Category Archives: weeknotes

Is there an appetite for collaboration? – Weeknote #309 – 31st January 2025

This week I attended the joint HEPI and Jisc webinar: Competition or collaboration? Opportunities for the future of the higher education sector. This was building on the Collaboration for a sustainable future report we recently published.

The appetite for collaboration and sharing appears to be growing, but as with any change, people want change, but don’t necessarily want to change. The more radical the change, the more resistant people become it would appear. However to maximise the benefits of collaboration, then very likely we will need some radical change.

One thing I have been thinking about is the barrier of identity. When you collaborate, do you lose your institutional identity. This actually brings back to the table the importance of personalisation.

I have continued to research, plan, and start writing an initial draft for higher education state of activity internal report. The challenge is how much to include and how much detail to put in there.

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Image by Photo Mix from Pixabay

I have also been researching data standards for teaching and learning, and corporate systems. The more I do, the more I realise I don’t know.

Managed to get to the Bristol office twice this week, Wednesday was very busy, and as you might expect Friday was less so.

Raising the standards – Weeknote #308 – 24th January 2025

I was off to London again this week. I was attending an 1EdTech Event in London, Innovate your way out of the funding crisis. This was my first engagement with the standards community for some time. Before I joined Jisc and when I was working in Further Education I did a lot of work looking at standards in relation to moving student data around so it could be imported into the VLE. Then there were standards for learning objects and ensuring that they would work on the VLE, both importing and exporting the right data. I also being very impressed with LTI and what it would enable in allowing students to use a WordPress installation for blogging. Blogging, what was that, and is it still around?

We are starting work on a collaborative project with UUK on collaboration. Part of that is reviewing the original terms of reference and bringing in a consultant to undertake some of the work as well.

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Image by fancycrave1 from Pixabay

I have been spending time researching, planning and writing initial draft for a higher education state of activity report.

In February Jisc has one of its regular meetings with the OfS and I have been preparing some notes for that meeting.

Spent time on the planning and logistics for a workshop I am attending in Helsinki in February. The workshop is about NRENs for Education. NRENs are the National Research and Education Networks that most countries have for connecting their universities and research institutes. In the UK Jisc is the NREN. This workshop is bringing together a group of like-minded NRENs to work together on essentially student mobility.

I am anticipating that Helsinki will be cold. I have been before, for an EU e-Learning Conference which took place in July 2006 in Finland. I reminisced about that conference back in a weeknote in July 2019.

I also signed up for TNC in Brighton in June. It’s the first TNC I go to, and it’s in the UK. Reminds me when I got funding to go to the international conference mLearn, and the year I went, it was in Dudley.

I haz a cold… – Weeknote #307 – 17th January 2025

The week started off well, but by the end of the week I was off sick with a bad cold.

Have been having meetings with UUK in regard to strand two of the work of UUK’s Taskforce on Efficiency and Transformation in Higher Education. Strand two covers: Developing detailed business cases on options for national collaboration, which will be externally published, and will give the sector clear paths towards transformation. This builds on the recent report I worked on, Collaboration for a sustainable future which looked at collaboration and shared services.

On Thursday, decided I would get to London for our team away day. It was exhausting and certainly I regret a little bit in heading off there feeling rough as I did.

Snow time for regrets – Weeknote #306 – 10th January 2025

Well first week back at work after the two week break for festivities. I nearly wrote first week back in the office, but with hybrid working, I suspect for some, this first day still means working from home. Also in various parts of the country the snow and flooding would make commuting challenging Personally I headed to our Bristol office. We still have a choice of where we can work with hybrid contracts, but I read yesterday about how many companies are now forcing or requiring staff to come into the office.

This was covered in a Guardian article, ‘It didn’t come as a surprise’: UK workers on being forced back into the office.

Some welcome cuts to hybrid working but others feel less productive and are considering change of job or country.

Many employers are mandating the return to the office, in this other piece on the Guardian website.

The post-festive return to work in the dark days of January is never easy, but this new year is shaping up to be tougher than usual for UK workers. Not only must they brave days of severe cold and ice, but many face the end of post-pandemic hybrid working.

The article continues…

Such orders are provoking fresh battles between employees and their bosses, who believe staff need to be brought together to foster collaboration, creativity and a sense of belonging.

The challenge I find with that, is with a geographically distributed team, even when you are in the office you are spending a lot of time on online calls and meetings. The value in being physically in the office is lost.

I expanded on this on one of my other blogs.

Image by Anja from Pixabay

Lots of snow this week, however, I didn’t see much mention of university closures compared to say fifteen years ago when we had some really bad snow. I wrote about this.

So this week we’ve had some snow, but I suspect the disruption is still there, but the response from the sector will be influenced by that covid experience, to the point where the disruption can be minimised.

Met with our new Head of Research this week.

Universities need new ways to make their research pay. An interesting opinion piece on the FT about York looking to diversify their research income by looking to industry to fill that gap.

Public and private funding are both vital for institutions such as the University of York as international student fees fall. But cracks have appeared in York’s financial foundations in the past couple of years. It suffered a £9mn deficit last financial year amid a fall in the number of higher-fee international students on whom it relies to support research and teaching of UK students. It shed 275 jobs, mainly among administrative staff, as part of an unpopular restructuring.

Attended our regular internal Consultancy Forum where the Collaboration for a sustainable future report was discussed and the opportunities therein for possible consultancy in this space.

