This week I was off to Amsterdam once more, this time for the GÉANT CTO workshop which I was helping to deliver a session for.
I spent time on Monday reviewing the two events I had attended in London and Birmingham over the last two weeks. What they were like, who was there, and what (if any) were implications for Jisc.
Tuesday I flew out from Bristol to Amsterdam. This is quite a quick flight. I had anticipated a lengthy wait at passport control, but it wasn’t that bad in the end. They did have the new EES system, which meant scanning my face and fingerprints. I thought that would be that, but I then had to go through the automated passport gate, which didn’t work for me. So, it was then to a manned passport booth. Got my passport stamped (which I thought EES would stop, maybe it will, but not at the moment).
Prior to the workshop I spent time preparing going through my notes and the presentation slides we were going to use in our session. I also had various online (and in-person) meetings as well.
The workshop went very well, with lots of positive comments about the approach and lot less resistance than expected.
I have also been looking at student data models and how SURF in the Netherlands approach this with regard to sharing data about students, courses and other aspects of education. A very different approach compared to the UK.
I had an afternoon flight back to the UK, so didn’t get back too late.
This week I was up in Birmingham for a conference. The HE Transformation Expo was a new event, and I was on a panel session entitled: Is Your Estate Working for You? Deploying Smart Campus Capabilities at Scale to Meet Efficiency Objectives.
We had a good session and an excellent discussion.
The event was at the NEC was part of a larger schools and academies show. This was much more a trade exhibition than a traditional conference, well it was described as an Expo. The sessions I watched were well attended, with standing room only. There was the challenge of delivering and listening to sessions against the noise of the event itself, but headphones were provided.
I did have some interesting conversations, as well as listening to some good sessions. The need for collaboration was across many of the sessions, the challenge of how you deliver on that aspiration was also there too.
Unfortunately I had some online meetings I needed to attend, and there wasn’t really any space at the Expo for such a meeting. I had planned to take the call in the speaker lounge, alas the lounge was just a fenced off area within the hall with tables, chairs and some really bad coffee. There were no other suitable spaces within the NEC, so I had to head back to my hotel for the call. Usually I try and avoid having meetings whilst at a conference, but sometimes this isn’t always possible.
I was lucky in that the cold weather didn’t impact on my travel arrangements however really felt that winter was now upon us.
Spent time planning for next week, I am attending a GÉANT workshop in Amsterdam.
Much of this week was spent in London. Monday I was in our London office, and on Tuesday and Wednesday I was at the WonkHE Festival of Higher Education where I was speaking on a panel about collaboration.
I really enjoyed attending the WonkHE Festival of Higher Education and I am slightly sad that they are taking a fallow year in 2026. What works for me is the structure and format of the range of sessions that happen across the conference. I like the interview format of the keynote sessions which is different to the usual kinds of keynotes we see at other conferences. There was a dearth of PowerPoint slides in most sessions, which I liked. Sometimes slides dominate a session rather than enhance it.
My session was on how to collaborate, which seemed to go down well. Also decent audience for a penultimate session on the final day. The only issue for me was that I had a bad cough all week which meant that I had virtually lost my voice and did have trouble speaking in the session, a number of people referenced my radio voice.
I particularly enjoyed the final session about where will higher education be in 2050. There was an amusing lively debate on the discord channel for this conference session. It reminded me of how we would use what was the Twitter back in the early 2010s at conferences.
At the end of the week I braved the rain and delayed trains to get to the office in Bristol.
This week I was in Amsterdam for a GÉANT workshop on education and their strategy.
As I was anticipating that the new Entry/Exit System (EES) would be in place at Schiphol Airport I didn’t want to take a late flight to Amsterdam or try and get there first thing on the day of the workshop. Though the EES wasn’t in place at Schiphol, it still took me longer to get out of the airport after landing then the time if took to fly from Bristol.
I had a late flight back, so spent the afternoon of Thursday working in the GÉANT office.
Next week I am in London for the WonkHE Festival of Higher Education where I am speaking on a panel about collaboration. I am doing some preparation for that.
