weeknotes

Happy Retirement Paul – Weeknote #291 – 27th September 2024

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Still can’t quite believe that it is October next week, did we have a summer, or was that somewhere else?

At the start of the week I had an online meeting with Oaklands College, about their smart campus aspirations. It was a good meeting, and we discussed various topics and aspects of what we mean by smart campus, use cases, and what foundations are needed.

Attended another active learning set session as part of an internal leadership training, I am undertaking. The problem we were discussing was about recruitment. I won’t go into details here, but I was reminded of the challenges involved in recruitment and getting it right. Over my career I have recruited some amazing people, and occasionally, not so much. One thing I will pass on from my experience is, no matter how desperate you are to fill a position, if the candidates you interview are not right, don’t feel forced to appoint. It may feel you have solved a short term issue, but the reality is that it may become a long term problem. Also, think about the type of attributes and skills you need for that position and then think about how you will find that in the people who apply. For example, does putting in having a degree as an essential attribute provide the skills you need, or will it exclude people who have those skills gained through experience, but never went to university, as it wasn’t something that was available to them?

Attending training for our new travel booking system. Not too different to the system we already have. Having this kind of self-service system makes life so much easier to the processes and systems I used in the past. I remember having to fill out paper forms, get them authorised, and then pass them to the travel team, who would then book the travel and accommodation.

I attended the Education Espresso session organised by Wonkhe and Adobe. It was an interesting discussion.

I had quite a few meetings this week.

Planned out the conferences I want to attend, I won’t be able to attend them all, but at least I have thought through the ones I would like to go to.

This week Paul Bailey retired; I have worked with Paul for twenty odd years. I joined Jisc in June 2015 and have regularly worked with Paul on various projects and programmes. I would also bring him for conversations about my work. Before I joined Jisc I collaborated and worked with Paul on various things, some I don’t remember, but certainly in the early days of learning analytics. I also am sure he was a critical friend of some case studies I did back in the 2000s. He was a real asset to Jisc and he will be missed.

weeknotes

It’ll be reyt – Weeknote #290 – 20th September 2024

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This week I was in Leeds. As we as a directorate away day (over two) days I also took the opportunity to visit various universities around the area.

I have written before about the declining student recruitment across UK higher education. This week we saw that the UCAS (28 day) acceptances were up slightly from last year. In total, there have been 498,340 acceptances, which has risen from 493,940 last year but is lower than the peak of 515,650 in 2020.

However it is not all good news, the overall number of acceptances has been driven by UK 18-year-olds but there has been a decline in mature and international students getting onto an undergraduate university or college course.

Wonkhe reported that the sector has lost another higher education provider. No it’s not a traditional provider, but it’s the second one within the last four weeks.

The Advanced Business Academy (ABA), an Office for Students approved provider of franchise and partnership provision with campuses in London and Luton, has ceased higher education operations with immediate effect. The provider’s website now provides guidance for current students, including contact details for academic partners (the University of Buckingham and Leeds Trinity University), noting that both ABA campuses are now closed.

We were up in Leeds for our Directorate Away Day, which takes place lunchtime to lunchtime due to the geographical distribution of the team. I did a presentation about the report I am working on.

Did some visits and field research (physicality) to the University of Leeds, Leeds Beckett University and the University of York in regard to Optimising Operations and Intelligent Campus. I have been to Leeds University quite a few times for conferences and events, but it was good to see the physical campus from a different perspective.

As I was in the area, I also walked around the University of York, I wanted to see how the campus felt with more people there, as the last time I had been to visit it has been the summer break. It didn’t feel crowded, which was interesting. I actually studied at York as an undergraduate, and over the last four decades the campus has expanded hugely, however the main campus around the lake (duck pond) hasn’t changed very much at all. There are some new buildings in and around the brutalist concrete buildings of the 1960s. It was quite a large campus when I was there in the late 1980s, but with the expansion into East Heslington the campus is so much expansive. This has implications for travelling across campus for study or for internal meetings. From an intelligent campus viewpoint, trying to utilise space more efficiently will be restricted by the physical distances between buildings and spaces. Should just note that I did visit Leeds University in the 1980s when I was at York for concerts in the Student Union.

