikTec. The product is GeoQlik and there details at http://demo.geoqlik.com/

Back in 2010 Jisc funded a BI project at UEL. It’s one of the case studies in our BI InfoKit. The work has attracted a good deal of sustainability funding from other sources. It’s based on QlikView and the lead, Gary Tindell presented a demonstration of this work. It’s based on data UEL purchase from HESA and loaded into QlikView allowing competitor analysis and identification of new markets for courses and areas for targeting Widening Participation. The insight gathered was a lack of STEM subject provision in the local Borough of Newham. The action taken to mitigate this was the development of a brand new (Newham Collegiate) Sixth Form College. UEL have since been commissioned to provide similar insight for all 33 London Burroughs but expanded to include student attainment data from HESA. UEL offer this as a chargeable service, so generate income from their investment in data and interpretations.

Number of students in HE by Borough, for example Newham sent 12K students into HE, we see the courses they took, 60% stayed in the local area, UEL was the most popular, it’s possible to adjust the parameters by ethnicity, age range, gender, award type, degree classification, destination of leavers (occupational classification). On and on it goes. There’s a lot of actionable insight here. Of course, the trick is prioritising what to action and how to do it.

As well as HESA data (and bought in HESA data) there are opportunities to identify actionable insights based on institutionally owned data and we saw a model with over 10 million records over 8 years, so big data in terms of volume, but not velocity and variety as it’s archived and structured.

Bath Spa have developed a product called QV Source which is for sale. It is a connector to the HESA data sets using the Heidi API. Heidi is the system that HESA provides to all Universities to collect and distribute their data sets. Out of the box Heidi allows XLS or XML downloads of data for client manipulation. The overhead of creating reports for this is considerable. QV Source connects Heidi data to QlikView as a live lookup obviating the need to manually manipulate Heidi provided data. Rather the data is manipulated via the QlikView client. Presumably standard dashboards can be provided as a service to end users.

Another demonstration here by a University client showed us visualisations of research income performance. We at jisc looked at this through the Liverpool, Glasgow and Huddersfield Business Intelligence projects and these are written up in our BI InfoKit.

It’s clear that QlikView can be used for administrative support to run a university, what was less well understood (by me at least) was its potential to support research and teaching.

I saw a demo of Quantrix at the end of the day so we’re off topic with respect to QlikView and visualising data from disparate sources. Here we have an analytical modelling tool to forecast future student intake. The tool extends dimensionality of spreadsheets from 2 to as many as required in the model.

A few pearls of wisdom;
People are the main problem in BI projects, not technology or data
Focus on the questions you want answers to, or you’ll drown in possibilities
Provide appropriate visualisations to each staff member, the more senior the staff, the simpler the dashboards
QlikView is a reporting tool, not a data source
Visualisations highlight data inaccuracies that users will fix, don’t try to clean all the data before you launch one, you’ll never get started

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
————–

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.

On 23 October I, along with Phil Wolstenholme and and Catherine Lillie presented at the AUA Development Conference.

These were our aims;

Understand the breadth of Jisc digital literacy work
Explore digital literacies administrators need to be successful in their current roles and beyond
Describe how AUA and Jisc support the development of these capabilities, and generate ideas on how they could better support them
Identify priorities for action once back in the office

In order to
help achieve an excellent digital experience for all

Here’s the PPT http://bit.ly/jisc_aua_dev_conf_session

It was lively as we explored the attributes administrators in the widest sense of the role need in order to be effective and efficient in a digital environment. Delegates worked in teams to draw the digitally literate administrator highlighting the attributes they thought were needed. The results were extremely complex and wide ranging and I only wish we had the time to video the presentations. Sadly the timing didn’t allow for that so all we have are the images themselves. Authors do feel free to add, or send me narrative!

We went on to look at the enablers, what Jisc and AUA have made available to help. These are linked below.

