I started off the week with a cross-sector agency meeting on widening participation.

I spent most of the week travelling. I was visiting various places and universities as part of a scoping piece of work I am doing in the Intelligent Campus space. It was also an opportunity to look at the physical campuses of various universities following two years of conversations over Zoom.

Dave Foord on a mailing list posted a link to a blog post he had written last month on three organisations he was supporting to return to Moodle having switched to a different VLE and then finding that  the “problems” that the new VLE was supposed to solve, hadn’t actually been solved. It reminded me of many similar conversations I have had in the past about changing VLEs. Often lack of engagement with a VLE is placed at the door of the VLE, so the conclusion is that switching the VLE is the answer. It usually isn’t.

Jim Dickinson (of WonkHE) created and crowdsourced a really interested and useful Twitter thread.

OK folks let's do a bit of crowdsourcing on how universities might help reduce students' costs this coming year. All ideas – big and small – welcome. Let's get this thread to 100 policy ideas.

— Jim Dickinson (@jim_dickinson) July 14, 2022

My contribution was about students being able to use their “local” campus rather than their “actual” campus.

Another option would be to allow commuter students to access their local college or university campus to study rather than commute to their ‘actual” campus.

— James Clay (@jamesclay) July 14, 2022

I spent some of the week reviewing our new guide to the Intelligent Campus, and the revamped guide to the Intelligent Library. The library guide was never published but has been updated for 2022. I am aiming for publication of these in the autumn.

My top tweet this week was this one.

Supporting organisations who dropped Moodle, but are now switching back – Dave Foord’s Weblog https://t.co/GVmP8e0j9b

— James Clay (@jamesclay) July 13, 2022