I spent most of the week working from home, it is exam time for some in the house, so I was around to provide lifts to early revision sessions, or to ensure functionality in case of delayed buses. I did plan to go into the office one day, but even though it was June, the weather forecast was for heavy rain and strong winds. My reasoning for going to the office was that I had a series of later afternoon meetings, so I would then have somewhere quieter to participate in them. In the end, two of those three (and the most participative) were cancelled, or not needed.
I actually like going to work in the office, the change in space, place, and routine, makes a difference to how I feel, or even my wellbeing.
I have been working on a concept Intelligent Campus Maturity Tool. Based on the Further Education elevation tool Jisc produced, the idea is that you can use the tool to assess your progress in building your smart campus. I have already identified the key themes and sub-themes; I am now working on competency statements for those different sub-themes. I am planning to run a workshop in the autumn to test out the tool with the community.
At the beginning of the week I was marking and moderating some bids for a tender we had out on the opportunities for collective, collaborative, and inter-institutional activity.
A couple of meetings were cancelled which gave me some time back.
I am currently taking a leadership course at Jisc, and this week I completed some more work on this.
Had a volunteering day on Friday. Jisc provides staff with three volunteering days a year. I use mine to support the administration of running a Cub Pack. This involves planning the programme, badge administration, risk assessments, and communicating with other organisations.
I spent most of the week working from home, it is exam time for some in the house, so I was around to provide lifts to early revision sessions, or to ensure functionality in case of delayed buses. I had intended to work in the office at least one day this week, but I was also expecting a call from the garage about my car, and it would have been easier to pick it up travelling from home, than from the office.
I am currently taking a leadership course at Jisc, and this week I completed some more units from the Institute of Leadership. I have extensive management and leadership experience, running teams of various sizes, complexity and geographically distributed. I have planned, designed, and delivered shared services for consortia and complex organisations. I have also managed multi-million pound budgets and projects. In addition I have delivered management and leadership training, both at Jisc, to universities, and was a Management and Business Studies lecturer back in the 1990s.
Having said all that there is still room to both learn new things and to update existing knowledge. I also want to affirm my understanding of leadership as well. The course has been useful for these things.
Had a couple of internal meetings this week, they were scheduled for longer than they actually took. Though it’s nice to have time back, it would be even better if we had that time back before the meeting took place. Planning meetings takes time for the person planning the meeting but can save a lot more time for those participating in that meeting. Do they even need to be in that meeting?
I have written about meetings over my Technology Stuff blog. Back in 2021 I reflected on an article by Atlassian on making meetings better, useful and interesting.
Running effective meetings isn’t simply a matter of doing the obvious things like sharing the agenda and starting on time. While those things are important, they’re just table stakes. The real key to running a great meeting is organizing and running them with a human touch – not like some corporate management automaton.
The perspective we can solve engagement issues by having meetings, and so we need to improve the online meetings, misses the key problem, which is the lack of engagement. This is a leadership and management challenge not just about improving online meetings. People have a personal responsibility to engage with corporate communication, give them choice, make it easier, but to think you solve it by having a meeting, is a similar thinking that people read all their e-mail.
The author, Professor Sir Chris Husbands, is the former vice-chancellor at Sheffield Hallam University. He develops four plausible scenarios for the future of English higher education and looks at what they could mean for students, universities and government.
Scenario 1 considers what happens on the current funding trajectory.
Scenario 2 looks at what a higher education sector fully funded for high participation, research and innovation might look like.
Scenario 3 explores the implications of a tertiary system.
Scenario 4 considers what a more differentiated system might look like.
I have written some scenarios up as future visions as prompts for discussion. The HEPI visions are much more near-future (and probably more realistic) than my visions. However my future visions are not supposed to be accurate predictions of the future, more as discussion pieces to prompt thinking about how higher education can change.
It’s long been assumed that whatever the outcome of the coming general election, fees would remain stuck in the freezer for the time being. We’ve pored over Public First polling that has neatly demonstrated how unpopular raising fees would be and concluded that no political party could feasibly contemplate this. But the ground is now shifting beneath our feet and I think a modest but significant fee rise looks more likely than ever.
