weeknotes

Competing collaborators – Weeknote #360 – 23rd January

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This week I was working from home. There was lots of rain and wind. The space I had gave me time to write up the workshop I attended last week. The write up also included the work I have been doing and the meetings I have had in this space over the last two months. I also had a number of meetings on the work.

This week I also presented at a GÉANT webinar on education. My part was discussing about possible alignment with existing funded work by NRENs across Europe. There is real diversity across the NERNs in Europe about the services they provide for higher education and research. Some, like Jisc, provide a range of education based services, others go further and even provide VLEs. There are though many NRENS whose primary area is research. Obviously it’s not that education doesn’t happen in that country, but that responsibility is down to other organisations.

Image by rawpixel from Pixabay
Image by rawpixel from Pixabay

On Friday the CMA (Competition and Markets Authority) published guidance on collaboration in higher education. This clarity about collaboration within the sector has to be welcomed. The law has not been changed, but the clarification can provide reassurance to the sector that looking to work together, sharing services and resources, as well as more formal collaboration is potentially possible. Part of me though does wonder, if the apprehension about collaboration was using the CMA and competition law as an excuse for not looking at collaboration rather than an actual reason not to collaborate. This new guidance mitigates that excuse now.

weeknotes

Standardised – Weeknote #359 – 16th January

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Was in London this week for a workshop looking at a standardised student data model. It linked into my work on E in NREN and LLE. This ideal of a student data model isn’t new, nor is it just about the data. There are cultural and planning issues that need to be addressed.

I have been talking to SURF in the Netherlands about lots of different things, including the data model work. However, this week I also had a constructive meeting about their OOAPI specification and hub.

Had a really interesting discussion with Lawrie about the government white paper on higher education. I was reminded of what I wrote back in October.

Could we see a paradigm shift in young people going to university? There is no longer talk about 50% of young people going to university, this has been swapped with the two-thirds under-25 participation in higher-level learning.

Another thing I wrote was:

There was much discussion about collaboration and sharing by providers, as well as a focus on specialisation.

What was more challenging was not necessarily coming up with ideas or solutions to the challenges set out in the white paper, but what was the role of Jisc in all this.

Of course the underlying challenge that the sector is facing is one of financial sustainability.

weeknotes

No Snow – Weeknote #358 – 9th January

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path

I was back at work after the festive break. In theory the first work day back was the 2nd of January, but I had taken leave on that day.

I had about twenty emails in my inbox (which was empty when I finished work in December). Took almost no time to clear as virtually all of them were notifications of some kind.

Across a lot of the country there was heavy snow and as you might expect closures of schools and colleges. I could mention all those blogs and podcasts I have written about snow, but not today. For me, though most of the week was icy cold, the sun was shining. Just one day of wind and rain.

I did manage to get to the Bristol office this week, which was quite busy so had a bit of  buzz in there.

I am continuing to look at data models in relation to student mobility. There are a couple of meetings next week that I was preparing for.

campus
Image by 小亭 江 from Pixabay

I have been invited to speak at two events in the spring, about collaboration in higher education in a smart campus and estates context. Estates are not only a huge asset for higher education institutions, but also take up a large proportion of operating expenditure. Is there a way in which collaboration can offset some of those costs and improve the efficiency of how the estate is used.

Read a well researched report, and an article on Generation Alpha. I am not really a fan of generational generalisations. I am not sure how useful they are. I am reminded of the whole digital natives debate, which still seems to bear its ugly head every so often. When you consider that, according to the Prensky definition, 60% of UK academic staff in UK universities are digital natives. You could even argue that the figure is closer to 80%…

Grouping people together and assuming that they will behave in a similar way, isn’t really that helpful.

stuff

e-Learning Stuff: Top Ten Blog Posts 2025

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Usually at this time I would publish a blog post of the top ten posts of the previous twelve months. However WordPress have stopped doing free stats for blogs that show adverts. So I don’t have detailed stats about the top posts.

In 2025 I published 63 blog posts. In 2024 I posted 70 posts on the blog. In 2023 I wrote 89 posts on the blog. There were 92 posts in 2022, 113 blog posts in 2021. In 2020 I had written 94 blog posts. In 2019 I had written 52 blog posts which was up from 2018 when I only wrote 17 blog posts.

Blog traffic in 2025 was double what it was in 2024.

weeknotes

It’s coming home – Weeknote #355 – 19th December

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The big news for me this week was the news that the UK will be (re)joining Erasmus+. The UK lost access to Erasmus following Brexit but this announcement means that in 2027 UK students will be able to study in the EU more easily. So what does the Erasmus announcement mean for UK higher education and for Jisc. I wrote up some thoughts from me on this.

We had our team Christmas meal and get together this week. Usually quite challenging for us to get everyone in the same place, as we are quite a geographically distributed team, even this time we didn’t have everyone. 

I continued my work into a student data model and the work SURF over in the Netherlands have done on this and the accompanying OOAPI. 

I also had some final meetings of the year with my European colleagues on various projects we are working on and potential routes to funding.

