Tag Archives: senior education and student experience group

weeknotes

Time back – Weeknote #275 – 7th June 2024

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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.

clock
Image by Monoar Rahman Rony from Pixabay

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.

I also wrote about how “Meetings are a waste of time”

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.

I enjoyed reading this HEPI article on future scenarios for Higher Education.

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.

Found this article on Wonkhe interesting on the future financial sustainability of higher education: Why I wouldn’t bet against a fee rise after the election.

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 continued to do some researching and then writing June Intelligent Campus newsletter. This is posted over on the Jiscmail mailing list for the Intelligent Campus.

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.

weeknotes

When it’s three o’clock in New York, it’s still 1938 in London – Weeknote #274 – 31st May 2024

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Shorter week this week with the Bank Holiday. Decided to work in our London office this week and do some more field research into the Intelligent Campus.

Wrote a blog post on attendance after reading a Guardian article on the subject.

It would appear that the remote teaching during covid is continuing to have an impact on attendance at in-person teaching. Alongside the cost of living crisis, rising costs, the need to work, and interestingly a perception by students that attendance at in-person sessions was unlikely to benefit their learning and their grades.

I had to answer some clarification questions in relation to Invitation to tender we have out.

Undertook some preparation for Senior Education and Student Experience group meeting. I am probably going to repeat the session we did in March.

Continued with some leadership training I am doing.

Have been creating and writing out IC monthly newsletter for June.

Listened to the THE Podcast, specifically the interview with Mark Thompson, professor of digital economy at the University of Exeter.

In this interview, conducted at the Digital Universities UK event at Exeter, Thompson shares his concern that the sector is drifting away from its true north of research, teaching and impact (he uses Jeff Bezos’ idea of “day one”), citing statistics that less than 40 per cent of university staff are academics. He suggests reasons for this and talks about the need for leadership at institutional and government level and the prisoner’s dilemma of whole-sector transformation.

It was an interesting interview, and there is a related article.

UK universities should rip up a lot of their “back-end nonsense”, tackle managerial bloat and stop shelling out for different versions of the same technology to allow them to return to their core missions and heavily invest in academic jobs, according to an influential professor who has helped to pioneer a new approach to digital infrastructure in the public sector.

This echoes much of my work in this space. I am not sure the sector could achieve the 20% saving, but I do think there is room for savings.

weeknotes

Deck of Cards – Weeknote #264 – 22nd March 2024

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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.

weeknotes

Merry Christmas – Weeknote #251 – 22nd December 2023

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I was travelling at the beginning of the week, spending time in London, Oxford and Cambridge.

It was a quieter week, what with the end of term for many in higher education, and many people in Jisc taking leave.

We had our Jisc Senior Education and Student Experience Group Meeting on Monday and worked on how the group will work moving forward, ensuring alignment with the similar research focussed group.

I had confirmation of my speaking slot at EDUtech Europe 2024, which takes place in October in Amsterdam.

Panel – The place where pedagogy meets technology: designing innovative learning spaces

  • Aligning physical and virtual spaces and technology with pedagogical approaches and teaching methods
  • Creating flexible spaces that accommodate diverse learning styles
  • The role of mobile devices and BYOD policies in shaping learning spaces

Undertook some more field work and research about campus and space.

Had an excellent meeting at UAL’s King Cross campus, including a short tour of their facilities.

altc2023, apple

Vision Pro announced – Weeknote #223 – 9th June 2023

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Somerset Levels

A full week back working after a week off. I nearly wrote a full week back in the office, but these days I rarely am physically in the office for the whole week.

Of course, the first day back was spent dealing with the bundle of email in my inbox. Though I use this approach to deal with my email, I also plan my work and communication, so that when I do get back from leave there is generally nothing urgent or critical to deal with. However, I did have one critical thing to do which was contribute a board report. As I have a range of smart objectives, use of JIRA, and these weeknotes, it was relatively simple to put a report together.

