Tag Archives: wonkhe

weeknotes

Time back – Weeknote #275 – 7th June 2024

1 Comment

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.

stuff

Should I stay or should I go….

1 Comment

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.

Scores of current UK students shared with the Guardian how they feel about attending university lectures and tutorials.

‘I see little point’: UK university students on why attendance has plummeted

About half of the students who got in touch said they were regularly skipping classes, with many saying they were hardly attending at all. A lot of students pointed to financial difficulties forcing them to prioritise paid work over studying, a lack of enthusiasm for the format of lectures, low motivation to get up and go in, and the perception that attending classes was unlikely to improve their grades.

We have to remember that many of these students would not have been at university during the lockdowns in 2020 and 2021. They would have been at school or college. Going forward there will be a continuing stream of new students who experienced remote teaching at school who will be attending university.

Polly Toynbee in the Guardian questioned in an opinion piece on university finances,

…why sixth-formers get so much more teaching time than university students at far lower cost.

The amount of in-person contact time that students have, is so much less than they experienced at college and school, that you have to ask, with less hours to attend than their previous educational experiences, they might value it more. It would appear that they value it less.

The financial imperative for work by students was also illustrated at the Wonkhe event, The Secret Life of Students.

The latest and most powerful insights on the student condition from Wonkhe and Cibyl’s Belong student survey platform and from across the HE sector.

I did a sketch note on that session.

There was a lot of things in there, about sleep, travel time, working, and time travelling to work.

A student also presented at that event and talked about how the need for work, would often trump attendance at lectures and classes. The student also questioned the value of attendance of in-person sessions which could be accessed through recordings later, or what needed to be learnt was learnt more effectively through resources and books.

Also see the original article that inspired the Guardian survey: Lectures in question as paid work pushes attendance even lower

Lecture attendance is now so low that some academics have started to openly question the future of the teaching method.

So what should universities do in light of this insight? What is the future of university teaching and how does it need to change? Also how does the university manage student expectations so that they stop seeing in-person teaching as a choice, and isn’t the optional extra of a university education.

Finally, and something I have been reflecting on this, what is the role of digital and technology in all this?

weeknotes

Calling it – Weeknote #273 – 24th May 2024

Leave a comment

On Thursday the prime minister announced that there will be a general election on the 4th July.  We can expect lots of policy ideas and manifesto commitments being pushed out over the next six weeks. Will the higher education sector be top of the list, somehow I doubt it.

I planned out some blog posts I want to write in relation to the areas I am working on. Now I just need to write them…

I spent some time preparing for a briefing I was giving at the end of the week. This was on the optimisation work I have been doing this year.

Concerns about the financial viability of higher education continues with some ex-ministers warning UK universities will go bust without higher fees or funding

Vice-chancellors and former ministers are warning that the cash crisis facing universities is so serious that the next government will have to urgently raise tuition fees or increase funding to avoid bankruptcies within two years.

Even with a general election coming soon, it is unlikely that we will see increased funding for universities.

Wonkhe reported that despite the recommendations of the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) report the government is still looking to reduce the number of international students coming to the UK.

The sector’s eyes are on the Prime Minister this week as, following the conclusion of the independent Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) that the Graduate route for international students should remain intact, there’s no indication the government plans to take the advice it asked for. All the latest signals from Number 10 suggest that Rishi Sunak is looking for ways to restrict international students further, potentially using a “best and brightest” formula to do so, despite the prospective damage to the economy and to universities, and the fundamental incoherence of the concept.

I am pretty sure that none of the international students coming to the UK arrive in small boats. Another situation where the political rhetoric doesn’t match reality.

Polly Toynbee in the Guardian notes that

But living within the incomes they can attract, universities may reconsider how they are organised: some will question why degrees need three years with such short terms, why vice-chancellors’ salaries, some higher than £500,000, are much higher than their European neighbours, why university teaching careers are so hard on beginners and why sixth-formers get so much more teaching time than university students at far lower cost.

Another perspective on why universities should be looking at their operating model, changing or optimising what they do, and becoming more efficient.

I started thinking about my objectives for next year. I say next year, our planning year runs from 1st August to 31st July, so there is a couple of months left to think about this.a

weeknotes

There may be mergers ahead – Weeknote #272 – 17th May 2024

Leave a comment

bird screen

The news this week was dominated by the financial crisis that the university sector is facing in the UK.

Wonkhe said in their daily briefing

An increasing number of universities in England face a material risk of closure unless they significantly cut costs or merge. The Office for Students (OfS) 2024 financial sustainability report discusses a heavy reliance on international students due to declining domestic student fee income, and a “worst-case scenario” predicts that four out of five institutions will be in deficit by 2027 without changes.