The visit to Leeds Beckett University was my first visit to the campus, and I am glad I went. I don’t know I had in my head that Leeds Beckett was comprised of modern buildings, but the campus is focussed around a number of Edwardian brick buildings. There are a number of newer buildings as well. Both the University of Leeds and Leeds Beckett both have additional city centre campuses in the heart of Leeds, which raises the question of collaboration and sharing.

Leeds is quite a distance away from Weston-super-Mare, so spent quite a bit of time travelling.

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Change is needed, but can we change? – Weeknote #287 – 30th August 2024

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Shorter week this week with the August bank holiday in England.

I went to the office a few times this week. I have written a fair few times about how I quite like going to the office to work. The change in routine and location is refreshing, and helps, especially as my current workload is very much focused on reading, writing, and having online calls. August is a quiet time for meetings and events.

Image by Photo Mix from Pixabay
Image by Photo Mix from Pixabay

I have been looking at which events to attend over the next few months, the WonkHE Festival of Higher Education is on that list, as is their Secret Life of Students taking place in early 2025. I am speaking at the Education Summit in October in London. I am looking at an overseas conference as well, torn between OEB in Berlin, or ASCILITE in Melbourne. They are close together, but don’t clash.

Wrote an update for the Jisc board on the work I have been doing. As part of this work I also reviewed content for a holding web page.

Had to use Excel, not my favourite activity, I was doing some research into higher education expenditure and was playing with some data. Excel is one of those applications I use infrequently, so I don’t always remember how to do stuff.

Read the OfS report on the closure of Schumacher College. In their overview the OfS said:

The higher education sector is facing significant financial challenges and institutions are facing difficult decisions. Universities and colleges are responsible for running their businesses and it’s vital that each provider has effective systems in place to identify and manage these risks to ensure students’ interests and rights are protected.

The WonkHE analysis was also an interesting read.

Closures of higher education providers due to financial pressures have been predicted for a long time – Schumacher may have existed outside of the traditional university sector, and was also experiencing wider and more sustained difficulties, but it is unlikely to be the only specialist provider that is struggling to make ends meet as we move towards the 2024-25 academic year.

So is this the first of many? There is a question of whether one of the (larger) more traditional providers will fail? There has been for many years rumours that there are three large universities on the brink of bankruptcy. No one actually names the three but reading across the education press there are numerous stories of financial problems, staff cuts, and closures. Would a large university be allowed to fail? I suspect more likely would be a forced merger with another institution to protect the students and allow them to finish their programmes of study. Regardless, the sector is facing huge financial pressures and this has implications for the way they are organised and operate.

Also in the ballpark was this HEPI Paper – Down with the World-Class University: How our business models damage universal higher education.

This paper discusses the proposition that the issue with higher education is not so much a lack of proper funding, but that the current operating model isn’t fit for purpose.

Higher education’s onrushing insolvency is not, as many would wish, merely a fixable fault in our funding model, caused by government backsliding on the tuition fee. Instead, we have a system-design problem, in which funding problems are simply a characteristic, not a cause. What other sector would allow itself to stall in an era of surging demand, as our addressable market expands from young people to all adults? The fault lies in our business models and our operating assumptions, as a sector and as providers. We must rethink the types of people we serve, and how we can meet their needs for education and skills in ways that meet the test of private and public goods. Our fascination with the ‘world-class university’ model has had negative systemic effects, draining resources from the wider sector. And we must question our default setting, our cherished high-quality, high-touch and high-cost model. These attributes are not inviolable aspects of our offer. Each places huge demands on students and providers. Can our system really be fit for purpose, if it is unworkable for large minorities of students and providers, and unaffordable for the state?

I am reminded of the recent post I wrote about hindsight in which I looked at the challenges and change that Intel and Kodak faced, and some would say failed to adapt to.

