I took some leave this week, so less intensive (from a work perspective) than more recent weeks.

We had the budget this week, and it wasn’t the budget for higher education. No sign of that fee increase everyone has been hoping for, nor was there any new funding. Of course the increase in employer’s National Insurance contributions had meant that wage costs across the sector have gone up. The Universities and Colleges Employers Association has calculated that this measure will add around £372m to the sector’s pay bill.

We have been planning the launch of the collaboration report that we finalised the draft of last week. There have been a few issues this week, so we have been delayed by a few days. Nothing serious, but it is important that we cover all the details and make sure everything is signed off. I also did some internal briefing documents for internal stakeholders.

Had a meeting about the education in NREN. Across the world there are various NRENs. These are the national research and education network (NREN) and each is a specialised internet service provider dedicated to supporting the needs of the research and education in each country. The Netherlands have SURF, and in the UK, we have Jisc. There have been discussions across various networks about raising the importance of the E in NREN. How can NRENs better support education. I do think in the UK, Jisc provides a lot of support for education across further and higher education. Could we do more, and what is happening in Europe? Lots to think about and find out.

I had a conversation with Lawrie about the lack of innovation in learning technology in higher education, now before you say artificial intelligence, let’s just put that to one side and focus on other aspects of innovation. The mailing lists are quiet, I am not seeing the blog posts or yore, and as for new technologies, is there anything out there which is truly innovative? Back in the day, well twenty years ago now… we were on the cusp of an innovation revolution. In 2004, there was no Twitter, no Facebook, no YouTube. The iPhone wasn’t going to be seen for another three years, while it would be six before we saw the iPad. Yes in 2004 we had smartphones and tablets, but it would be the way in which Apple designed their versions which revolutionised how consumers (and then students) would use them. Over a ten year period we saw massive changes in consumer technologies, connectivity, web services, which all impacted on learning and teaching.

Since then, not so much.

Another thing we discussed was how the financial constraints on higher education could be impacting on the role of learning technologists within higher education. There is an invalid assumption that because of covid, we all know how to do it now. Combine that with the lack of flashy innovation, then the visibility of the hard work of learning technologists might be lacking. When your work moves away from discovery into embedding, then the profile of what you do becomes less visible. Big flash events about how a single cohort are using a new technology is exciting, whereas embedding use of the VLE across the entire university has a greater impact but isn’t as high profile. Sometimes talking about what you are doing and the impact it is having on the student experience is just as important as actually doing it.