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.

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!