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Competition Time

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market stall

Last month 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. 

When the sector conversation started on collaboration there was some loud voices saying that we couldn’t collaborate because of the legal implications of competition law. The government and sector bodies were pushing the opportunities about working together and some parts of the sector were pushing back, talking about competition and the law. I wrote about this in a week note from February last year.

So, much so, that a discussion was had with the CMA and then the resulting guidance from them was published.

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. Will the new guidance mitigate that excuse now.

Was the rhetoric from the sector about Competition Law more about using it as an excuse to avoid the discussion and need to collaborate.

Now the guidance has been published, or will we now find that there is another reason why HE can’t collaborate?

Is it because they don’t want to collaborate?

Is it because they don’t know how to collaborate?

I think it’s a bit of both.

I was reminded of my experiences back in the 2000s when I was introducing technology into learning and teaching.

Often staff would tell me why they couldn’t or wouldn’t use learning technologies.

Where is the evidence etc???

When then presented with the evidence, it was then another reason, and then another reason…

Sometimes you had to listen, other times you need to dig a little deeper to understand why a person (or an organisation) doesn’t want to do something. The reason they give, may not be the actual reason why they aren’t going to do that thing.

The reality was, more my problem, I was presenting the introduction of learning technologies as a problem to be solved, the reality was technology was actually a solution, what I hadn’t done, was identified the problem. Learning technologies are a solution to problems, not the problem that needs to be solved.

market stall

We need to move away from excuses and obstacles, and move towards opportunities and solutions.

We need to remind ourselves that collaboration and sharing within higher education isn’t the problem we need to solve, it is in fact a solution (and not the only solution) to a (probably not well defined) problem. We need to be clear about the problem, define that problem, and then we can start thinking about possible solutions, one of which may be collaboration and sharing. I recently wrote about bridge building in helping understanding about problems and solutions.

Back in the day when I was designing aspects of the Digital Leadership programme I recognised that helping people to understand the differences between problems and solutions I would use a bridge building analogy.

If we are to work towards solving the solutions to the many challenges the higher education sector is facing then we need to stop just thinking about the problems with potential solutions, but focus on making those solutions work.

weeknotes

Another position – Weeknote #364 – 20th February 2026

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barge on a river next to office buildings

After many weeks travelling around the country and to Europe, this week was another week with nothing booked into the diary in terms of events or conferences. This gave me the opportunity to focus on research into the European Higher Education Interoperability Framework (EHEIF) use cases as well as more work on a possible Jisc version of the SURFEduHub.

I finalised the first draft of some position papers on the EHEIF which puts them in the UK context and what it means for Jisc and some of the work we are involved in.

These are very much first draft, or even pre-draft documents. The aim really was to research what I didn’t know, I didn’t know. Now I have resolved the unknown unknowns, the next step will be research these, but also to validate the position papers with the relevant teams within Jisc.

green field next to Devon coast with sea and cliffs in the background

This week I have been working with the consultancy team, supporting them with various pieces of work, helping them (or will be helping them) to quality assure future consultancy projects. This was the same team I worked with last year on the strategic outline cases we worked on at Jisc for the UUK Transformation & Efficiency Taskforce.

Had quite a few discussions this week on the student data model project I have been working on. I do find it useful to discuss the challenges and issues and to see what insights others have in this space.

Greenway House, white Georgian house, in front of which is a grass slope

Also had my quarterly review, which went well, so pleased with that.

I managed to get to the office twice this week, and was able to have some unplanned conversations with others, who were also in the office.

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Bridge Building

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wooden bridge
Image by Elizabeth from Pixabay

One question that sometimes comes up, is do we know how to collaborate?

Though there has been ample talk about collaboration and sharing, it is one of those things that is probably easy to talk about and more difficult to actually do. Part of the challenge is how universities are inconsistent in their approaches to managing themselves, which then makes it even more challenging to work together or collaborate.

We need to remind ourselves that collaboration and sharing within higher education isn’t the problem we need to solve, it is in fact a solution (and not the only solution) to a (probably not well defined) problem. We need to be clear about the problem, define that problem, and then we can start thinking about possible solutions, one of which may be collaboration and sharing.

wooden bridge
Image by hmauck from Pixabay

Back in the day when I was designing aspects of the Digital Leadership programme I recognised that helping people to understand the differences between problems and solutions I would use a bridge building analogy.

If you imagine a river, you know where you are and you have fair idea about where you want to be. The problem is how do you get from one side of the river to other. The solution is to build a bridge. The bridge in itself is not the problem you need to solve, it is the solution to the actual problem of crossing the river.