As the year comes to a close, the whole sector goes dark, as people take leave for the holidays. It is quite nice in some respects as virtually everyone takes the two weeks off, so there is little email and Teams messages.

news

It’s coming back

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Some thoughts from me on the news that the UK will be joining Erasmus+. So what does the Erasmus announcement mean for UK higher education and for Jisc.

Since Brexit the number of EU students attending UK higher education institutions fell sharply.

Brexit’s effects on student demographics also tell an alarming story. EU student degree intake in the UK has more than halved. From a vibrant community of over 150,000 in 2020-21 (the final year when home fees applied), the total EU-citizen enrolment slipped to just 75,000 by 2023-24, with a larger fall in first-year enrolment. EU students, once representing a quarter of all international students, have now shrunk to less than a tenth. While UK universities have not suffered financially and indeed have compensated by increasing income from non-EU international student fees, the transformation runs deeper than balance sheets.1

Re-joining Erasmus could potentially see the number of EU students attending UK universities increase, possibly back to even pre-Brexit levels.  However, with the international student levy, we may see an overall decline in international student numbers.

One of the interesting aspects of re-joining Erasmus is the implications of this on the plan in the EU for a European Education Area where students can move between institutions and study when and where they want to. Despite the pre-eminence of national agendas in the education space, the EU Commission is looking to improve and enable greater student mobility. There has been substantial work on this by the various European University Alliances across the EU, the European Digital Education Hub 2, and it wouldn’t surprise you by the various NRENs across Europe as well.

Of course in the UK (well England), we have our own plans for student mobility with the LLE 3.

Europe has already undertaken a lot of work in the mobility space with the implementation of the European Higher Education Interoperability Framework 4.  What the Erasmus news means is that student mobility between the EU and the UK will be easier (and cheaper) than it was, and the EU ambitions in relation to student mobility does mean that the UK should be thinking how UK higher education could be aligned to what is happening in Europe.

1 https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20251021121022353

2 https://education.ec.europa.eu/focus-topics/digital-education/action-plan/european-digital-education-hub

3 https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/for-providers/student-protection-and-choice/lifelong-learning-entitlement/

4 https://education.ec.europa.eu/focus-topics/digital-education/digital-education-hub/workshops-and-working-groups/interoperability-framework

weeknotes

Writing stuff – Weeknote #354 – 12th December

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Road with houses

Took some leave this week, so a shorter week than normal. Did spend two days in Bristol where we had some Christmas festivities happening. Nice to see people I hadn’t seen in a while.

Spent time looking at and understanding various data models and standards. Over the last few weeks I have been looking at data models. This made me reminisce about the work I did back in the day with the Western Colleges Consortium, which I wrote about.

I also was reviewing some policies this week as well.

I had some mandatory training come up as well. My usual tactic with this is to just get it done and dusted, rather than procrastinating about it, avoiding all those email reminders and management messages on non-compliance and completion.

I found an WonkHE article on insolvency interesting and the current state of thinking at government and by others on what would happen if a university was to fail. I wrote up my thoughts. 

Typewriter
Image by Patrik Houštecký from Pixabay

I am trying to do more writing, on this blog, for internal communications, and potentially other places well.

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Insolvency on the horizon

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abandoned room
Image by Rudy and Peter Skitterians from Pixabay

I found this WonkHE article on insolvency interesting and the current state of thinking at government and by others on what would happen if a university was to fail.

Insolvency legislation “permits continued trading” if a university enters compulsory liquidation. How so?

The view of the Minister

“…were an organisation to enter into compulsory liquidation, we believe that insolvency legislation permits continued trading during that period of compulsory liquidation. It would mean, therefore, that we would be able, as I have described, to support students, to support research and the important capacity of that provider during the period of liquidation, and to make sure particularly that students had the opportunity to be supported through a teach-out of their course, to be supported to move elsewhere, and to have their records and their achievements protected.”

I did think this from Mills & Reeve was interesting as well.

“The vast majority of entities operating as HEIs are not able to go into an insolvency process, save possibly for liquidation. This is because they are mostly incorporated by Royal Charter or are HECs, and are not therefore companies under the insolvency legislation.”

There was news a few weeks back that there were some universities on the verge of bankruptcy. We still really don’t know what will happen if an HEI fails. The smaller failures in higher education we have seen before have been private companies.

From a digital and technology perspective, could a failed institution continue to maintain a secure and stable infrastructure for example? You can well imagine professional services staff leaving, both as the organisation was wound down, but also as they moved to new and more secure jobs.

We know that the OfS perspective in England is to protect the needs of the student, hence the talk of “teach-out” and supporting students move to other providers. I do think that the actual process will depend a lot on the geographical location of the failed provider. For example, a provider in a large metropolitan area offers students more options, whereas a sole provider in a larger rural part of the country, there are less options.

I do think though that a better option is to avoid reacting and being more proactive in avoiding insolvency. This does mean thinking very differently about the way the university as a business is managed and transforming the operating model to something that is a lot more sustainable. Of course the challenge with that is though there are lots of similarities between higher education institutions, there are enough substantial differences, meaning there isn’t one model with fits all.

news and views on e-learning, TEL and learning stuff in general…