With over optimistic views by universities about student numbers (domestic and international) the sector is facing a real financial challenge and with no real solutions in sight. There is no easy solution to this.

The OfS report was quite clear about the pressures facing the university sector.

Continuing decline in the real-terms value of income from UK undergraduates combined with inflationary and economic pressures on operating costs and the costs of developing buildings and facilities, as well as increasing employer contributions to some pension schemes.

They added the following key points in their report.

  • A recent apparent reduction in UK and international applications after years of strong growth, especially from international students.
  • A higher education financial model that has become reliant on fee income from international students, with a particular vulnerability where recruitment is predominantly from a single country.
  • The affordability of necessary estate maintenance and development and the significant cost of investment needed to reduce carbon emissions as part of providers’ commitments to achieve net zero.
  • Cost of living difficulties for students and staff, which challenge both student recruitment and the support needed by students during their time in higher education.

The report set out that universities may need to think differently to respond to the challenges they face.

Changes to a provider’s operating model can be a healthy response to financial challenge.  The sector as a whole has been in a relatively strong financial position for much of the past decade and has expanded its delivery to more UK and non-UK students. The financial challenges it is facing now could be a catalyst to drive positive change and innovation. Actions being taken by providers can result in more efficient operation, and could have benefits for students, including improved value for money.

This very much echoes the work I have been doing at Jisc on optimising operations and looking at collaboration and shared services.

The report also acknowledges that there may be mergers ahead.

We also expect that we might see some changes to the size and shape of the sector, for example, through mergers and acquisitions or increase specialisation.

As part of my work I wrote a vision about mergers and the formation of large university groups, but with the individual partners within that group retaining their local identity.

The first large university groups appeared following mergers forced by the regulator after financial pressures could have caused at least one higher education institution to fail. The new group recognised that though in theory they should have a new name, they also realised that the existing names were brands in their own right. As a result they formed The University Group™ but the individual university names were kept. Staff were employed by The University Group™ but students attended a named university. It was so successful that some smaller institutions asked to join the group but retain their identity. What was important to the group was that management and staff recognised that they were employed by The University Group™ and not the named university in which they worked (though some teaching staff worked across the group), from a student experience perspective the student was a student of the named university. They would be awarded their degree from that named university and would to all intents and purposes be a graduate of that named university.

This is a model we have seen in the Further Education sector, with large college groups and individual campuses having a separate brand and identity.

As well as facing financial challenges, the sector is also facing an unhappy cohort of students who are making more complaints.

Students complaints to the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA) in England and Wales rose to 3,137 in 2023, the ombuds’ annual report reveals. This was a ten per cent increase from 2022, and OIA recommendations led to more than £580,000 paid out in financial compensation, in addition to almost £640,000 in settlements. Some 21 per cent of complaints were adjudged to be justified (two per cent) or partly justified (seven per cent) or were settled in favour of the student. 

Wonkhe reflects on a year of complaints received by the Office of the Independent Adjudicator.

I was in the office for a couple of days this week, but reflected I’ve not been out and about for a while. I was expecting to go out and do some visits and workshops in May, but these never materialised. I‘ve also not attended any recent events, I think I might have to do some travelling over the next few weeks.

I attended our regular catch up meeting with the OfS this week in our Bristol office, and we updated each other which what is happening and what this may mean.

Wrote a short thought piece on academic staff using ChatGPT for student feedback.

We know that students are using tools such as ChatGPT to support their assessment work. It looks like some staff are also using the tool to provide feedback.

conference
Image by Florian Pircher from Pixabay

I have started a leadership development programme at Jisc. I am very much in the position in my career, where it is much less about what do I need to do to advance my career, but more about having achieved my career aspiration, what can I do for Jisc. 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 managed multi-million pound budgets and projects.

So, I am not attending the programme to learn how to be a leader, but there is something about refreshing and updating your knowledge in this space. Also, it will be good to work with colleagues across the organisation as well.

twitter, weeknotes

Immaturity Framing – Weeknote #270 – 3rd May 2024

Leave a comment

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.

stuff

Keeping you awake?

1 Comment

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.

Estates Directors, by and large, are significant net spenders of university income. While we may also run aspects of our institution’s income-generating commercial services – conferencing and retail for instance – and we know our university built environment can be key in attracting research income, staff and students too, on the whole we sit on the expenditure side of the balance sheet, with buildings second only to people in terms of operating costs.

It noted the challenge that costs are rising, and budgets are being cut, and the challenges that this budgetary nightmare brings to the Estates team. There are things they can cut, things they can spend less on, and then there are the statutory requirements that have to be met and paid for. In addition the way in which campuses are been used are changing.