There are lots of examples of how organisations and companies did not respond to changes and trends. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, as you can ask, why didn’t they change, they could see the challenge, they could have changed, they could have adapted. The problem often is that though internally the organisation may know it needs to change, the current situation means they are unable to change.

Higher Education knows that they are facing challenges, and that they need to change. They know this. However a deeper question is not the one that Higher Education needs to be told they need to change, they know that, but they are actually unable to change and so the question is how do we change a sector, that knows it needs to change, but actually can’t make that change.

weeknotes

Record numbers – Weeknote #286 – 23rd August 2024

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Image by chiến nguyễn bá from Pixabay

Over the last couple of months I have been struggling to get these weeknotes up in a timely manner. I usually try and post them on the Friday of that week, but if not, get them finished over the weekend. However over the last few months I have been missing my own deadlines and have been posting them weeks late… I think I need to review the process by which I bring them together and what they are for, and what I need them for. I think that’s a blog post in itself.

Wonkhe in their weekly briefing were very positive about the recent A Level results.

Young people are turning away from university study in their droves. It is too expensive, too “woke”, too “marketised”, too traditional: too expected. There are other attractive options – apprenticeships, travel, specific work-related qualifications. University just isn’t as important any more. A degree is a financial millstone, not a career or lifetime benefit.

That’s the story we’ve been hearing all year from commentators who may (perish the thought) be incorporating their own ideological wish-fulfilment into their analysis. Any or all of the reasons may turn out to be correct for some groups of students, but the central contention is wrong. Overall there are more UK-domiciled 18 year old applicants with a confirmed university place one day after results day in 2024 than at any point in history.

Yes, you read that correctly.

…for now – take a rare vote of confidence: UK 18 year olds want to go to university, in record numbers.

Despite the positive news last week about the A Level results, the university sector is facing a financial crisis like never before. As mentioned last week, there was this report, Cash-strapped universities could go bust before new students graduate

Cash-strapped universities could fold within three years due to a “perfect storm” of plummeting international student numbers and being unable to attract undergraduates through A-level clearing, a leading education expert (HEPI) has warned. A funding crisis has left 40 per cent of universities facing budget deficits, a recent report has found, with around 70 undergoing redundancy or restructuring programmes amid growing fears over the higher education sector’s financial stability.

Of course the implication of a university going under means that there will be job losses as report in this article: Universities face job losses as ‘perfect storm’ gathers.

Some of the universities that today’s happy students will be aiming to attend from the autumn are facing huge financial pressures. Adam McCulloch investigates a sector that could well be on the cusp of contraction – with job losses and closed departments ahead.

As mentioned in the article, a list of job losses as collated by UCU

You kind of hope that some enterprising manager doesn’t decide that the solution to reducing the number of staff is to replace them with some kind of AI.

The HE sector is facing tough financial times ahead. Last week’s A Level results may have been a good news item, but the university sector are facing falling student numbers, both domestic and international. In addition, flat student funding combined with rising costs, means that universities can not sustain their current expenditure and operating model

I had planned to go to the office this week, but they had closed the line from the Portway Park & Ride to Bristol for engineering work. So would have done my usual trip to Bristol catching the train from Worle, but in the end I drove to work and parked in Bristol.

I finally managed to get my Funky Cat back from the dealership after nearly three months having a software update fail. The car had been reset to factory settings, so it took a while to configure it to how I had it before I took it in. There was also a new GWM app for the car as well.

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Tough times – Weeknote #285 – 16th August 2024

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The HE sector is facing tough financial times ahead. Thursday’s A Level results may have been a good news item, but the university sector are facing falling student numbers, both domestic and international. In addition, flat student funding combined with rising costs, means that universities can not sustain their current expenditure and operating model. This has many implications for university priorities, including universities looking to cut costs, reduce new expenditure, and their focus being on financial sustainability and being more efficient.

Despite the positive news yesterday about the A Level results, the university sector is facing a financial crisis like never before.