One of the challenges is that often people don’t know how to build a bridge. Then the focus energy and resources are pushed into bridge building. Sometimes it becomes all about bridge building and less about crossing the river.

In many ways I see collaboration as the bridge. We know that the sector is facing challenges, one solution is to build a bridge (collaboration) but the bridge itself isn’t the problem.

Generally what most communities do when they need a bridge, they get experts in to build that bridge. It’s pretty much the same with collaboration, why not get expert help, to help with the collaboration and then that allows greater focus on the actual problems that collaboration is trying to solve.

Generally once you’ve built a bridge, you use it to cross the river and then move on.

So are you building bridges, or are you still thinking about how to construct one?

weeknotes

A crisis of trust – Weeknote #363 – 13th February 2026

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The wet weather still seems to be haunting us. Even so I did make it to the office one day this week, which though was quite quiet in comparison to other days I have spent in the office, I was a productive and constructive workspace. I also had a day’s leave this week as well, visiting Stourhead (in the rain).

After a tip off from that Lawrie, I read Peter Bryant’s most recent essay in his Mirror University series of blog posts: The Mirror University 7: Trust is the only currency that matters in higher education: Rebuilding a culture of trust in an era of distrust.

The central argument of the article is that trust is the real existential crisis facing higher education. While public debates fixate on generative AI, academic integrity, declining attendance, or marketisation, these are symptoms of a deeper erosion of trust between students, academics, institutions, government, and society.

As with much of what Peter writes it’s a piece that makes you stop and think. Peter does come from this, from an Australian perspective, but there is much in there that resonates with the current climate in the UK towards higher education. Well worth taking the time to read.

I had my regular check in with my colleagues within NRENs 4 Education, or as I call it E in NREN. The team is presenting at TNC in Helsinki in June, I hope to be attending. 

As part of my work on E in NREN I have been developing some position papers on the eight use cases from the European Higher Education Interoperability Framework and where they sit within the UK context, where they sit within Jisc, and what are the links with a potential student data model and the proposed future of LLE (Lifelong Learning Entitlement). The key word is developing, rather than writing, as because as they are developed I am not only writing what I know, but also what I know I don’t know. In addition the act of development is helping me understand what I don’t know I don’t know. One of the challenges with all eight use cases are the multiple stakeholders involved. Jisc on its own, is not the solution, but is part of the solution.

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A more holistic approach – Weeknote #362 – 6th February 2026

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Venice
Grand Canal in Venice

I was on leave on Monday and did a crazy thing, I did a day trip to Venice. 

Back at work I was looking at continuing to research and write a series of position papers on the eight use cases of the European Higher Education Interoperability Framework.

This was very much about putting a UK and Jisc lens on each of the use cases. Working out who was working in this space. I have to say though some of the work is about working out, not only what I don’t know, but also ensuring I am aware of what I don’t know, I don’t know. The good old unknown unknowns.

Managed to make it once more to the Bristol office. I had a number of happenstance conversations, as a result I am going to try and plan to get to the office more. I go at least once a week, I am thinking I might try and make that twice a week.

Jisc Offices in Portwall Lane, Bristol
Jisc Offices in Portwall Lane, Bristol

This was also the start of our third quarter, the Jisc year starts on the 1st August, so we’re half way through our year now. I did my quarterly review paperwork, as well as these week notes, I also keep a regular note of what I am doing each week as well. This makes it very easy to write up the review.

Had an interesting conversation with a colleague (in licensing) discussing standards in relation to learning, teaching, and assessment. I was reminded about the 1EdTech conference I attended in Delft, last September, where the impression I came away was that institutional interoperability was quite mature, but that it wasn’t necessarily going to enable or work for inter-institutional interoperability. Moving data around an institution is challenging enough, moving that data with other institutions (and over a longer time frame) does need a new way of thinking about data and interoperability.

A simple example, you have a learning analytics service within your institution, it gathers student data from the VLE, attendance, library data and it can be used to better understand that individual student and possible needs for interventions. Now imagine that student is not just studying at your university, but is concurrently studying at two other universities. Do you just use your own data for analytics? Or, would you want to bring in data from the other institutions? A more holistic approach to learning analytics perhaps!

weeknotes

Positioning Interoperability – Weeknote #361 – 30th January 2026

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This week I made it to the Bristol office to work and meet with colleagues. I had a chance meeting with a member of the OpenAthens team which was useful and we sat down and had a discussion about trust and identity. I do like going to the office, and have decided I will try and get in more than I have been going. I think the wet weather probably puts me off. The other aspect is that if I have a lot of online meetings, then actually going into the office is makes that more challenging, as I would need to book a meeting room, and on some days, when the office is busy, there are fewer meeting rooms available.