Next was a quick look at what people felt was missing in terms of needs from team leaders, heads of department, institutions, Jisc and AUA summarised below;

Encourage the use of appropriate services, rather than being told by IT that that ‘isn’t supported’ or isn’t allowed. Not being allowed to use Prezi was quoted as one example.
Make sure barriers/restrictions are sensible, control is relaxed when appropriate, and exploration is allowed. Is there evidence for why restrictive policies are in place?
Moving quickly to change, but in a managed way. Sensible strategies.
Clear ownership of online material – course descriptions etc.
Communicating the benefits when new systems/services are introduced – technology supported by staff development – how to make the most of things.
Responsibilities for new technologies can be assigned to those who show interest and existing own skills rather than those in traditional tech/comms areas. One delegate quotes how a member of administrative staff showed a group of colleagues how to livetweet etc at a launch event. Here the support and advice came from this member of staff, not from a Marketing or IT department. People with existing skills could be encouraged to contribute through competitions.

AUA’s role:
Highlighting best practice. Providing examples of who is doing things well – case studies.
AUA and UCISA – bottom up development of resources. Encouraging IT to be enabling not restrictive.

Lastly we called for action and people were most interested in the AUA Digital Tool Box http://services.aua.ac.uk/digitaltools and the revised Jisc shortcuts for AUA members http://bit.ly/aua-jisc-shortcuts-oct13.

All in all a great little interactive session with plenty of opportunities for follow up and action for delegates, Jisc and AUA.

Blogwebs / cobwebs.

It’s been a while since I was here so out with the dust and on with some comments.

Things on my mind at the moment include;

Analytics and Business Intelligence
Summer of Student Innovation
Efficiency Exchange
Digital literacy

So if any of those float your boat, read on.

Analytics and Business Intelligence
We at Jisc have made some great progress in these areas, notably the Analytics Series and the Business Intelligence InfoKit. Watch this space for announcements about each, potentially bringing the two together through a new two year initiative.
Complimentary to this my InfoNet colleagues have put together a Data Visualisations InfoKit to compliment the Business Intelligence InfoKit. It’s up for review at the moment so do take a look.
Today I’m blogging from HESA where I’ve been invited to their 25th anniversary celebration. I’m looking forward to catching up on their HEDIIP programme and overlap with that new Jisc initiative I alluded to. More on that later.
On Learning Analytics I’ve been talking with Desire2Learn about the analytics capability in their flagship products and their interest in running a longitudinal study into their applicability in UK HE. Such capability in best of breed commercial offerings is something we’ve been expecting and I hope to write up a blog post about the functionality and efficacy soon.

Summer of Student Innovation
This has been a great programme whereby Jisc sought student generated ideas for projects to improve the student experience. We did this through the Jisc elevator where students posted videos and sector people voted for them. If enough institutions voted, we funded the ideas resulting in 21 projects at 5K. We added value by running a programme of support with experts helping students develop to wireframes and beta versions as well as how to gain funding, pitching and preparing professional videos. The projects are concluding and we’re holding a Trade Fair in November where 80 HEI customers will meet the projects with a view to determining appetite for uptake. I represented the projects at the sponsoring group of ‘CoDesigners’ (RUGIT, SCONUL et al) where we aired ideas for moving forward. More official news on this will follow soon.

Efficiency Exchange
This is a two year project funded by HEFCE through LFHE and being joint delivered by Jisc and UUK. It’s a direct result of the Diamond report recommendations. Year 1 is complete and we have a platform with content. Year 2 planning is underway and we’ll be announcing a new collaboration with a major media organisation in November. We’ll also be putting together offers to match the interests of some key staff roles. More on that to follow.

Digital Literacy
The project phase of this 1.5 million pound programme concluded at the end of July. We’re now synthesising across the portfolio and will be releasing materials to help the sector benefit from the work from November. These will include overview and detailed guides, briefings and toolkts for the wider HE workforce including teaching staff, heads of department, e-learning staff and managers, careers staff, staff and educational developers, HR, senior managers (L&T, student experience, facilities/services), library staff, IT services staff and those involved in aspects of administration. The association strand concludes in December and I’m looking forward to receiving those project final deliverables by 1 December.
On administration, I presented at the AUA Development Conference this week. Here’s the PPT. It was lively as we explored the attributes administrators in the widest sense of the role need in order to be effective and efficient in a digital environment. We went on to look at the enablers, what Jisc and AUA have made available to help. Next was a quick look at what people felt was missing in terms of needs from employers. Lastly we called for action and people were most interested in the AUA Digital Tool Box and the revised Jisc shortcuts for AUA members.