 Cash-strapped universities could go bust before new students graduate

Cash-strapped universities could fold within three years due to a “perfect storm” of plummeting international student numbers and being unable to attract undergraduates through A-level clearing, a leading education expert (HEPI) has warned. A funding crisis has left 40 per cent of universities facing budget deficits, a recent report has found, with around 70 undergoing redundancy or restructuring programmes amid growing fears over the higher education sector’s financial stability.

Universities face job losses as ‘perfect storm’ gathers

Some of the universities that today’s happy students will be aiming to attend from the autumn are facing huge financial pressures. Adam McCulloch investigates a sector that could well be on the cusp of contraction – with job losses and closed departments ahead.

As mentioned in the article, a list of job losses as collated by UCU

It is clear that the higher education sector is facing challenges it hasn’t had to face before.

I thought this collated thread by Cory Doctorow was an interesting read. It is about how scholarly publishing is a “collective action problem”.

Once you learn about the “collective action problem,” you start seeing it everywhere. Democrats – including elected officials – all wanted Biden to step down, but none of them wanted to be the first one to take a firm stand, so for months, his campaign limped on: a collective action problem.

He has some examples from other industries and then spends time discussing academic publishing.

Here’s how the scholarly publishing scam works: academics do original scholarly research, funded by a mix of private grants, public funding, funding from their universities and other institutions, and private funds. These academics write up their research and send it to a scholarly journal, usually one that’s owned by a small number of firms that formed a scholarly publishing cartel by buying all the smaller publishers in a string of anticompetitive acquisitions. Then, other scholars review the submission, for free. More unpaid scholars do the work of editing the paper. The paper’s author is sent a non-negotiable contract that requires them to permanently assign their copyright to the journal, again, for free. Finally, the paper is published, and the institution that paid the researcher to do the original research has to pay again – sometimes tens of thousands of dollars per year! – for the journal in which it appears.

Take the time to read the thread.

I wrote a blog post about change and hindsight.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, as you can ask, why didn’t they change, they could see the challenge, they could have changed, they could have adapted.

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Hindsight is a wonderful thing

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I read the other day that UCAS applications for university were down for a second year running. This maybe something that universities should not only care about, they should be worrying about this and thinking about their planning for the next few years, even the next ten years.

I also read that Intel, the computer chip manufacturer were laying off 15% of their staff having failed to respond in an effective way to the use of ARM chips, first by Apple and then by many other PC manufacturers.

Throw in a podcast I listened to in the car the other day when stuck in traffic on the M5, which covered companies that failed to change. This included Kodak who did not adapt to the introduction of digital cameras, magazine publishers who didn’t understand the web, and even record stores that couldn’t adapt to the introduction of CDs or downloads.

Before I discuss the impact of the drops in applications for universities, it will provide some insights into looking at what is happening to Intel and looking back at other major companies that failed to respond to (usually digital) disruption. It should be said that hindsight is a wonderful thing.

When I started working at City of Bristol College in the early 1990s (it was Brunel College then), I worked in the Faculty of Business, Food, and Hairdressing. A large diverse faculty, and across the many staff we shared a single 286 personal computer. The 286 was the name of the chip that powered the computer. Intel at the time was the biggest chip manufacturer in the world. I read in the book, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, that it had successfully transitioned from a manufacturer of computer memory to one that made computer core chips.

In the 1990s I remember upgrading computers to a 386 and then a 486. I remember the marketing hype that arrived in 1993 when Intel named the 586, the Pentium, in order to differentiate it from other chip manufacturers.

In 2002 I moved over to the Apple platform, buying a G4 PowerBook and later a G5 Power Mac. I was, like many Mac users, a little concerned when Apple announced the move to Intel back in 2005. However all wasn’t’ well for Intel, when they failed to deliver on the needs of Apple. Apple moved to fabricating their own chips, first for their iOS devices and then their Mac lineup. Apple announced in 2020 that they would be moving all their Mac models away from Intel chips to ARM processors. The M1, M2 and now the M3 chips power all their current models.

The problem for Intel, and probably is why they are now having problems, was that they didn’t just lose a customer when Apple moved to ARM, other computer manufacturers in an attempt to maintain market share and compete with Apple also started building ARM powered computers. Intel had not only lost Apple, they were also now losing considerable market share.

