Online Innovation in Higher Education
Dr Malcolm Read, JISC Executive Secretary
Tim O’Shea was originally going to speak at this point with a VC’s perspective. I’m in no position to talk about these issues from the perspective of a VC but I can talk about Ron Cook’s recent report on the future of HE and which will be influential in shaping JISC strategy.
Ron’s original first draft was punchy, short, focused and really quite offensive. By the time it went through all the consultation it lost its edge in that sense. But it is polite!
Ron called for a greater awareness and much less fear of IT among senior staff. It was common 10-15 years ago that senior managers would look like a rabbit caught in the headlights if they had the misfortune to have to talk to me as they feared that I would talk about network protocols to them. After 15 years you would have thought that would have changed but there is still that perception that IT is not just a tool but something to be frightened of.
It makes this conference and our relationship with the LF very timely and important.
Key challenges highlighted in Ron’s paper include the changing nature of the student experience, although the extent to which it is a challenge I’m not sure, It doesn’t change the nature of pedagogy – people still learn but students are embarking on a learning process which is fundamentally different to ours.
Another big issue is ‘virtual education’ or ‘online learning’ – basically e-learning. E-infrastructures relates to infrastructures to the research process, and information strategies. Digital literacy is a further challenge.
When the Secretary of State first met with Ron, he wanted him to advise on open access learning resources and how that could be used to create an organisation that could exploit that content as a separate benefit to UK HE. Ron was not so impressed with that idea so his recommendations are about using a core of open access materials that all universities that wish to can benefit from. So he wants to encourage the creation of open content but contextualising it, and then create a number of centres of excellence to support it (clusters of like-minded institutions that would try to reach students though the internet). Issues about quality control and updating relate to the institutions themselves. It remains the property of the universities. Where a lecturer makes material available there should be enough metadata around it for it to link to other data and there should be some sense of permanence
HEFCE had already agreed to pilot a £5.7m programme and hope to start next financial year. It will be managed by JISC and the HE Academy, and is an attempt to help universities to create and expose course materials in an open access way. Will call for seven projects at an institutional level, perhaps focused on particular student types such as HE students in FE, or research-focused, or workplace. Also 12 projects at subject level and 10 projects at individual level.
Will also be funding expert advice and guidance and some action research. There are a lot of reports on e-learning but it doesn’t seem to be getting adequately out there. We will review the literature and write a literature review paper to help people find their way through it. Also thinking through a longer-term set of studies to think through e-learning in a structured way. Also a lot of work still to be done on IPR. Gowers report was very supportive of the exceptions needed for open learning content but the EC green paper presents challenges so there is lobbying work to be done in this area.
Benefits that could be realised from this work include increased student satisfaction; enhancement of global academic reputation; contribution to public good; increase in open availability; advertising and marketing benefits; opportunity to recognise and reward the contribution of teaching within HEIs.
E-infrastructure: main concern is not the network or high performance computing as UK HE is quite well-served in both those areas and good structures in place to ensure that it continues to get looked after and funded but the area of preserving research data is quite weak. There is a data deluge problem – CERN is the often quoted example even though it is not causing any problems at the moment because it doesn’t actually work right now – but then there is a sense that a lot of smaller scale research generates data that is lost. I suspect all the researchers in the room will have shared my experience of throwing the data away after a while as too much trouble to keep. But it could have value to other researchers but if it is not available you will never know.
At JISC we do not advocate open data, we do not go that far, but we do argue that the outputs of publicly funded research should be publicly available through scholarly journals. The whole area will move relatively slowly and the main problem will not be technical issues but policy gaps. Most universities do not have a policy on who owns research data. Doesn’t matter so much who does own it but if there is not policy then missing the first step. Other countries are progressing faster. Australia has the Australian National Data Service and the Germans have an impressive statement across all their funding bodies but are not really in a position yet to implement it as does not have the infrastructure. We do, through repositories, but do not have the policy to match it. US has the data grid and JISC is trying to get work in this area linked up across the world as makes sense to have it widely available to the international research community.
Information strategies: lack of link up and requires not just technology but leadership.
Green IT: focused on work that reduces energy consumption. We have a couple of projects, one at Oxford, one at Bradford [link] looking at large clusters to reduce energy use.
Digital literacy: students bad at using online information in a critical way – they go to Google, look at the first site that comes up, takes the information straight off it and do not check for scholarly rigour. The Tower and the Cloud – recommend the paper in it on this subject. Also doing some work as the current Google generation become PhD students and any changes there may be in the research process. They may be more interested in open research. Area worth looking at. Digital literacy needs to be looked at in schools and we are working with Beta on this. Problem is that teachers themselves may not be experts in using online resources and so that needs to be addressed.
Q+A
Roger Stickland: interested in the dynamic of getting people to release their much loved personal content – is that an issue?
Malcolm: we are rather of the view that there are enough people in the sector who are willing to do that. No pressure should be applied. You don’t need many copies of material on one subject so if only 10% of the community are interested and keen to share then that will create a critical mass. We are asking them to go a step further than putting it up on a website but to use metadata so it could be contextualised and would need to make a commit to look after it. Couldn’t just bung it up on the website and leave it to the fate of the gods how long it stays there. So we would be asking more of the teachers but a great many are very keen to share their material. Open University has the largest professionally managed collection of open resources and rivals MIT in its breadth and quality
Delegate: JISC RSCs get a few mentions and I would like to hear if there any plans to encourage great collaboration between RSCs and HE generally.
Malcolm: RSCs are a real jewel in our crown. Greatly appreciated and valued and hugely dedicated and continually being mucked about. We cannot get them on to a long term secure financial footing as things stand the moment. Currently funded by the LSC which is not going to be there in two years and we don’t know what will happen after that and under that scenario we cannot expand them at the moment.
Delegate: it occurs to me that we spend quite a lot of money running an in-house e-learning group of specialists – is there not a possibility of solving the two problems simultaneously and use the resource of the RSC with a broader emit instead of or as an adjunct to the in-house unit, so solving the funding issue in one go.
Malcolm: great idea. Some forum which would bring together representatives of the host institutions would be useful
Delegate: should not forget partnership with our librarian colleagues in terms of digital literacy and there is huge skill and capacity there to help in this area.
Institutional strategy and information strategy are/should be inter-twined; this is core business for HE. Focus in the 90’s was too much on MIS and the need to integrate systems - it failed because the architectures were not present or thought through, and the maturity level was too low, but most importantly you couldn’t get universal buy-in. Things have now changed and the value of information as a core asset of the “business” is hopefully now regarded as sufficient to elevate the debate.