17 May and I’m in Leeds at the SEDA event where multiple Jisc projects are presenting on our Digital Literacies in Higher Education programme findings. Leeds is my back yard. Look – we’ve just (February 2013) opened one of those millenium wheel things 13 years late but ours has Yorkshire ticket prices! Hurry, it closes on April 21st!

Joking aside if you’r reading this in Leeds and around for the weekend don’t miss the excellent Henry Moore Institute, Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Hepworth Gallery.

The conference agenda is here. I’ve dropped into a research paper presented by a Jisc project at the Institute of Education and led by Martin Oliver and Lesly Gourlay. I’ve worked with Lesly in the past working across a number of professional associations to produce a suite of tools and resources designed to assist with changing staff roles relationships and skills in light of opportunities afforded by digital technologies.

So Lesly and Martin from IoE have been looking into post graduate attributes of digital literacies. Uniquely we designed the programme so that rpojects were encouraged to release outputs and finding in real time, rather than at the end of the funded period. All the projects have been doing this and the outputs are being synthesised during the funded period too and available here. The IoE project outputs are being developed here.

So to the paper. An analysis of different ‘types’ of post graduate students and their digital behaviours noting that academic practice tends to be very text based. Surfacing of personal choice in terms of blurring boundaries, technology choice, digital persona and footprint. Difficulties identified addressed included organisational issues associated with different online identities depending on task. So multiple email addresses, user accounts, systems and services. Multiple locations and the choices associated with them. The example given was a mature post graduate Japanese student who chose to scan texts, load into iPad, contain iPad in a zip lock bag and read during extended bathing times…. the concept presented is ‘text journeys’. Pick a text and trace;

– where did it come from?
– where did you take it?
– when did it become digital and when printed?
– what did you turn it into?

Here’s the research summary

Here’s the bit I always like to see coming from Jisc funding. The changes to policy AND practice as a result of the work.

Great to see some genuine outcomes as well as outputs.

The exercise here was to draw out where you undertake your work, when, and with what. Here’s mine.

People here were very device focussed but for me the issues are about data availability and increasingly data synchronisation. Personally I find myself in the midst of a step change between cloud storage and access and local storage (in my case MacBook hard drive). The technologies don’t quite work to be entirely cloud based in my own experience and I think many people will find that step change phase, whether it be local to cloud or laptop to tablet an interesting area.

Further weight to that cloud issue is that there’s no free wifi here and zero 3G signal. I’m finding 3G less and less helpful and cotemplating giving back my Vodafone 3G stick. The solution today was to buy 24 hours of wifi. For a 1 day event at £15 that’s a bit steep but I find it very hard to work without a connection these days. And don;t get me started on access to power outlets!

Next up I’ve dived into a session on Alumni. Am really intersted in this area and have worked with colleagues to develop the Jisc Relationship Management InfoKit based on 3 years of funded work in HEIs. This piece is aimed at professionalising relationships between students, alumni and business with the institution.

Examples here of Alumni engagement include work experience / shadowing to open the door to a more formal placement. So Alumni as mentors and agents of placements. Alumni as motivational external speakers. Alumni as mentors.

Here’s the Jisc take on that (from the InfoKit Alumni section)

The presenter discussed an MBA course and how a mentoring scheme was introduced using Alumni volunteers. The incentive was that they University paid for mentors to be put through a professionally recognised course on mentoring so a tie in to their own CPD. Rather than document the process undertaken, I’ll pick out their use of the European Mentoring and and Coaching Council Guidelines at http://www.emccouncil.org which was adopted as a QA measure and more by the project.