My submission for ALT-C this autumn was accepted. This is the first time since 2017 that I have presented at the conference. I didn’t submit a session in 2018, I didn’t attend in 2019, the conference was cancelled in 2020, it was online in 2021, I did attend in 2022. At this point the only thing I will say is that the session is not about dead VLEs.

Apple Vision Pro

I was totally impressed with Apple’s new Vision Pro, and totally disappointed that it will be US only in the first instance!

The more I hear and read about the Vision Pro, the more I am intrigued and impressed. Will it be a game changer? Don’t know, but I do see it more as a (remote) individual technology compared to say a class set of iPads.

I’ve blogged about AR quite a bit over the years, this post was 13 years ago in 2010. What I think Apple’s Vision Pro will do (in the future when it is cheaper) is make this a more engaging AR interaction. The key, will it be *better* than a flat screen?

Agreed with this comment from Alex Lindsay on the Twitter about the WWDC keynote.

The event video was so great… I can’t go back to watching stage events. The era of the “Keynote” has less than 3 years left before it’s gone everywhere.

Freeform

Discovered Freeform for the Mac and the iPad. It looks like a great planning tool, I did wonder if it would be useful for sketch notes, it could be, but it is missing many of the functions that I use in Paper by WeTransfer.

Spent time organising the final Senior Education and Student Experience Group meeting for this year, which takes place next week.  Originally planned to be in Scotland, it will not be happening online.

Library

Did some work organising and planning Intelligent Library community event for the 21st June, which is now pretty much full, which is nice.

Got some feedback from the Intelligent Campus Community Event I ran a couple of weeks back. There was 100% satisfaction with over 66% very satisfied.

Small group forum worked well, good space for interactions, right duration.

Had an excellent meeting with a University about their current work in the smart and intelligent campus space. It was really refreshing to see an institution actually delivering on the theoretical and vision concepts we imagined in this space five years ago.

I take way too many photographs like this….

My top tweet this week was this one.

weeknotes

Punting on the river – Weeknote #216 – 21st April 2023

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Having spent most of last week, I spent time on Monday clearing my inbox. I realised that my email address is on lots of mailing lists, and I did some unsubscriptions or added rules to my inbox.

Had a meeting with SURF discussing the smart and intelligent campus space. They are working in this space, and we have agreed to continue to discuss and share what we are doing. SURF are the NREN for the Netherlands. They had seen the guide we published.

Attended HEAnet Group Advisory Forum meeting. Their new strategy has many similarities to Jisc’s (new) strategy. Useful insightful meeting with Irish universities (and colleges) facing many of the issues that the UK is facing.

Spent some of the week in Cambridge at the LILAC 23 Conference.

No I didn’t go punting.

I was last at LILAC delivering a keynote on digital capability when it was in Dublin in 2016. This did make me think why I hadn’t been since then. Part of it was in 2017 and 2018 I had moved away from digital capabilities into the intelligent campus landscape, and the apprenticeship space. Delving into the LILAC community wasn’t a priority in those areas. In March 2019 I got a new role, part of which was looking at the HE sector. Of course the following March we went into lockdown, LILAC 2020 was cancelled. LILAC 2021 was online. I was on leave when LILAC 2022 was happening in Manchester. So when I was looking at events and conferences to attend in 2023, LILAC was on my list. I did manage to find the time to attend.

LILAC 23 was an excellent conference, and really useful to see the library and information professional services view and perspective. AI was certainly the elephant in the room.

Sketchnote

Posted some sketch notes of various sessions.

Information Literacy and podcasting: teaching and learning through conversation

Accessibility – what does it mean for libraries and education?

Discussed the publication process for the forthcoming Guide to the Intelligent Library.

Continued the planning for the Intelligent Campus Community Event.

Continued research into AI specifically AI imaging and voices.