Spent much of the week I felt filling in a survey for a workshop. The survey was about Jisc activity across various spaces and planned activity.

I finished and completed Lead at Jisc management and leadership course I have been doing since last April.

Conditional creativity – Weeknote #303 – 20th December 2024

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Image by mohamed ramzee from Pixabay

An interesting blog post from WonKHE about the challenges that exist with restructuring higher education. It’s not as simple as we think it is. There is a lot of resistance and scepticism about merger that we have seen elsewhere as well.

Connect more: creating the conditions for a more resilient and sustainable HE sector in England

There is a startling dearth of law and policy around structural collaboration for HE; some issues such as the VAT rules on shared services, are well established, while others are more speculative. What would the regulatory approach be to a “federated” group of HE providers? What are merging providers’ legal responsibilities to students? What data and evidence might providers draw on to inform their planning?

Alignment, standardisation, rationalisation, and commonality, though requisite for merger, you don’t need to have merger to undertake the work to allow for greater alignment.

The Times Higher Education published an article about collaboration, and mentions the Jisc collaboration report by name.

A recent, comprehensive report on “collaboration for a sustainable future” by Jisc and KPMG celebrated more examples – but also made a compelling case for the sector to keep pushing itself on this.

In addition, Jisc is involved in and working with the Transformation and Efficiency Taskforce. I am working in collaboration with UUK on a joint project working on the following strand:

  • Developing detailed business cases on options for national collaboration, which will be externally published, and will give the sector clear paths towards transformation

The launch of the taskforce is on the UUK website as well. I like this quote:

“While institutions have been doing more and more to be as efficient as possible, they have largely been doing so at an individual level. Truly impactful transformation will best be delivered through partnership and collaboration at both a regional and a national level. It is time for some blue sky thinking on what that looks like.”

Breaking down the silos – Weeknote #302 – 13th December 2024

I wrote a blog post, So does your institution have a silo mentality? I wrote it after reading this article on the WonkHE about higher education silos, Institutional silos are making it harder to build learning environments for student success.

Ask any higher education institution leader about the organisational challenges they’re grappling with, and they’ll start talking about silos.

Though talking about silos, the article is more about integrating digital into learning and teaching.

Though as anyone knows breaking down silos is hard. We often think of grain silos, metal cylinders that are close together, they should be easy to break, shouldn’t they? I always now think of higher education silos as missile silos, embedded into reinforced concrete and dispersed across a wide area.

Breaking down silo working, isn’t just about saying, we need to break down the silos but is so much more about thinking strategically about what your organisation is trying to achieve.

After working from home at the start of the week, I went off to London. I was attending the BLE 20th anniversary event at Senate House.

The Bloomsbury Learning Exchange (BLE) brings together expertise to share good practice and enable collaboration in digital education and technology enhanced learning projects. We are a partnership comprising six Higher Education Institutions in Bloomsbury, central London. Essentially, the BLE is the community, and the BLE Executive Team facilitates the exchange as well as offering specific services to the partner institutions.

They have grown over the years and expanded their collaboration. It is a really good example of collaboration that doesn’t mean you have to create complex pseudo-organisations to manage a shared service. The core of the BLE is the memorandum of understanding.

I ran a similar collaboration back in 2000, called the Western Colleges Consortium, where the FE colleges in Avon shared a VLE. There are lots of lessons from that experience and the BLE that higher education probably should take on board for future collaborations, especially in the learning technology space. One of the key lessons is about keeping it simple, constant adaptation and tinkering, may in the short term resolve problems, but it is harder to then collaborate whern faced with a future challenging scenario.

I have done quite a few things with the BLE over the last twenty years, including a few things while I have been at Jisc. It was nice to see and hear about their success.

At the event I had a couple of interesting conversations. One was with a manager, who spoke about the challenges in joining collaborative ventures, and needing more support from senior management. We know that collaboration often needs to come from the top, but there is also the need to delegate that downwards, to enable collaboration at different levels in the organisation as well.

In another conversation someone provided feedback on the report, which he stated he “had read thoroughly” and even quoted lines from the report. He said it was an excellent report and much needed. This was nice to hear.

Did some more work on the UUK project, did some stuff with the KPMG report next steps, and created a template for the position papers for the E in NREN activity.

Similar working – Weeknote #301 – 6th December 2024

I can not quite believe that it is December already (or is that again). Guess it must just be an age thing.

Pretty much a similar week to last week. Took some leave, did some more work on the UUK project, did some stuff with the KPMG report next steps, and thought more about the position papers for the E in NREN activity.

Had a pre-emptive call with a university on Jisc’s “coalition of willing”, they were keen to participate and provided some useful insights into what this coalition could look like and what they would do.

Three hundred – Weeknote #300 – 29th November 2024

So this is weeknote number three hundred. When I started these weeknotes back in March 2019, I did wonder if I would keep it going. Well over five years later and three hundred posts later, I guess I have.

Still sorting things out with my new house, so I took some leave to deal with a couple of issues.

I will be working on a project with UUK on collaboration building on the report we did with KPMG. It will be interesting to see how this goes.

I undertook some scoping and planning on the E in NREN work I am doing over the next few months.

I have been reflecting on coalition of the willing, the report has catalysed a really positive response from many in the higher education sector. We need to think about how we can build on this to ensure that future collaboration takes place.