I wrote an article on Erasmus+ for the internal comms team, which did draw on the article I wrote for this blog back in December.

I did write three blog posts this week. The first was on students’ perceptions of their providers’ response to financial challenges.

What this report and analysis is showing is that student satisfaction is being impacted by the financial situation in higher education.

The second was on the news from the University of Nottingham about their course closures and staff student ratios.

The university is planning to consolidate the number of faculties from five to three and reduce the number of courses that are delivered at the university by suspending recruitment on 42 courses. 

The two stories are somewhat linked. The financial crisis impacting on the higher education sector is not just about numbers and figures, it is about people. As well as the impact on staff and redundancy, we are also seeing the negative impact on the student experience and student satisfaction. Alas, this can be a somewhat downward spiral if we see student numbers drop. Having said that the news from UCAS this week was 338,940 UK 18-year-olds have applied for university – a record high and 4.8 per cent more than the 323,360 that applied in 2025. That increase though is driven by demographics, the number of 18 year olds in 2026 is largest for 35 years. Probably better to look at the application rate as a percentage of that demographic, and then the figure has remained relatively static at 40.7%, it was 40.6% in 2025. There was a peak of 42.8% in 2022. What we can say then is the rise in applications is down to population growth.

Going forward if applications stay around the 40% mark then we will in the future see the number of applications fall. Of course not all of those 40% actually go to university and then there are others who will choose later to go having not made an UCAS application.  The recent government white paper no longer talks of the 50% going to university but does talk about 67% undertaking some form of higher level education. What does that look like going forward?

The third blog post was on generalisations and assumptions.

As I said earlier, as a society technology and digital has become more embedded into our lives, the concept of post-digital echoes the sentiment that as technology becomes part of our everyday lives, the less we see it as technology. At the end of the day we are probably all digital now, living in a post-digital world.

I have been looking at the European Higher Education Interoperability Framework, in the main for the work I have been doing in the E in NREN landscape, but also how it could support LLE in the future. It is also been used within the UCISA work on the student data model.

I have been researching and planning some position papers on the European Higher Education Interoperability Framework, looking at the current UK landscape and what Jisc is doing or could do in that landscape.

I have also been having discussions about collaboration and sharing. One question that sometimes comes up, is do we know how to collaborate?

Though there has been ample talk about collaboration and sharing, it is one of those things that is probably easy to talk about and more difficult to actually do. Part of the challenge is how universities are inconsistent in their approaches to managing themselves, which then makes it even more challenging to work together or collaborate.

We need to remind ourselves that collaboration and sharing within higher education isn’t the problem we need to solve, it is in fact a solution (and not the only solution) to a (probably not well defined) problem. We need to be clear about the problem, define that problem, and then we can start thinking about possible solutions, one of which may be collaboration and sharing.

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Impact of financial challenges – the student perspective

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stable door

The Office for Students (OfS) has published the results from a survey (from April 2025) on students’ perceptions of their providers’ response to financial challenges.

WonkHE have done their usual excellent analysis of the polling and is well worth a read.

83 per cent of those polled thought that cost-cutting measures had changed the experience they felt they’d been promised – often through larger class sizes than expected, greater use of online learning, or reduced access to academic resources and student support.

Some of my own thoughts on this.

The survey was actually done last April, so the impact of more recent responses to financial sustainability won’t have influenced the results. Even so, it demonstrates that cost-cutting is impacting on the student experience and this is reducing student satisfaction.

Interesting to read that greater use of online learning is still seen as a negative, the impact of remote online learning during covid is still having an impact. We have to remember that the majority of students been surveyed weren’t actually at university at the height of the covid lockdowns, so their experiences of school and college are having a longitudinal impact on their feelings about online learning. 

Changes noted by students included increased class sizes, and my recent post on Nottingham and their changes to student staff ratios shows that this is not going away anytime soon.

What this report and analysis is showing is that student satisfaction is being impacted by the financial situation in higher education. Though fees are set to rise, this is only going to reflect inflation, so costs in real terms is going to stay the same. We might not see so much cost reduction in the future, but we need to reflect that we not going to see much increase in real spending either.

What will this mean, well with fees still set to rise and actual costs of going to university, falling graduate incomes, does this mean that the benefit of attending university becomes less attractive to prospective students in the future?