This project focussed only on alumni as mentors to support first year MBA students on their assignments. I’ve been working with HEIs recently on employability issues. It’s a big thing at the moment for policy and decision makers and certainly funders, Government and certainly students as they find their own places. So a real asset to HEIs in todays competitive environment. Alumni could be used to mentor on employability issues, preparing students for employment practices be they my own example in the discussion session of digital literacies for employability such as remote collaborative working and the like. Or a co-participant who highlighted an alumni speaker from the NHS to nursing undergraduates who outlined the turmoil in the profession and failings of the NHS itself as employer. The group knee jerk on this was horror – don’t demotivate our students! Another take on this would be an opportunity for the HEI to act on this feedback and prepare their graduates to deal with the sorts of issues that were being outlined. Risks and mitigation, crisis and opportunity. My own feeling and this is borne out by the aforementioned Jisc work and InfoKit is that alumni relationships are underdeveloped and the opportunities to enhance graduate employability attributes as well as acting on that feedback loop to amend curricula, services and up skill lecturers themselves is ripe for the picking.

If you’re into Alumni Relations for Higher Ed you may find our recent case studies, videos and reports of use as well as our ‘Short of Time‘ section to help you get some quick insight into relationship management across the entire student lifecycle from pre-admission through to alumni.

The speaker dwelt on the difficulties of remote mentoring and a reliance on email and the finding that face to face worked better. I have to wander whether this was an opportunity for the Institution to help up skill mentor and mentee in remote collaborative working. That way the employer gains benefit through new working practices pioneered by the recent employee (alumni). I’ve often been in conversations about the lack of join up in HEIs between business leaders, ICT leaders and the resulting lack of effectiveness in business benefit fort investment in ICT. The idea of the recent graduate acting as catalyst between SME employer IT and Business Leaders for the same enhancement in impact of ICT to working practices was something I heard about this week in my blog of the Jisc Digital Literacy event.

So all good so far and we’ve grabbed a coffee to boot. I’m now in the presence of Professor Sir David Watson, Principal of Green Templeton College Oxford our Key Note speaker with the topic of Changing Values in Higher Education.

Here’s the outline

David describes his observations of the ‘temperature’ or ‘state’ of Higher Education in the UK; that it being a polarised view oscillating between desperate hope and desperate fear.

David mentioned a book that made great waves last year about the state of Higher Education in the Uk by Stefan Collini and notes it lacked the following

The last point reflects the HEPI announcement this week which outlined student disappointment in terms of traditional contact teaching time but failed to consider the digital interactions and anything beyond curriculum delivery in terms of the academic student experience.

Next to Michael Barber and his avalanche with a fairly damming observation of his previous 8 KPIs in Whitehall of which only 2 were met – waiting times in A&E at 4 hours (is this a good target and to what detriment medically is it met) and trains running on time (but often with journeys as slow as 100 years ago).

David Watson notes that ‘It’s very difficult to kill a University’. They tend to partner rather than close down. Therefore the sector doesn’t actually ‘do avalanches’.

Next up we hear about the geological nature of Higher Education development as strata being laid down and building on one another.

Humanism was introduced as a 16th century phenomenon. Science and enlightenment starting in the 17th century through to internet in the 20th of course.

An alternative model of HE change was introduced by the example of Matt Parker the UK Olympic Cycling Teams who was the team lead on ‘marginal gains’. Temporary creative cross development in higher education is the way in which Universities make progress.

See the later trends of corporate profiteering in HE provision.

Next up a history lesson

A note that US Universities tend to run a short compulsory course on history of the University itself.

Here are the claims Universities are making in terms of benefits to students. PDP and autonomous learning, competencies, exposure and creation of long term networks, time and space to learn and make mistakes with ivy on the walls, disciplinary activity without the drawbacks of commercial necessities

Quite difficult to comment on this talk as it’s very philosophical and I’m not! Here’s that perspective as described by our Key Note

And a question – what is the Hypocratic oath of Higher Education? Well, isn’t that quite the question? Instead we’re given 10 commandments

Lastly (for the blog at least) here are some Dilemma phrases, note the cunningness applied in making them all begin with A

And now we have the Jisc strand on Digital Literacies chaired by Sue Thomson representing HEDG (Higher Education Developer Group).