On Friday I was in London for the third of the Senior Education and Student Experience Group meetings, this was a meeting to accommodate those who had been unable to make the previous Monday meetings. We had an expected lower turnout, but still had some excellent, useful, and interesting conversations.

My top tweet this week was this one.

weeknotes

Personalising – Weeknote #214 – 7th April 2023

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Shorter week this week due to the Easter holiday.

Attended the Wonkhe and Adobe Education Espresso online event – Curriculum for the whole person. There was an excellent presentation from Hull University.

I spent most of the week in London working in our London office.

Wrote up notes for internal and external use on the Senior Education and Student Experience Group meeting. I also updated CRM for those that attended the Senior Education and Student Experience Group meeting. Spent time planning logistics and informing for (next) Senior Education and Student Experience Group Meeting on 21st April.

lecture theatre
Image by Wokandapix from Pixabay

Had a meeting on a possible Learning Spaces session for Connect More. In the end I recognised what I wanted from the session and how I would like to run it, wasn’t aligned. So, I dropped myself from the session. From a strategic perspective, I want a learning spaces session at Connect More, this doesn’t mean I need to deliver such a session.

Planning a meeting with SURF sharing notes on the concepts of the Smart Campus and the Intelligent Campus.

Went down to Portsmouth, to look at a city campus. I am planning some reports on the smart city, civic university, belonging. I wanted some inspiration for a place I had not visited before.

Spent time planning and inviting colleagues to some internal personalisation workshops. This will be followed by some external workshops.  We are doing this as part of a strategic target that we will undertake and publish research into the concept of personalised learning and what it could mean for higher education.

I was supporting our events team with invitations for people to present at Connect More.

Thursday, we had our monthly sector strategy leads meeting.

Had to spend some time planning travel and accommodation for April and May. I am off to LILAC 23, UCISA’s Spotlight 23, as well as some internal training in London.

My top tweet this week was this one.

altc2023, connectmore2023, ucisa23, weeknotes

A Hard Day’s Night – Weeknote #212 – 24th March 2023

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Royal Albert Dock

Monday I was in London at the Jisc offices in Fetter Lane. We had our Senior Education and Student Experience Group Meeting with 12 PVCs (including a VC and DVCs). As you might expect ChatGPT and AI was a hot topic of conversation in the meeting.

After the meeting I was heading up to London for the UCISA Leadership Conference in Liverpool.

I did some sketch notes while I was up there.

I did enjoy the conference, not sure if I enjoyed it as much as the previous year, but it was still an excellent conference. Various sessions got me thinking, and I am contemplating writing some of my thoughts up from the conference.

The equality, diversity, and inclusion sessions were interesting and useful. Why don’t universities try and be more flexible in their recruitment practices, for example how many offer term time only contracts (reduced hours) to attract working parents. Family friendly policies can widen the talent pool. Why are so many jobs 37.5 hrs 52 weeks? Also why is it so often that recruitment for an individual, rather than recruiting for the team. A more diverse team is often more effective.

Was a little disappointed that one of the opening sessions talked about digital natives. They don’t exist, never have.

Wondered if any university was looking at implementing a four day week?

This BBC news article reflects on the experiences of those involved in a four day week trial.

The scheme, organised by 4 Day Week Global, took place between June and December 2022, and involved organisations across the UK, including some non-profit organisations, as well as private firms in recruitment, software, and manufacturing. A report assessing its impact has found it had “extensive benefits” particularly for employees’ well-being.

I spent time reviewing the Connect More 2023 themes and topics with others across Jisc.

Started reflecting on possible ideas for ALT-C 2023 now that the call for papers is out. In 2021 I did a blog post about the digital lens, based on earlier work, so looking at possibly revisiting this.

Continued my researching AI in education. Have had early access to Bard, which looks very good.

Saw this on the Twitter – Fake Trump arrest photos trigger a new AI panic. The quality of AI images is getting better and better, and as you might expect, the images they are creating can be problematic.

