The Support and Synthesis project is getting down into two grooves of activity. The first is supporting the Phase three, Lifelong Learning projects to produce their outputs and then to realise the benefits more widely. We are contacting and visiting all projects, stirring up assemblies, promoting the “Festival of Assemblies” on 20 October (do get that date in your diaries) and encouraging the uptake of the current call for Benefits Realisation funding. I hope you find our interest informative and developmental and not just a blind nuisance. (more…)

Congratulations to the Phase 2 Institutional Innovation projects on reaching a big milestone in your journeys. I am really pleased to be seeing your final reports and your project outputs. Phase 3: keep calm and carry on! The support team (SSBR) is being reshaped and refocused to concentrate on synthesising the outcomes from what has in many ways been a visionary programme. Taken individually you have all achieved great things at the practitioner and institutional level. Taken collectively, the outcomes of the programme are going towards helping to define what we can imagine as the future higher education space. This is a space where we might see institutions be (virtually) disaggregated and recombined at various levels into novel partnerships and associations with other institutions, enterprises, firms and civil society bodies at the regional, national and even global levels.

Alongside this reshaping of the institutional space we will see novel frameworks for accreditation supporting more and increasingly flexible pathways for progression, personal and professional development and lifelong learning. New literacies and practices for the digital era are being developed by teachers and learners (are we not all in our ways researchers, mentors and designers of learning?) and these will be set against new knowledge frameworks for validating academic knowledge and assessing and recognising achievement: while still early days, for example, there is an assault on the hegemony of print as the medium for storing valorised propositional knowledge; how do you cite and annotate a podcast; what are the real challenges for providing audio and video feedback? We are already seeing the physical and digital worlds becoming more and more mutually interpenetrating as reconfigurable learning spaces are built and connectivity and connected devices become ubiquitous.

All this, of course, means that there is a lot of work still to be done on the semantics of access and discovery; it is not just identity management, but a new web of people and things articulated through new standards and practices: what Tim O’Reilly recently called the operating system of the Internet. And, of course, all this means that the notions of “traditional” and “non-traditional” learners and learning breaks down. Will the new higher education space be one where participation in learning is accessible to all who need and want it? I would hope so, but we need to recognise that the space is still contested (and costly) and that there are many drivers for change: political, economic, pragmatic and – mediating between these – JISC programmes.

In the months to come I will be approaching you all with a view to producing a number of reports and briefings for senior managers, higher education leaders, and the JISC. I look forward to reflecting with you on the meanings of your achievements.

Thank you all for your participation in the Institutional Innovation Programme.

George Roberts

groberts@brookes.ac.uk

The XCRI Support Project

March sees the end of the JISC-funded XCRI Support Project as it signs off leaving the development of the XCRI (eXchanging Course Related Information) specification for sharing (and advertising) course information looking very healthy indeed.

The support project picked up where the original XCRI Reference Model project left off. Having identified the marketing and syndication of course descriptions as a significant opportunity for innovation – due to the general practice in this area being one of huge efforts around re-typing of information to accommodate various different systems, sites and services…then to have that information maintained separately in various places – the XCRI Reference Model project mapped out the spaces of course management, curriculum development and course marketing and provided the community with a common standard for exchanging course related information. This would streamline approaches to the syndication of such information and give us the benefits of cost savings when it comes to collecting and managing the data and opens up the opportunities for a more sustainable approach to lifelong learning services that rely on course information from learning providers. (more…)

Draft Reports / Final Reports

For those of you that are approaching the end of the project, your draft and final reports will soon be due. Make sure you get them to your nominated support project person in plenty of time for feedback. The template on the JISC website (here) is an excellent template, but you may find that some headings are not applicable and therefore it should be seen as a guide rather than prescriptive. Focus on the outputs and the learning that will be transferable to other HEIs.

Articulate in such a way as to show the benefits of the project, e.g. “as a result of implementing xxx, institutions will be able to save £xxx” or “because of this of this project there have been the following direct impact on xxx”. Currently I am working with the OUT team on some revised headings for the completion report and I will disseminate this in the near future.

Conferences

If you are presenting at a conference about your work, please send me the details (conference title, paper/session title, dates). This is so I get a picture of where we are being discussed and to look at where we could be in the future (l.phipps@jisc.ac.uk).

Senior Management videos

Is your SMT (PVC etc) involved or aware of the project? Are they impressed? It would be useful to see a few short video clips of them praising the work of the project and discussing the benefits of the project to the institution, especially as you should be nearing completion. If you can get these videos (lasting no more than 90 seconds – 2 minutes) I will get them appended to the project pages on the website.

And Finally

I just wanted to say thanks for the great participation that you gave at the programme meeting and for the high quality of benefits and products that were on show. As well as seeing this for myself at the meeting, I have also been hearing good things at various JISC meetings and from other institutions as I work on other programmes and visit senior staff elsewhere.

Lawrie Phipps

This session takes place on 4 November and will share a number of experiences of using PebblePad eportfolio at the University of Wolverhampton. Julie Hughes will give an in-depth practitioner perspective from the School of Education and will share numerous success stories of engaged communities of learners who are established and sustained through the use of eportfolio and blogs. Emma Purnell will share institutional perspectives, exploring strategy drivers and staff engagement and will give an overview of successes and challenges of providing support, encouraging community and addressing sustainability and scalability issues at institutional level. (more…)