I think that may happen, as a last resort if there are real possibilities of universities failing, as well as declining international student recruitment, then the (next) government may need to raise fees to ensure that universities survive financially.
I have been working on an Intelligent Campus Maturity Tool, this has required me to map out competency statements that institutions would require to assess their current state of readiness in relation to smart and intelligent campus.
Wrote a section for our board report on the work I have been doing.
I planned, prepared and then cancelled my Senior Education and Student Experience group meeting. I have now been asked to attend UUK Round Table on the same date.
Have been working on sub-themes for the proposed Intelligent Campus framework. This means taking the themes and breaking them down further.
This week was Connect More, I attended various Connect More sessions. Chaired a Connect More session on accessible maths, delivered by an old friend of mine, Lilian Joy. She described the challenges in teaching maths to the visually impaired. One insight was the use of tactile methods to teach maths, made easier due to the availability of cost effective 3D printing.
Continuing my work on the report on how universities could support their organisational change through the optimisation of their operations.
We are now in quarter four, so I did my Q3 paperwork for my Q3 review. These weeknotes were useful in helping with that.
I attended a review meeting for the Digital Elevation Model. Though not directly reviewing the model, I am using the meetings to inform and influence my work on the Intelligent Campus framework.
Read the UCU report on Academic Freedom in the Digital University.
Spent some time working on some draft themes for a possibly (maturity) framework for the intelligent campus.
I am a little but loathe to call it a maturity framework, as we really don’t confidently know what a mature intelligent campus looks like. However at this stage I don’t want to spend a lot of time thinking about a name, when there is much more to do with the framework.
I am planning to use the FE Digital Elevation Tool as a starting point. The first stage is to identify the main themes. This is what I arrived at, reflecting on the work I have done in this space for the last eight years.
Vision
Campus
Data
Digital
Technology
People
Activity
Policy
Process
Security
Ethics
Energy
Community
A theme has many sub-themes, so we could take people and break it down into staff and students.
Each sub-theme has many competencies. Competency has three statements and there are four responses to each statement.
Completed
In progress
Not started
Not a priority
This will take some time to work on, but I am planning to run some community events around this.
I rebooted my monthly Intelligent Campus newsletter on the Jiscmail. You can subscribe to the mailing list here.
I wrote a blog post about a Wonkhe article I read.
Across the country there are a real variety of university campuses. No two campuses are alike, but all have similar challenges that the Estates team have to work with. There was an interesting article from Wonkhe a few weeks back on what keeps your estates manager awake at night? from the incoming AUDE chair.
I also published some thoughts about personalisation.
I have been looking at what we mean by personalisation in higher education. What I have discovered is that there isn’t really any clear idea or definition of what we mean by personalisation and across the sector there are varied views and opinions about what is personalisation, what can be personalised, and importantly why we would do this.
We had our monthly team meeting.
I am recognising that now as I no longer use Twitter, that I am missing some articles and news that would have been shared on Twitter. I would also use the postings (especially of links) I made to Twitter to inform the writing of these weeknotes. I need to reflect on what this means going forward and if there is some other kind of mechanism I can use. I really don’t want to go back to the Twitter.
Shorter week next week with the bank holiday. I am chairing a session at Jisc’s Connect More event next week, so attended a rehearsal on how to use the platform we are using.
Shorter week this week with Easter Monday. Headed to the office on Tuesday after the long weekend and did some writing and planning. In the end (with what it being school holidays) I was in the office every day this week. With many people in Jisc on leave this week, and the same can be said for much of higher education it was a rather quiet week, which gave me time to focus on getting some research, analysis and writing done.
I did write a blog post about lecture capture and how you could do things more creatively.
The idea of capturing a lecture isn’t new. Even before the advent of dedicated lecture capture systems being installed across the campus some lecturers (and some students) would record the lecture onto cassette tape.