Saw on WonkHE that Nestlé had undertaken a survey on student coffee drinking habits, now I had to read that. With my intelligent campus and learning spaces work I have visited many different university campuses, one constant feature was coffee shops, sometimes chains such as Starbucks and Costa, other times it was home brewed coffee places. Of course, all were selling espresso based drinks. I look back at my university experience in the late 1980s and I trying to recall what was available back then. There wasn’t any espresso type coffee on sale, and I suspect that it was probably filter coffee, or even instant.
Just to note I did write an interesting blog piece on coffee analytics a couple of years ago and could we combine data on coffee drinking (along with snacks and tea) with other student data sets to better understand the student experience. I actually think we could still do that. I wrote some more on that here.
On Monday I was in London, along with my colleague, I was delivering a presentation about Jisc to a delegation of Koreans from KERIS. They were on a study tour of the UK and had asked to see Jisc and hear about who we support higher education. It was an interesting experience presenting and then waiting for the translation, before continuing the delivery. Likewise answering question was equally challenging. I wrote up about the visit for an internal blog.
I was involved in various meetings about a workshop I am helping to deliver next week in Amsterdam.
I spent a lot of time analysing the recent higher education white paper and what it means for higher education, Jisc, and what we can do to support the sector. There was a lot of discussion in the paper about collaboration and sharing.
I noted that Advance HE are getting into the collaboration space as announced on the WonkHE site.
On the site this morning, Alistair Jarvis sets out for the first time his plans for Advance HE to focus its offer to members on transformation and change. Recognising that the sector’s challenges will necessitate significant transformation agendas, innovation and a different set of leadership skills, Jarvis commits to modernising the sector’s development agency and putting transformation and change “at the heart of what Advance HE does.” A new strategic advisory group will support in-house expertise to embed transformation support across all Advance HE’s programmes, products, and services.
There are some interesting comments in the article and the primary focus of Advance HE now to be on transformation and change (rather than improvement).
Firstly, we have made supporting transformation and change a core part of our membership offer.
They indicate that they will do this by:
Supporting enhancement, change and transformation will now be at the heart of what Advance HE does – embedded across our member benefits, our programmes and our consultancy. To help institutions through these challenging times we will apply our expertise, experience and resources to best support enhancement and service improvement, where it is needed.
As we know transformation is usually enhanced and enabled by digital, data and technology. The next comment shows a potential opportunity for Jisc as well.
Collaborating with partner organisations that are supporting transformation and change will be central to our approach. Blending our expertise in leadership development, educational excellence, equality and inclusion, governance effectiveness with the experience of partners that have different but complementary skills and capabilities.
They also see that they have a role for mergers as well as less formal collaboration as well.
…we have launched the Merger Insights and Roadmap, a new resource for navigating institutional collaboration, partnerships and mergers.
The big story this week was the publication of the e government’s post-16 education and skills white paper.
What is in the post-16 education and skills white paper for higher education? Well WonkHE as per usual does a really good job of analysing what was in it for higher education.
In terms of strategic ambition, there are five objectives for the sector: economic growth, a high quality experience, national capability via specific research and skills development, regional impact, and an increase in international standing. In the international domain, these translate into global standing, nationally to government goals on growth, security and skills, regionally to meeting skills needs through collaboration, and at provider level, to specialisation and efficiency.
There was much discussion about collaboration and sharing by providers, as well as a focus on specialisation.
Though the news about increased fees will be welcomed by institutions, I wonder what the reaction will be from prospective students. Yes, student fee debt, is not really debt as often explained by Martin Lewis, but as he says the amount you borrow is mostly irrelevant day to day – it works more like a tax. The reality is that extra 9% tax on earnings above £25,000 will make a difference, in terms of things like mortgage affordability, but also when comparing graduate income levels to non-graduate income levels. Throw in the temptations of a degree apprenticeship where there are no fees and debts (and you get paid). Could we see a paradigm shift in young people going to university? There is no longer talk about 50% of young people going to university, this has been swapped with the two-thirds under-25 participation in higher-level learning.
Next week we have a Korean delegation from KERIS visiting us in our London offices. With over twenty five delegates there was some logistical stuff to sort out, as well as my travel.
I continued working on the E in NREN project, planning for two workshops in November, as well as thinking about a session at TNC 26 in Helsinki in June next year.
At the end of the week I was in Glasgow for the Association for Learning Technology Conference (ALT-C). This year it is both shorter than usual, later than usual. Unlike previous conferences, it is taking place in a hotel rather than an university. In the past ALT-C was a three day conference, this year it was concentrated into two days.