This month we saw Intel decided they needed to cut costs and have cut 15% of their staff. Will this be enough, maybe, but probably not.

The podcast I listened to discussed how Kodak did not adapt well to the digital revolution in photography.

It was interesting as it wasn’t as though Kodak ignored digital, they actually produced a handheld digital camera back in 1975.

However, company executives were reluctant to make a strong pivot towards digital technology, since it would require heavy investment, make the core business of film unprofitable, and put the company into direct competition with established firms in the computer hardware industry.

One of their own employees had written in 1979 that photography would completely shift to digital by 2010.

Kodak knew that digital was going to disrupt the market for photography. However they were unwilling to pivot and shift from their core business. They couldn’t see what they needed to change, as they were concerned with protecting their existing business.

Their customers and consumers made the move to digital and there were plenty of other companies out there who were being innovative and designing, developing and making the (digital) photography products that were being demanded.

It also probably didn’t help that Fujifilm started competing directly with Kodak in the US (and worldwide) in the 1980s.

You could say that Kodak didn’t adapt to the changes happening to their sector.  Kodak weren’t blind to the threats posed to their business, they knew what digital meant for photography, they designed and built digital photography products. However they failed to change enough to make a difference.

In 2012 Kodak filed for bankruptcy.

There are lots of other examples of how organisations and companies did not respond to changes and trends. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, as you can ask, why didn’t they change, they could see the challenge, they could have changed, they could have adapted.

The problem often is that though internally the organisation may know it needs to change, the current situation means they are unable to change.

That radical step is make radical change knowing that this will have a potentially negative impact on the business and your customers.

So is the drop in applications a bump or a trend? That we don’t know, but maybe we will this time next year.

So universities may know and realise that they need to change, but they can’t afford to make those changes now. As a result they may never change.

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Down Solent Way – Weeknote #284 – 9th August 2024

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August is a quiet time in higher education. University campuses, usually bustling with staff and students, become a calm oasis of peace. As with many organisations associated with education, Jisc is less busy and quieter.

I have been working on a report, which has required, interviews with key stakeholders across higher education, and so it has been somewhat of a relief that people have been around for those conversations.

On Tuesday I headed down the Solent way to Southampton by train for a lunch meeting with some senior colleagues from Solent University. It was a really useful meeting to discuss their challenges and how Jisc could help and support them. I also took the opportunity to test the waters of the report we’re producing on collaboration.

It’s the time of year where I get told to refresh my mandatory training, this time it was Data Protection and Information Security. I generally try and get these done, as soon as I am notified it is needed. In the past (in previous jobs) I would de-prioritise this kind of activity, as I would be busy doing other things. Then it would either be at or pass the deadline. The training would then be rushed, and a manager would be chasing me. Now I just get it done, it gets prioritised, so that it’s less of a worry and an annoyance.

In a similar vein, I did my end of year review paperwork as well. This is relatively easy to do as I record weekly activities, and these feed into both the review paperwork and these weeknotes.

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Mandatory – Weeknote #283 – 2nd August 2024

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I spent the week in London undertaking various activities. Some of which had to change due to transport issues and the high summer temperatures.

We had our team away day in the London office.

Spent some of the week working on a collaborative activities report that will very likely be published in September.

It’s the time of the year where I have to refresh my mandatory training, this time it was on information security and data protection. I approach these with a positive attitude, I realise some people think of this as a tick box exercise, I don’t.

Attended an action learning set, which was an interesting training session. Something I hadn’t really done before.

Had lunch with a few of our relationship managers in the London office. Always nice to meet up, chat and discuss stuff with them.

I did some field research looking at geographical challenges in collaboration. I was intrigued by the setup at the old Olympic Park where quite a few universities, both London based and nationally, have sites. I was wondering what the issues would be for students if they collaborated together on areas of the student experience. One thing I found was that, looking at a map provides some insights, but doesn’t compare to actually physically being in the location and walking the walk. Really helpful in feeding into my work on optimising operations and collaboration.

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