I have been thinking of using Jisc’s Digital Elevation Tool for FE in the Intelligent Campus space. So this week I started planning what needs to happen to make that happen. This involved looking at the scaffolding that the tool has and what would need to be in a campus version of the tool.
Is UK higher education really the world’s third most expensive way of getting a degree – and if it is, what might the alternatives look like?
One of the key questions that arises from different operating models, are higher education institutions prepared to change, and are they only going to change because they are forced to.
There’s a history of attempts to drive efficiency by sharing services – and precious little evidence of success.
When I started my work in this space, I came to similar conclusions that were in this article. However I do think just because that was the way things were, doesn’t mean that there isn’t opportunities in the future.
Did some analysis of various reports, articles, and links in relation to Optimising Operations and Data. I did a similar analysis of various reports, articles, and links in relation to Intelligent Campus.
I started the planning various reports in relation to Optimising Operations and Data.
I had a meeting about a proposed Intelligent Campus maturity framework.
I did some more field research on the Intelligent Campus.
A busy start to the week, I was attending HESCA 24 at the University of Loughborough. HESCA is the Higher Education Smart Card Association, primarily a membership organisation for vendors in the smart card and access card space.
There were some interesting talks and presentations. Some were from universities and others were from vendors. As the presentations were about fifteen minutes long, I didn’t make any sketch notes.
I was talking at the final session of the conference talking about the holistic approach to building a smart campus. Got some nice feedback from the session.
This week we also had our Senior Education and Student Experience Group Meeting. As a well as our usual what’s on your agenda discussion, we also looked at what the big challenge is for higher education and discussed two of the future visions I have been writing. Some interesting thoughts and commentary came out from that.
I had an initial discussion meeting with another university about a possible stakeholder workshop. I was also contacted by a colleague in Jisc about a different university for a conversation, who is also interested in this space. There is a lot of interest and demand in this area from universities across the UK.
I continued my work on optimising operations and data, undertaking further analysis of various reports, articles, and links. I did a similar thing with my work on the intelligent campus.
We had a team meeting, though meeting isn’t really the operative word here, much more a structured conversation and chat.
I was in the office on Friday which was quite busy, for a Friday, usually it is quite quiet.
I attended the Digital Elevation Model review meeting with colleagues from the FE side of Jisc.
I have been working on a series of visions about how universities could be working differently in the future. The aim of the visions is not to predict a future, but to provide an insight into a possible view of what that future could look like and think about how these impact on your current position and thinking. We did something similar for Learning and Teaching Reimagined, and though I wasn’t personally credited with the authorship of some of the visions, I did create and write the visions. I tested them out with a few people and got the reaction I wanted as well as stimulating an interesting discussion.
One of those visions was about organisations merging. Coincidently in the news this week was the news that City, University of London and St George’s, University of London have agreed a merger – the new institution will be called City St George’s, University of London and commence operations from 1 August, “though full integration will take longer.” Current City president Anthony Finkelstein will lead the combined institution.
There has been much talk about the four day week, in the Guardian this week was an article on how some firms have made their four day week trials permanent.
Most of the UK companies that took part in the world’s biggest ever four-day working week trial have made the policy permanent, research shows.
Reports from more than half the pilot organisations said that the trial, in which staff worked 100% of their output in 80% of their time, had a positive impact.
For 82% this included positive effects on staff wellbeing, 50% found it reduced staff turnover, while 32% said it improved job recruitment. Nearly half (46%) said working and productivity improved.
How can learning analytics – data systems that help understand student engagement and learning – be used to identify students who may be at risk of withdrawing from their studies, or failing their courses, and what interventions work to re-engage students in their studies?
The key findings from the report were:
Neither HEP found a measurable difference in post-intervention engagement rating between at-risk students who received an email followed by a support phone call and at-risk students who received only the email.
Neither HEP found any significant impact of the additional support call on the likelihood of a student generating additional at-risk alerts.
Qualitative feedback indicated that students welcomed the intervention. For some, the phone call was appreciated as a means of breaking down barriers between themselves and the institution and stimulating their re-engagement with learning. For others, the email alone was cited as a sufficient motivator to re-engage with learning.