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This is the way

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Writing in a notebook
Image by Pexels from Pixabay

Before I finished for the festive break there was a report in the Times Higher Education on the current situation at Nottingham University.

Staff at the University of Nottingham fear that planned course closures and changes to staff-student ratios could damage the university’s international standing and create “impossible” workloads.

The university is planning to consolidate the number of faculties from five to three and reduce the number of courses that are delivered at the university by suspending recruitment on 42 courses. Of course the challenge in suspending recruitment is that restarting recruitment might be challenging, and probably impossible to do quickly.

The University of Nottingham is not alone in facing a financial crisis and equally is not alone in cutting courses and reducing staff numbers.

What is also consistent for most universities in this predicament is that they are facing it alone. Though there has been ample talk about collaboration and sharing, it is one of those things that is probably easy to talk about and more difficult to actually do. Part of the challenge is how universities are inconsistent in their approaches to managing themselves, which then makes it even more challenging to work together or collaborate.

Making those changes to be more aligned, is probably not even on the agenda, as the next crisis loads on the existing crisis. Sitting outside the turmoil, you might think it is easy to offer solutions, the reality is that there is so much unknowns in that crisis, that any solution may become the next problem.

We need to remind ourselves that collaboration and sharing within higher education isn’t the problem we need to solve, it is in fact a solution (and not the only solution) to a (probably not well defined) problem. We need to be clear about the problem, define that problem, and then we can start thinking about possible solutions, one of which may be collaboration and sharing.

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60% of UK academic staff in UK universities are digital natives

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Typewriter
Image by Patrik Houštecký from Pixabay

As I mentioned in one of my week notes I read a well researched report and an article on Generation Alpha and how I am not really a fan of generational generalisations. I said how I am not sure how useful they are. 

I was though reminded of the whole digital natives debate, which still seems to bear its ugly head every so often. Prensky’s premise was the idea that if you were old you were only a  digital immigrant and the young people were digital natives. As young people were born into a digital world then they were digital natives. Whereas everyone else was born into a non-digital world and therefore digital was new to them and not something that they had always known.

According to the Prensky definition, 60% of UK academic staff in UK universities are pure digital natives. You could even argue that the figure is closer to 80%…

So, using the term to describe students isn’t helpful as the definition by definition in theory applies to virtually everyone who is part of the university. 

Giving a generation a name is one thing, but what people then conjectured was that as they had this name, digital native, they would be able to handle a range of digital tools, services and environments. They would be in a better position to handle online environments then the so called immigrants.

This conjecture is rather flawed and makes a lot of assumptions about behaviours, skills and experience, based on what is really just a label.

Making labels to describe generations is one thing, making assumptions about how individuals will be able to do things (or not do things) just because they are part of that generation is just wrong.

Over the years technology changes as does society. They both influence each other, both positively and negatively. Behaviours change as technology both enables and enhances. The other aspect of technology is that it is constantly evolving and changing, as new technologies arrive, others become redundant or less useful.

As a society technology and digital has become more embedded into our lives, the concept of post-digital echoes the sentiment that as technology becomes part of our everyday lives, the less we see it as technology.

Thinking about this I am reminded of two aspects of my work over the the years.

When I started working at Gloucestershire College in 2006 I did a few new staff induction sessions about the use of IT in the college. I remember asking new staff, who had an email account, many didn’t. It wasn’t part of their life, they didn’t need one, obviously some did. I then handed over the inductions to another member of staff. Later in 2013 I was asked to cover one of the staff induction sessions, and it was very apparent that a lot had moved on. Now, it was pointless asking the question about email, so I asked what was the last thing they bought online. Everyone in the room was shopping online, some were even buying shoes online, which still to this day I find incredulous.

Another thing I did was help develop and deliver the Jisc Digital Leaders Programme. In the early days we did some mapping of our digital self using the concept of Visitors and Residents. 

At the time I liked how the mapping exercise makes you consider how you are using various tools and what needs to happen to change that map, how do you become more resident when using a tool such as Bluesky. Or how do you start using a tool which is currently not on your map, such as a professional blog? 

The mapping changes as new tools are introduced, old ones retire and your role and behaviours change.

When a couple of years ago I did a similar mapping exercise again, I started to realised how embedded digital and services were into everyday life. The value of mapping your digital self had become less valuable and so much more was embedded into how we communicate and collaborate. 

As I said earlier, as a society technology and digital has become more embedded into our lives, the concept of post-digital echoes the sentiment that as technology becomes part of our everyday lives, the less we see it as technology. At the end of the day we are probably all digital now, living in a post-digital world.

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.

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