I really enjoyed and got a lot out of the conference. I have been part of this community for over twenty years, attending my first ALT-C back in 2003.
Though I tested negative for covid I am still feeling the after effects of having had covid. I am not too surprised by this as my last experience with covid back in 2021 was horrific. This week though I was mainly working from home. I had planned to get to the Bristol office, but there were some issues with the car park.
I spent time planning various trips, conferences, events and visits that are happening over the next few months.
I was supporting the planning and design of some workshops that will take place in Amsterdam in November.
Next week I am in Glasgow for ALT-C. I didn’t go last year for various reasons, though I did enjoy attending in 2023 at Warwick. I am not presenting, but am interested in having conversations about collaboration, sharing, and student mobility.
The week before I was quite unwell with covid. I was getting better, so I did another test and this one came back negative. I wasn’t 100%, but I did think I was well enough to travel to Birmingham for a couple of days. We had a team away day on Tuesday and an all staff conference on the Wednesday.
Jisc is very much a hybrid geographically distributed organisation across the UK, so more often than not, conversations and discussion is over Teams. So, it makes a nice change to actually meet in person and chat and discuss stuff.
On Monday the day before I headed off to Birmingham, we had a meeting about collaboration. I was reminded of the article I wrote on blocking collaboration back in 2022.
Collaboration is defined in the dictionary as: traitorous cooperation with an enemy. That may not mean what we think when we say collaboration. Of course there is another definition which is: the action of working with someone to produce something.
I concluded that collaboration does require teams to plan and think about their ways of working. Compromises have to be made to ensure effective collaboration. You have to trust, and trust is a two way street.
It is looking like I will be travelling to the Netherlands quite a bit over the next few months delivering workshops and attending various meetings. One of things I will need to do before all that is renew my passport. In theory I have just under three months left on my passport, reality is that I need to have at least three months left on my passport if I am going to travel. I will be losing my nice burgundy passport and getting a new blue one.
The BBC reports on an UCU analysis which shows universities have collectively announced more than 12,000 job cuts in the last year. The article discusses not just the closure of courses, but also cuts to services for students. Could the ongoing financial crisis for the sector actually become worse, as some young people decide that an deprecated student experience isn’t the experience that they want from university, and choose a different path.
Felt rough on Monday, signed myself off sick, read this BBC report, and said to myself, James you’ve got Covid.
If you feel unwell with a bad throat and a temperature you may well have caught one of the new strains of Covid circulating this autumn. XFG, called Stratus by some, and NB.1.8.1, known as Nimbus, are now the most common variants being passed around in the UK, according to officials, external.
This week I was in the Netherlands in the main for a GÉANT TF-EDU (Education Taskforce) meeting but was also attending the 1EdTech Learning Impact conference before ending the week meeting up with Dutch colleagues from SURF.
I was quite impressed that Amsterdam was only a one hour flight time from Bristol to Amsterdam, so spent longer at Bristol waiting for boarding, and just as long at Amsterdam going through passport control. You have to say the process of doing this at one end for the Eurostar and DFDS ferries at Dover makes the disembarkation process so much faster.
The first part of the week was spent in Delft, which I have never been to before. It’s a beautiful city, though as is the case with attending meetings and conferences, I spent a lot of time in the conference venue, with just a short amount of time to explore and enjoy the sights of Delft.
I hadn’t originally planned to attend 1EdTech Learning Impact conference when I was doing my conference planning earlier in the year, but it was recommended to me by my SURF colleagues and when I looked over the programme I saw that my CEO Heidi was presenting.
Though the education landscape across Europe has a lot of similarities with the UK there are also lots of differences.
When I was at the Western Colleges Consortium back in the 2000s I was very much aware of the standards issues and interoperability. Now looking at the current landscape, standards and interoperability at an institutional level is mature.
Whereas standards and interoperability at a national level is challenging, especially in relation to student mobility and LLE requirements. Though students can move between institutions it is a difficult process with a lot of duplication and repetition. Access, authentication, and authorisation also becomes a barrier rather than an enabler. Standards and interoperability at an international level is virtually non-existent, especially in relation to student mobility.
Alongside the planned meetings and the conference, I also engaged in various side meetings and conversations with European colleagues, and UK based delegates.
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