A new study from TASO seeks to judge “what works” in the use of learning analytics for student support, exploring whether students identified by engagement data as being “at risk” were better supported by email and phone contact or email alone. Large cohorts of students at two providers, Sheffield Hallam University and Nottingham Trent University, were divided into two random groups. In both cases, it was found that an additional support call created no measurable difference in at-risk students’ subsequent engagement and no appreciable change in the likelihood of the student generating subsequent alerts.
It will be crucial to robustly test the impact of any wellbeing interventions that analytics systems may trigger.
As many people already well known, the environmental costs of generative AI is soaring, and that also being kept mostly secret. In Nature is an article about the impact AI will have on energy systems.
Last month, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman finally admitted what researchers have been saying for years — that the artificial intelligence (AI) industry is heading for an energy crisis. It’s an unusual admission. At the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Altman warned that the next wave of generative AI systems will consume vastly more power than expected, and that energy systems will struggle to cope.
Spent some time planning out Senior Education and Student Experience Group meeting for March.
Wrote a briefing update on the work I have been doing on the optimisation of operations and data work.
Had an interesting and informative conversation with a college about their smart campus aspirations.
Spent time planning next steps of my Intelligent Campus work.
Planning a meeting with an university for a follow up workshop on their smart campus planning, after successful workshop in January and their request for a 1-2 day cross university workshop.
Worked on creating and planning blog ideas in the personalisation space. Also worked on creating and planning senior management primer ideas in the personalisation space, and some use case ideas.
Spent time planning out ideas for Spaces events over the next 12 months.
Noted that this worknote represents five years of undertaking worknotes for the blog.
It was half term week in North Somerset, so I was off to the office for most of the week.
I posted a blog post What makes an intelligent campus? which was about the differences between a smart campus and a campus which is intelligent.
A dumb campus is merely a series of spaces and buildings. For example the heating comes on at 8am, off at 5pm, and is only switched on between November and March, regardless of the external temperature.
A smart campus uses data from the spaces and buildings to make decisions. For example, a thermostat controls the heating, as the room warms up, the heating turns off.
An intelligent campus uses data from across the organisation to make decisions and make predictions. For example, a team is out on an away day, so the intelligent campus, switches off the heating and lighting on that floor for that day.
I also updated a blog post I had written about the links between the university smart campus and the smart city (or smart community).
So how does the intelligent campus slot into the smart city? The reality is in many cities the campus and the city are not distinct spaces, and for many people they will move between city and campus across the day. If a university with an intelligent campus does not integrate or work with the smart city, then they won’t have the full picture and in some cases could be at odds with each other. Bringing in the full picture, all the data, a better understanding can be drawn from the experiences of the students and the city population at large.
Following on from the Intelligent Campus workshop I ran in January, the university has been back in touch to discuss planning a two day workshop with a wider range of stakeholders.
I had my Q2 review. As always, these notes come in useful for writing up that review.
I spent time reviewing the personalisation space I have on Dovetail and identifying gaps and further research required. The plan here is not to create the definitive guide to personalisation in higher education, but reflect on a shared understanding, the needs of the sector in this landscape, and where and how Jisc can help and support universities in moving to a more personalised student experience. I worked through a potential workplan and what the next steps are.
I have spent time working on learning spaces, and I undertook a second analysis of learning spaces scoping study we did last year, adding tags and insights to Dovetail space I have on learning spaces.
The smart campus is already here. Universities across the UK are already using technology, sensors and data analysis capability to prompt simple, automated actions such as adjusting heating, for example. The smart campus goes further than such simple actions and allows us to gather data about the spaces and, importantly, act on that data. We can turn down heating in rooms which aren’t being used, and the system will take into account the actual external temperature and not just the time of year. We can use electronic entry systems, such as swipe cards, to ensure the security of the rooms, but also to measure room occupancy. Similar occupancy data can be gleaned from campus wide wireless neteworks. We can also ensure that the lighting, heating and CO2 levels are within defined parameters. We often have insights into specific aspects of the smart campus, environmental conditions or room utilisation but these insights can be limited in what they can tell us. Most of the time, it isn’t all joined up and so has limited scope in terms of what we can learn and how we can use the knowledge to enhance and improve the student experience.
