All posts by James Clay

weeknotes

No Snow – Weeknote #358 – 9th January

Leave a comment

path

I was back at work after the festive break. In theory the first work day back was the 2nd of January, but I had taken leave on that day.

I had about twenty emails in my inbox (which was empty when I finished work in December). Took almost no time to clear as virtually all of them were notifications of some kind.

Across a lot of the country there was heavy snow and as you might expect closures of schools and colleges. I could mention all those blogs and podcasts I have written about snow, but not today. For me, though most of the week was icy cold, the sun was shining. Just one day of wind and rain.

I did manage to get to the Bristol office this week, which was quite busy so had a bit of  buzz in there.

I am continuing to look at data models in relation to student mobility. There are a couple of meetings next week that I was preparing for.

campus
Image by 小亭 江 from Pixabay

I have been invited to speak at two events in the spring, about collaboration in higher education in a smart campus and estates context. Estates are not only a huge asset for higher education institutions, but also take up a large proportion of operating expenditure. Is there a way in which collaboration can offset some of those costs and improve the efficiency of how the estate is used.

Read a well researched report, and an article on Generation Alpha. I am not really a fan of generational generalisations. I am not sure how useful they are. I am reminded of the whole digital natives debate, which still seems to bear its ugly head every so often. When you consider that, according to the Prensky definition, 60% of UK academic staff in UK universities are digital natives. You could even argue that the figure is closer to 80%…

Grouping people together and assuming that they will behave in a similar way, isn’t really that helpful.

stuff

e-Learning Stuff: Top Ten Blog Posts 2025

Leave a comment

Usually at this time I would publish a blog post of the top ten posts of the previous twelve months. However WordPress have stopped doing free stats for blogs that show adverts. So I don’t have detailed stats about the top posts.

In 2025 I published 63 blog posts. In 2024 I posted 70 posts on the blog. In 2023 I wrote 89 posts on the blog. There were 92 posts in 2022, 113 blog posts in 2021. In 2020 I had written 94 blog posts. In 2019 I had written 52 blog posts which was up from 2018 when I only wrote 17 blog posts.

Blog traffic in 2025 was double what it was in 2024.

weeknotes

It’s coming home – Weeknote #355 – 19th December

Leave a comment

The big news for me this week was the news that the UK will be (re)joining Erasmus+. The UK lost access to Erasmus following Brexit but this announcement means that in 2027 UK students will be able to study in the EU more easily. So what does the Erasmus announcement mean for UK higher education and for Jisc. I wrote up some thoughts from me on this.

We had our team Christmas meal and get together this week. Usually quite challenging for us to get everyone in the same place, as we are quite a geographically distributed team, even this time we didn’t have everyone. 

I continued my work into a student data model and the work SURF over in the Netherlands have done on this and the accompanying OOAPI. 

I also had some final meetings of the year with my European colleagues on various projects we are working on and potential routes to funding.

As the year comes to a close, the whole sector goes dark, as people take leave for the holidays. It is quite nice in some respects as virtually everyone takes the two weeks off, so there is little email and Teams messages.

news

It’s coming back

1 Comment

Some thoughts from me on the news that the UK will be joining Erasmus+. So what does the Erasmus announcement mean for UK higher education and for Jisc.

Since Brexit the number of EU students attending UK higher education institutions fell sharply.

Brexit’s effects on student demographics also tell an alarming story. EU student degree intake in the UK has more than halved. From a vibrant community of over 150,000 in 2020-21 (the final year when home fees applied), the total EU-citizen enrolment slipped to just 75,000 by 2023-24, with a larger fall in first-year enrolment. EU students, once representing a quarter of all international students, have now shrunk to less than a tenth. While UK universities have not suffered financially and indeed have compensated by increasing income from non-EU international student fees, the transformation runs deeper than balance sheets.1

Re-joining Erasmus could potentially see the number of EU students attending UK universities increase, possibly back to even pre-Brexit levels.  However, with the international student levy, we may see an overall decline in international student numbers.

One of the interesting aspects of re-joining Erasmus is the implications of this on the plan in the EU for a European Education Area where students can move between institutions and study when and where they want to. Despite the pre-eminence of national agendas in the education space, the EU Commission is looking to improve and enable greater student mobility. There has been substantial work on this by the various European University Alliances across the EU, the European Digital Education Hub 2, and it wouldn’t surprise you by the various NRENs across Europe as well.

Of course in the UK (well England), we have our own plans for student mobility with the LLE 3.

Europe has already undertaken a lot of work in the mobility space with the implementation of the European Higher Education Interoperability Framework 4.  What the Erasmus news means is that student mobility between the EU and the UK will be easier (and cheaper) than it was, and the EU ambitions in relation to student mobility does mean that the UK should be thinking how UK higher education could be aligned to what is happening in Europe.

1 https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20251021121022353

2 https://education.ec.europa.eu/focus-topics/digital-education/action-plan/european-digital-education-hub

3 https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/for-providers/student-protection-and-choice/lifelong-learning-entitlement/

4 https://education.ec.europa.eu/focus-topics/digital-education/digital-education-hub/workshops-and-working-groups/interoperability-framework

weeknotes

Writing stuff – Weeknote #354 – 12th December

Leave a comment

Road with houses

Took some leave this week, so a shorter week than normal. Did spend two days in Bristol where we had some Christmas festivities happening. Nice to see people I hadn’t seen in a while.

Spent time looking at and understanding various data models and standards. Over the last few weeks I have been looking at data models. This made me reminisce about the work I did back in the day with the Western Colleges Consortium, which I wrote about.

I also was reviewing some policies this week as well.

