Across my career, I have come to realise the importance of scalability and ramping up ideas that will work with thousands of students well beyond the scope of an initial pilot or small scale project. I wrote this back in 2018 on scaling up pilots.

One lesson I would pass on, is if you are undertaking a small scale pilot is to reflect on how it would scale in the future. It’s not just about how the technology, device or process enhances and enriches teaching and learning, but what about all the other stuff. Logistics, charging, storage, training, support, staff development, sustainability, and end of life.

Much of that post was about scaling up institutional pilots to be delivered across the whole institution. Small scale pilots are useful, but thinking about scale and mainstreaming early on will avoid major headaches and challenges later.

Today, working for Jisc, I have come to appreciate the need to sometimes scale up not just small scale pilots, but institutional pilots to a national level.

In the area of interoperability that does mean when thinking about the eight use cases of the European Higher Education Interoperability Framework for example, this means not just scaling up at a national level, but also internationally.

Take use case one, discovery, in essence providing a course catalogue of available courses.

It is one thing to provide an institutional catalogue, thousands of courses for an institutional portal, it’s something else to provide a national portal for hundreds of thousands of courses. Scale up to an European level, and you could be talking millions of courses. 

The technology that would work within an institutional portal may not scale up to a national or international portal.

The challenge is that an institution looking at an institutional solution will probably not consider the issues that arise when scaling up to a national or international solution.