It’s a similar story with the smart city. Cities across the world are looking at how they can use technology to make transport and transit systems work for the people in that city. The Wikipedia definition of a smart city is “an urban development vision to integrate information and communication technology (ICT) and internet of things (IoT) technology in a secure fashion to manage a city’s assets”. Data from systems and sensors across a city can tell us some stories, about the use of transport, congestion, parking, pollution, health care, crime and a range of other functions and aspects of the modern city. Like the smart campus these insights and stories can be limited in scope, and often only give us part of the story.
Newcastle University worked with its local authority to develop a Cooperative Intelligent Transport System (CITS) leading to a “smart corridor”. This will mean that buses will be controlled by digital technology. This will allow buses to “talk to” traffic lights, maybe holding green lights for a short time or redirect drivers past congestion, improving journeys and reducing delays. Many of these smart city initiatives work in isolation, where real benefit comes is when the data from these systems is integrated and new possibilities emerge. It’s not always about systems talking to each other – if a system can utilise the data from another then maybe better informed decisions can be made.
There is a vision of universities moving from a smart campus, to a smarter campus, to the intelligent campus. An intelligent campus will take data from a range of sources, not just the physical aspects of the campus and how it is being used, but also the data from digital systems such as cohort information, attendance records, the virtual learning environment, the library, student records, even Electronic Point of Sales and online services. This joined up approach can provide insights into the student experience that we would otherwise miss. These insights can inform and support decision-making by individuals across the campus, including students, academic and professional service staff.
An intelligent campus using predictive analytics means that rather than responding to problems, universities and colleges are proactive and make appropriate interventions earlier to avoid those problems happening in the first place, based on a range of live data sources. It’s a similar story within the smart city, where using a range of data sources and analytics could enable informed decision making removing the need to react to problems by ensuring they don’t happen or are mitigated as much as possible.
So how does the intelligent campus slot into the smart city? The reality is in many cities the campus and the city are not distinct spaces, and for many people they will move between city and campus across the day. If a university with an intelligent campus does not integrate or work with the smart city then they won’t have the full picture and in some cases could be at odds with each other. Bringing in the full picture, all the data, a better understanding can be drawn from the experiences of the students and the city population at large.
The collection and interpretation of data from a wide variety of sources understandably raises some concerns about the appropriateness of data collection and usage. One of the challenges that does need to be seriously considered are the ethical issues of using a range of sensors, tracking technologies, even CCTV that could be used to track not just people’s movements, but could actually be linked to individuals.
Some of the examples of data used in intelligent campus or smart city activities might not be thought of as personal. However, with the combination of different types of data from different sources, it becomes potentially easier to identify individuals, for example precise location and user behaviour. Anonymised data once aggregated can lead to better understanding of user behaviour and the management of facilities, but also potentially reduce privacy.
Even in an age where sharing of data on an app is commonplace, and sometimes scant attention is paid by users to the extent of this sharing, the fears and concerns of individuals should not be underestimated nor dismissed. This is something that we at Jisc have had to grapple with when developing our Learning Analytics service, which we recently launched, along with a code of practice to address ethical questions.
Could this become a reality? Learning analytics services rely on a hub where academic and engagement data is collected, stored and processed. What if we, as a sector, could extend the learning data hub to enable data to be gathered in from physical places? Could we also bring in data from public systems, such as transit information, traffic, pollution levels, health care, entertainment information and provide a full enhanced student experience? Well that’s a dream that may well be possible in the near future.
References
Clay, J. (2018). Guide to the intelligent campus. 1st ed. [ebook] Bristol: Jisc. Available at: http://repository.jisc.ac.uk/6882/ [Accessed 13 Feb 2024].
Education Technology. (2018). What makes an intelligent campus?. [offline] Available at: https://edtechnology.co.uk/Article/what-makes-an-intelligent-campus [Accessed 10 Sep. 2018].
