This week I was in Oxford for the HESCA conference. I enjoyed the conference and it was good to hear a range of diverse viewpoints on the use of technology to support the student experience.

I was talking once more about collaboration, but taking more of a reflective look on where we are. I was presenting a state of the nation look at collaboration and why the higher education sector is not doing more collaboration. In many ways the focus of my presentation was based on my blog post on building bridges.

On my way back from Oxford I did pop in and have a meeting at our offices in Milton Park before then heading back to our Bristol office.

I have been having conversations and discussions with colleagues inside Jisc on digital credentials and digital wallets. Within the European Higher Education Interoperability Framework one of the use cases is about how a student can communicate their educational credentials to both other educational institutions and employers. There has been quite a bit of work done in this space, what I was interested in was what has been happening in Jisc.

I wrote a blog post about the impact of student loans on peoples’ lives.

Over the last couple of years I have been saying across various conversations about the impact of paying back student loans could have on future student recruitment. I would talk about how the next generation of students will be the first whose parents were required to take out student loans to pay their fees and for the maintenance. Their parents would have the seen the real life impact of their student debt on their lifestyle. It would reduce their real income and would have had an impact on other financial choices such as mortgage affordability.

I read WonkHE’s report on AI and students. It reflected much of my (admittedly limited) knowledge on how students are using AI.