First up we have Lindsay Jordan from University of the Arts London. Lindsay kicks off with a group discussion question ‘How do the academic development programmes in your institutions promote the development of digital literacy?’

Some excellent examples of impact and uptake here as people describe new initiatives as well as firm plans and intentions to embed digital literacy as core competencies of teaching practice and the support channels in place.
Lindsay went on to describe an initiative to encourage (compulsory so strongly encourage) creative blogging by staff and PGCERT students. Here’s Lindsay in full flow with a background of blog initiative structure. Constructive alignment was very evident.

Here are Lindsay’s emoticon labelled results, self explanatory.

Great benefits here with techniques and examples to engage the unengaged – those negative to the digital literacy agenda are able to make great progress in up skilling as part of their teaching.

Next it’s David Baume. David did this great webinar on his Jisc funded work for the UK Professional Standards Framework in the digital university. This stuff is quite hot at the moment as Universities strive to put their teaching staff through HEA accreditation and UKPSF.

David talked about digitally literate organisations. Not great images from this position but you can about make out his thoughts.

Next David described the activities SEDA has used to embed the learning from the Jisc Digital Literacy Programme in its offers to members. There’s an incredible range of these and I’m personally very grateful for their efforts. My own reflection here and looking across the 10 professional associations Jisc funded to take part in the programme are that different organisations were at different states of readiness. Indeed each association undertook a baseline activity at the beginning to help target appropriate interventions and identify step change. At the heart of this is the SEDA SIG on technology enhanced practice. There’s a whole bunch of professional association stuff on the Jisc Design Studio. Though the themes and resources are probably the best place to look for wider impact and uptake.

Sue talked next about HEDG and digital literacy. Sue has spoken to me about how her own digital literacy has improved since being involved in the programme and is very supportive of the initiative. HEDG are trying to find a way of not producing more ‘stuff’ but to achieve uptake and change in practice.

Lastly we undertook a critique of each of the presentations considering how we might take the outputs and use them when back in the office.

Event ends, weekend begins 😉

Hi ho, hi ho, it’s back to Birmingham we go.

Specifically it’s the final programme meeting at Maple House with all the projects and professional associations from the Jisc digital literacies programme.

The first thing that struck me was a wave of nausea and terror as I alighted my train at an entirely unfamiliar station. But no, I hadn’t caught the wrong train after all. It’s the first phase of the New Street Redevelopment. A quick poll at the start of the day revealed the majority of attendees had the same reaction.

The agenda is all about reflection and consolidation.

First off we ran a ‘lessons from across the programme’ session lead by the projects. Here the lessons learned need to be;

Specific – what we know about developing digital literacies in different contexts
Make a difference – to decisions people make, not just bland generalisations
Are not obvious – what we now know we couldn’t have guessed. The format was plenary from project lead followed by group discussions then feedback via post it notes.

The following are based on 2 minute pitches so little time for me to add reflections!

First off we had the Bath PRIDE project on Digital Literacies in the Disciplines noting;

1. Work within existing culture
a. Embed what you do in existing processes
b. Link to CPD

2. Language
a. Disciplines have their own language
b. Allow disciplines to define what they mean by digital literacy

3. Balance
a. Instituional
b. Deopaertmental
c. Individual

4. Support / Development should be localized
a. 50% generic, 50% subject specific but;
b. Utilise the external perspective as well!

And the results from the group discussion

Next up Reading on Digi Lit for Employability

No slides for this one unfortunately and the speaker had laryngitis!
Students are keen to develop online identity but require guidance
Employers need specific language to engage and can be easily alienated. They can help identify the skills required
Students rely on academic staff to gain the skills BUT academic staff don;t necessarily have those skills themselves
Key is how we engage students to develop the employability skills in year one rather than as seems to be the case leaving things to year 2
No take here on Alumni which I found unusual. There’s a section on Employability in our new (Feb 13) Relationship Management InfoKit as well as one on Alumni

And the results from the group discussion

Next up Assessing and Progressing digital literacy
Lots of slides and little time so reproduced those below.
First we have a slide on student journey for digital literacy

And a highlight on the Exeter student and researcher self diagnostic quizzes http://bit.ly/learnerquiz and http://bit.ly/researcherquiz

Lots of knowledge and challenges

Note that employers speaking a different language – how do we embed their needs into the curriculum identified again. I wander how people are doing this – alumni, placement and more no doubt in the post it session.