I had some mandatory training come up as well. My usual tactic with this is to just get it done and dusted, rather than procrastinating about it, avoiding all those email reminders and management messages on non-compliance and completion.

I found an WonkHE article on insolvency interesting and the current state of thinking at government and by others on what would happen if a university was to fail. I wrote up my thoughts. 

Typewriter
Image by Patrik Houštecký from Pixabay

I am trying to do more writing, on this blog, for internal communications, and potentially other places well.

stuff

Insolvency on the horizon

Leave a comment
abandoned room
Image by Rudy and Peter Skitterians from Pixabay

I found this WonkHE article on insolvency interesting and the current state of thinking at government and by others on what would happen if a university was to fail.

Insolvency legislation “permits continued trading” if a university enters compulsory liquidation. How so?

The view of the Minister

“…were an organisation to enter into compulsory liquidation, we believe that insolvency legislation permits continued trading during that period of compulsory liquidation. It would mean, therefore, that we would be able, as I have described, to support students, to support research and the important capacity of that provider during the period of liquidation, and to make sure particularly that students had the opportunity to be supported through a teach-out of their course, to be supported to move elsewhere, and to have their records and their achievements protected.”

I did think this from Mills & Reeve was interesting as well.

“The vast majority of entities operating as HEIs are not able to go into an insolvency process, save possibly for liquidation. This is because they are mostly incorporated by Royal Charter or are HECs, and are not therefore companies under the insolvency legislation.”

There was news a few weeks back that there were some universities on the verge of bankruptcy. We still really don’t know what will happen if an HEI fails. The smaller failures in higher education we have seen before have been private companies.

From a digital and technology perspective, could a failed institution continue to maintain a secure and stable infrastructure for example? You can well imagine professional services staff leaving, both as the organisation was wound down, but also as they moved to new and more secure jobs.

We know that the OfS perspective in England is to protect the needs of the student, hence the talk of “teach-out” and supporting students move to other providers. I do think that the actual process will depend a lot on the geographical location of the failed provider. For example, a provider in a large metropolitan area offers students more options, whereas a sole provider in a larger rural part of the country, there are less options.

I do think though that a better option is to avoid reacting and being more proactive in avoiding insolvency. This does mean thinking very differently about the way the university as a business is managed and transforming the operating model to something that is a lot more sustainable. Of course the challenge with that is though there are lots of similarities between higher education institutions, there are enough substantial differences, meaning there isn’t one model with fits all.

stuff

Reminiscing about the Consortium

2 Comments

Over the last few weeks I have been looking at data models. This made me reminisce about the work I did back in the day with the Western Colleges Consortium. We had seven different college student record systems sending us student data which was then uploaded to a shared VLE. 

This was twenty five years ago, so though I am reminiscing, I this was some time ago, so I don’t remember all the details and I am probably misremembering some of this. The essence of what we did was that each night, each student record system would run a routine which would create an XML file of the student details, this would then be sent via secure FTP to our server which would collate all seven XML files into a single XML file and upload the student data to the VLE. It would both create new users, delete redundant users, and update where necessary.

What was key I think was that, though the student record systems had quite a lot of detail about the student, we didn’t need that information for the shared VLE. This was about accessing a system, we didn’t need ti know their date of birth, address and so on.

There were some challenges I remember in providing a course identification so that when the user was created on the VLE they would then have access to their courses only on the VLE.

It was certainly considered quite innovative at the time, and myself and others did a number of presentations about what we did.

Back then we didn’t have single sign on, so students would have to have another password in addition to the one they used to log into the college computers. Interoperability was something new to me back then and it was an interesting time in which I realised the many technical challenges in building an interoperable learning environment. One challenge for us was that the technical development in this area was very much focused on the single institution model and ensuring the institutional systems could talk (interoperate) with each other. The concept of a multi-institutional model was a step too far.

In the end the Western Colleges Consortium became defunct. The main reasons were college mergers, the seven became four, this made the financial model unsustainable. The shared platform wasn’t meeting the needs of the students and the requirements of the consortium. Finally, the compromises of collaboration were decided to be a barrier to further VLE usage and take up.

Today the core internal interoperability challenges appear to have been solved. Attending the 1EdTech conference in Delft earlier this year demonstrated to me how mature these educational standards have become.

With the changes in technology and the requirements of student mobility today (think LLE) means that the interoperability requirements have just gone up another level, as has the need for deeper collaboration. What does this mean, well that’s another blog post.

weeknotes

Discovering – Weeknote #353 – 5th December

Leave a comment
coffee
Image by David Schwarzenberg from Pixabay

This week was the first week in quite a while that I didn’t have any serious travelling, actually checking the diary the last time I had a week with no travelling was the second week in October.

Spent much of the week looking at data models. This made me reminisce about the work I did back in the day with the Western Colleges Consortium. We had seven different college student record systems sending us student data which was then uploaded to a shared VLE. Back then we didn’t have single sign on, so students would have to have another password in addition to the one they used to log into the college computers. Interoperability was something new to me back then.

Joined an interesting meeting that I helped broker between the UK admissions organisation UCAS and the Finnish NREN CSC. One of the use cases in the European Higher Education Interoperability Framework is on discovery and application.

Blenheim Palace
Image by Ad Vertentie from Pixabay

In a conversation with a colleague last month they mentioned the potential impact of AI on estate data, something they thought I might be interested in, in relation to my long history with the intelligent campus. At the recent HE Transformation Expo in Birmingham I was talking to my fellow presenters and they also mentioned this. So, where to start, well I did a quick Google search and an article came up in my search results: Oxford Brookes University expertise in AI helps Blenheim Palace. I wrote a short blog post on Intelligent Visitor Attractions.