Category Archives: weeknotes

weeknotes

A more holistic approach – Weeknote #362 – 6th February 2026

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Venice
Grand Canal in Venice

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.

Jisc Offices in Portwall Lane, Bristol
Jisc Offices in Portwall Lane, Bristol

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!

weeknotes

Positioning Interoperability – Weeknote #361 – 30th January 2026

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This week I made it to the Bristol office to work and meet with colleagues. I had a chance meeting with a member of the OpenAthens team which was useful and we sat down and had a discussion about trust and identity. I do like going to the office, and have decided I will try and get in more than I have been going. I think the wet weather probably puts me off. The other aspect is that if I have a lot of online meetings, then actually going into the office is makes that more challenging, as I would need to book a meeting room, and on some days, when the office is busy, there are fewer meeting rooms available.

I wrote an article on Erasmus+ for the internal comms team, which did draw on the article I wrote for this blog back in December.

I did write three blog posts this week. The first was on students’ perceptions of their providers’ response to financial challenges.

What this report and analysis is showing is that student satisfaction is being impacted by the financial situation in higher education.

The second was on the news from the University of Nottingham about their course closures and staff student ratios.

The university is planning to consolidate the number of faculties from five to three and reduce the number of courses that are delivered at the university by suspending recruitment on 42 courses. 

The two stories are somewhat linked. The financial crisis impacting on the higher education sector is not just about numbers and figures, it is about people. As well as the impact on staff and redundancy, we are also seeing the negative impact on the student experience and student satisfaction. Alas, this can be a somewhat downward spiral if we see student numbers drop. Having said that the news from UCAS this week was 338,940 UK 18-year-olds have applied for university – a record high and 4.8 per cent more than the 323,360 that applied in 2025. That increase though is driven by demographics, the number of 18 year olds in 2026 is largest for 35 years. Probably better to look at the application rate as a percentage of that demographic, and then the figure has remained relatively static at 40.7%, it was 40.6% in 2025. There was a peak of 42.8% in 2022. What we can say then is the rise in applications is down to population growth.

Going forward if applications stay around the 40% mark then we will in the future see the number of applications fall. Of course not all of those 40% actually go to university and then there are others who will choose later to go having not made an UCAS application.  The recent government white paper no longer talks of the 50% going to university but does talk about 67% undertaking some form of higher level education. What does that look like going forward?

The third blog post was on generalisations and assumptions.

As I said earlier, as a society technology and digital has become more embedded into our lives, the concept of post-digital echoes the sentiment that as technology becomes part of our everyday lives, the less we see it as technology. At the end of the day we are probably all digital now, living in a post-digital world.

I have been looking at the European Higher Education Interoperability Framework, in the main for the work I have been doing in the E in NREN landscape, but also how it could support LLE in the future. It is also been used within the UCISA work on the student data model.

I have been researching and planning some position papers on the European Higher Education Interoperability Framework, looking at the current UK landscape and what Jisc is doing or could do in that landscape.

I have also been having discussions about collaboration and sharing. One question that sometimes comes up, is do we know how to collaborate?

Though there has been ample talk about collaboration and sharing, it is one of those things that is probably easy to talk about and more difficult to actually do. Part of the challenge is how universities are inconsistent in their approaches to managing themselves, which then makes it even more challenging to work together or collaborate.

We need to remind ourselves that collaboration and sharing within higher education isn’t the problem we need to solve, it is in fact a solution (and not the only solution) to a (probably not well defined) problem. We need to be clear about the problem, define that problem, and then we can start thinking about possible solutions, one of which may be collaboration and sharing.

weeknotes

Competing collaborators – Weeknote #360 – 23rd January

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This week I was working from home. There was lots of rain and wind. The space I had gave me time to write up the workshop I attended last week. The write up also included the work I have been doing and the meetings I have had in this space over the last two months. I also had a number of meetings on the work.

This week I also presented at a GÉANT webinar on education. My part was discussing about possible alignment with existing funded work by NRENs across Europe. There is real diversity across the NERNs in Europe about the services they provide for higher education and research. Some, like Jisc, provide a range of education based services, others go further and even provide VLEs. There are though many NRENS whose primary area is research. Obviously it’s not that education doesn’t happen in that country, but that responsibility is down to other organisations.

Image by rawpixel from Pixabay
Image by rawpixel from Pixabay

On Friday the CMA (Competition and Markets Authority) published guidance on collaboration in higher education. This clarity about collaboration within the sector has to be welcomed. The law has not been changed, but the clarification can provide reassurance to the sector that looking to work together, sharing services and resources, as well as more formal collaboration is potentially possible. Part of me though does wonder, if the apprehension about collaboration was using the CMA and competition law as an excuse for not looking at collaboration rather than an actual reason not to collaborate. This new guidance mitigates that excuse now.

weeknotes

Standardised – Weeknote #359 – 16th January

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Was in London this week for a workshop looking at a standardised student data model. It linked into my work on E in NREN and LLE. This ideal of a student data model isn’t new, nor is it just about the data. There are cultural and planning issues that need to be addressed.

I have been talking to SURF in the Netherlands about lots of different things, including the data model work. However, this week I also had a constructive meeting about their OOAPI specification and hub.

Had a really interesting discussion with Lawrie about the government white paper on higher education. I was reminded of what I wrote back in October.

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.

Another thing I wrote was:

There was much discussion about collaboration and sharing by providers, as well as a focus on specialisation.

What was more challenging was not necessarily coming up with ideas or solutions to the challenges set out in the white paper, but what was the role of Jisc in all this.

Of course the underlying challenge that the sector is facing is one of financial sustainability.

weeknotes

No Snow – Weeknote #358 – 9th January

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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.

weeknotes

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

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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.

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Writing stuff – Weeknote #354 – 12th December

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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.

weeknotes

Discovering – Weeknote #353 – 5th December

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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.