Last slide here was about rate of change and thinking 5 years ahead

and a comment from the floor regarding the qualities students need to cope with the next 50 years of employability. So instilling the skills to be competent and confident to embrace new technologies and techniques. Richard Francis brought up the notion of technology detox – students must eb able to determine when they don’t want / need to use particular technologies. Also a comment that comes up time again in the conversation I’ve been having recently – student have an elevated self perception of their own abilities and confidence in digital literacies. So interventions to help them realise this are effective.

And the results from the group discussion

Next up Richard Francis from Oxford Brookes on Students as Pioneers

Key stuff this in my opinion in terms of successes from the programme

Richard highlights care must be taken that student engagement doesn’t become market research. Key messages in the slide below

Richard poses the questions whether to pay students for involvement or voluntary approaches

Horses for courses but here are the lessons learnt:

Noting that students are individuals and this needs to be recognised in approaches taken. Also that the process of students as change agents needs to meet the expectations of the students themselves in terms of what they want to get from the process.

And the results from the group discussion

Next up Andrew Comrie describing lessons from his project cluster

Lots of words to these slide so reproduced below.

Lesson 2 was that no particular method works for all occasions

Lesson 3 reproduced in the slide

Key question was online identity and bring your own device

More lessons from Andrew, same caveat – verbose slides, 2 minute pitch, live blog is limited to pictures!

Notes little evidence of digital literacies for strategic managers – but we have a session on that later in the day so may be able to challenge it.

And the results from the group discussion

Session Closes

We’re now spending some time in group work. Each table has a theme pertaining to a ‘resource kit’ or ‘box’. Attendees are going to circulate and add resources to each or identify gaps. We split the group into ‘residents’ (explaining what’s on offer and what’s needed) and ‘visitors’ (offering new insights etc).

The themes were

Curriculum staff
Digital scholars and researchers
Graduates and employability
Digital Pioners
Managers and strategists
Those developing own digital literacies

Rather than post photos of the post it notes I’ll link to the Jisc Design Studio Digital Literacies Resource Kits page where the findings will appear.

Breakout sessions next and I’m attending Peter Chatterton discussing Digital Enquiry and Employability.

Peter notes that;

In SMEs / Employers
Senior Managers and those Directing IT need to work more closely with exemplary graduates

In HEIs
Digital Enquiry (Horzon scanning, trend spotting and then application in an academic context). Digital innovation (via problem identification and problem solving) and Digital Influence (the power to influence stakeholders so a focused area of communications and stakeholder persuasion) are the areas we should be teaching.

By providing graduates with these qualities and the confidence to apply them, success in employment can be enhanced

Asking employers what they want / need in terms of digitally literate (and capable) graduates is therefore non-trivial. Raising company aspirations is important. So HEI relationships with employers is the area this falls into. Working more strategically and in partnership with employers is a key area for development and rich in terms of benefits to all parties be they HEIs, Students or Employers.

So where the Jisc Digital Literacy Programme has identified and operationalised partnerships with students as change agents Peter is proposing a similar approach for graduates in employment. Intersting also that Peter highlights a divide between commercial business leaders and ICT leaders much as Jisc and the Leadership Foundation identified when we looked into Strategic Approaches to Technology and built the Strategic ICT Toolkit.

Engaging the Unengaged – Andy Wilson and Rebecca Radics on behalf of the Staff Development Forum.