Spent time writing and reviewing some ideas for next year, including looking at the rumoured Apple Reality Pro.

Final comment, often we know where we are, and where we want to be. The harder job is working out how to get there. What do we need to do to make it happen. How do we get there?

My top tweet this week was this one.

conference, weeknotes

Secret life – Weeknote #211 – 17th March 2023

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I was on leave for part of this week.

I attended The Secret Life of Students last year and enjoyed the conference, so made a point this year of booking a place.

This year the focus of the conference was on belonging.

I made some sketch notes from many of the sessions.

I did some more planning for Senior Education and Student Experience Group Meeting on the 20th March.

I spent time reviewing and having discussions on the Connect More themes.

campus
Image by 小亭 江 from Pixabay

I did some planning , working on ideas for the  Intelligent Campus community event which is taking place on the 24th May 2023. Bookings are now open.

This community of practice gives people a chance to network, share practice and hear what various institutions are doing. You will have the opportunity to discover more about intelligent campus projects and our work in this space. The focus of this community event will be where do we go next? You can read the new guide to the intelligent campus and reflect on your own journey in this space, and where you feel we can provide help and support. This will be an opportunity to discover more about the history of our past and current work in the intelligent campus space as well as hear from others about their work on this exciting topic.

I did some reflecting and reviewing potential priorities for next year, as well as some budgetary planning to support it. Much of what I am planning to do, builds on the work I have done this year and am doing this year.

My top tweet this week was this one.

digifest23, twitter, weeknotes

Back to Birmingham – Weeknote #210 – 10th March 2023

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Monday I was spending time planning and working on the  Intelligent Campus community event for the 24th May 2023 and the Intelligent Library community event for the 21st June 2023. I also did some more planning for Senior Education and Student Experience Group Meetings on the 20th March and 21st April, including producing slides for the meeting I am planning some internal and external personalisation events.

The government got slammed on the Twitter for talking about innovation, through the use of a QR code and some weirdly animated AR text.


I published this in 2011 which was a little while ago, though for some I guess it only feels like yesterday… Ten ways to use QR Codes.

Sorry, this is not a blog post on ten ways to use QR Codes, but it is a blog post about what you actually can do with QR Codes. Once you know what you can do with QR Codes then you can build learning activities round those functions.

Still one of my favourite bizarre uses of a QR code.

Remember holding your phone whilst driving is illegal.

In the middle of the week, I was in Birmingham this week for Jisc’s Digifest conference.

I did a few sketch notes of some of the presentations.

I undertook a fireside chat with Dom Pates on the Intelligent Campus, early indications were forty plus people attended the session. It was also recorded. In case you were wondering where the slides are, well we didn’t use slides, we literally had a chat, with a video of a fireplace on my iPad.

It also coincided with the launch of the revised guide to the intelligent campus.

Many colleges and universities are working on ways to improve their students’ experience, business efficiencies and environmental performance by better utilising data. This data can be directly related to learning and part of the overall campus experience.

I was intrigued and enjoyed this article, Why ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI – and be destroyed on The Register.

“I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

In the article, Alexander Hanff, a computer scientist and leading privacy technologist who helped develop Europe’s GDPR and ePrivacy rules, talks about how ChatGPT killed him off and even tried to fabricate URLs to a fake obituary. A scary thought on how relying on AI could result in you trying to prove to people that you’re alive, though the AI says you’re dead!

Though there is an upside to ChatGPT, Essay mills ‘under threat from rise of ChatGPT’.

The emergence of chatbots and other writing tools powered by artificial intelligence may pose a far greater threat to the future of essay mills than legislation has proved to be, experts said. There are early signs that firms which specialise in selling assignments are already having to shift their business models in the face of more students using the likes of ChatGPT to generate answers of a similar or better quality to what they may have been tempted to buy previously.

At the end of the week I was doing some logistics for future travel and events.

My top tweet this week was this one.