I dropped into this parallel session part way through and reproduce below the findings as documented by Rebecca Radics

Sian PVC(T) New Buckinghamshire University

Shan talked us through her own journey on developing digital literacy as well as reflecting on the impact of the Jisc programme. Shan Skpyed into the room and shared her desktop to present her slides.
Here are the Immediate Goals she identified for the two arts based projects she’s been involved with in the programme

Shan went on to outline longer term impacts (such as leadership enhancements) and these struck me as the sorts of benefits one tends to see from programmes rather than projects. Next Shan introduced the concept of ‘super complexity’ and argued that these issues are now widely felt. Programme level benefits realisation came through again here personified in the second bullet as disparate join up of infrastructure.

Balance was introduced next, a nice slide showing the sorts of ‘offsets’ we’re aiming to achieve for success in the digital literacy arena.

Shan described ‘outrageous ambition’. A concept at New Buckinghamshire involving the development and definition of the vision of a future we wish to step into. Impact has been beyond digital literacies and a nice presentation showing how we can impact positively on strategic vision through longer term programmes of change. Long live Programme Management.

Associations Strand Project Report Session
I made the suggestion to the association strand projects that we have a short session to co-design their final report / case study. As one might imagine, views were mixed! We left it that we’d have a week to reflect but it seemed most likely that we allow each to amend the template the projects are using to address their own needs. We identified the following suggested amendments.

Jisc would like to see evidence of impact and benefits on associations, individuals and externals. We’re also keen to hear ‘how was it for you’ in terms of experiences of working with Jisc in this manner. If associations presented this as a case study we could share with others that would be helpful. If there are confidential aspects associations would wish to share with Jisc these may be added as an appendix or marked as such and will be redacted prior to publication. Associations are reminded that the outputs are for their own benefit as well as that of the wider sector and that Jisc wishes to uncover evidence of the value or lack thereof in engaging such that we might learn from and refine the process in the future.

Here’s are the notes we made

Last up we had projects celebrating their success through the medium of cake, cake, cream teas, lubrication and an installation. Here’s a shot of Joe Nicholls of the DigiDol project describing the cake mix

Here’s Professor Neil Witt of Plymouth on Jisc projects and Battenberg

Side conversations
People have approached me to discuss how we maintain the momentum we’ve gathered through the programme. Our conversations have included the concept of widening the net in terms of the professional associations via further joint activities co sponsored and co designed via Values Realisation. We also highlighted the need for resource discovery enhancements in the Design Studio, perhaps via tagging.

Lastly a piece of advice from my train conductor. Buying a single from Wakefield – Sheffield and another from Sheffield to Derby and another from Derby to Birmingham then the three corresponding on the way back is £30 cheaper than the obvious. You live and learn. Shame that was the last of our programme meetings in Birmingham!

Nice work everyone and for associations I’ll be in touch for a progress report over the summer and perhaps a BlackBoard Collaborate session toward the end of the year and end of your funded period. Meanwhile good luck with the dissemination and uptake.

Are you interested in Business Intelligence? Have you heard of Analytics?

On May 13th 2013 at 12.00 I’ll be involved in a webinar where we’ll try to help people realise some of the benefits we’ve seen in institutions working with Jisc on the new Business Intelligence InfoKit (http://bit.ly/jisc_bi). It’s the culmination of 3 years of work with HE partner organisations and HEIs and has rich case studies, videos, anecdotes and all manner of useful material.

So Jisc has expertise, experience and resources in the fields of BI and Analytics and during the webinar we’ll make participants aware of tools for measuring their own maturity in relation to BI. We’ll also aim to share peoples aspirations for BI and Analytics and air the sorts of benefits that can be achieved. We’ll be scoping out the types of assistance people feel they’d benefit from with a view to putting something in motion to help out further in 2013.

But it’s not just Jisc presenting. We’ve also lined up Anita Wright, Head of Planning at Liverpool University to talk us through some of the approaches that have achieved savings, efficiency gains and competitive edge there.

As with most things Jisc the materials and experience we’ll be airing have been developed with the UK HE Sector for the UK HE Sector.

If you’d like to join us, sign up at www.jiscbiwebinar.eventbrite.com

If BI and Analytics is your thing have a look around this blog. There’s plenty of material on both.