The issue of both students and staff using the campus differently now, post covid, and their hybrid use of space for studying and working. We know that space designed for the way we would use those spaces pre-covid, aren’t necessarily now the kinds of spaces that we need post-covid. Easy to say, actually quite challenging to think about and design spaces that meet these new needs. What are those new kinds of spaces and how would we know?

Most universities I have discussed this with reinforce the importance of the university space, a place for people to come together for education and research. There is an expectation that staff and students will be physically travelling to and using the university buildings and spaces.

Even so with hybrid working and studying the norm these days, spaces have to be flexible to allow for in-person working and studying, as well as allowing for online interactions to take place on campus as well. Just because a meeting or a lecture is online this doesn’t automatically mean that the person participating is going to be off campus. Are there spaces on the campus that can be used for these online activities.

Another challenge isn’t just space, but also time. You can already see that more people are coming into the office for two or three days a week, and those days are usually in the middle of the week. The challenge that anyone has in managing space is how do you provide the capacity needed for two or three days, knowing that for the rest of the week it will be underutilised. How do you incentivise people to spread their in-person working (and studying) patterns across the week, to ensure space is being used efficiently.

With people working at home for part of the week, what I am seeing in our own spaces, and hearing about on university campuses, and also seeing in the office work environment; is that without some kind of intervention, people are creating their own working patterns based on the patterns that benefits them individually and aren’t necessarily the most efficient mechanism for space utilisation across a working space. There is a default to mid-week in-person working, resulting in less utilisation on the extremities of the week. Should spaces be closed one day a week to allow for this?

Might it be more efficient to spread utilisation across the week, and then reduce the size of the space required? How then do you encourage and incentivise people to work on the less popular days of the week?

Whatever decisions are made by estates teams in relation to the campus, it is understandable why it might be keeping them awake at night.

weeknotes

The challenge of time and space – Weeknote #268 – 19th April 2024

Leave a comment

I was working on an invitation to tender this week. This took up most of my time with researching, reading, writing, reviewing, sharing, and then going back again…

Interesting article from Wonkhe this week on what keeps your estates manager awake at night?

Estates Directors, by and large, are significant net spenders of university income. While we may also run aspects of our institution’s income-generating commercial services – conferencing and retail for instance – and we know our university built environment can be key in attracting research income, staff and students too, on the whole we sit on the expenditure side of the balance sheet, with buildings second only to people in terms of operating costs.

It noted the challenge that costs are rising and budgets are being cut, and the challenges that this brings to the Estates team.

The issue of both students and staff using the campus differently now, post covid, and their hybrid use of space for studying and working. We know that space designed for the way we would use those spaces pre-covid, aren’t necessarily now the kinds of spaces that we need post-covid. Easy to say, actually quite challenging to design spaces that meet these new needs. What are those new kinds of spaces and how would we know?

The other challenge isn’t just space, but also time. You can already see that more people are coming into the office for two or three days a week, and those days are usually in the middle of the week. The challenge that anyone has in managing space is how do you provide the capacity needed for two or three days, knowing that for the rest of the week it will be underutilised. How do you incentivise people to spread their in-person working (and studying) patterns across the week, to ensure space is being used efficiently.

Next week I am presenting at our directorate away day in Bristol on my work. I produced a presentation, which for me has a fair few words on it. I also developed the visions exercise I ran recently with our senior group; I turned the visions into handouts and created an activity that can be used with them.

conference

Quality and AI

Leave a comment

Back in March 2024 I attended Wonkhe’s Secret Life of Students at the Shaw Theatre in London. There was a range of interesting sessions, and for some I made some sketch notes.

There was part of one session which focussed on quality and included insights into AI and plagiarism.

It wasn’t a lengthy presentation, so it’s quite a minimalistic sketchnote as a result. I do like the fact that the Matrix inspired background worked well for a sketchnote; over the plain background I usually use.

conference

Sometimes it doesn’t quite work…

Leave a comment

Back in March 2024 I attended Wonkhe’s Secret Life of Students at the Shaw Theatre in London. There was a range of interesting sessions, and for some I made some sketch notes.

I did attempt to do a sketchnote on one of the sessions, but it didn’t come together.

Looking over the programme I am not even sure which session this was for!

My sketch notes are really for me, rather than other people. The process of sketching allows me to digest for myself what is been talked about and demonstrated. The sketch note provides me with a mechanism that provides a process for my interpretation of what is being said and what I understand from the talk. The process of sketching engages me in the talk in ways in which note taking does for others or conversing on social media.

Now in this session, I really couldn’t bring together what was being said in a sketch. There were odd words and phrases, which I noted in my sketch.

Does this mean it was a poor presentation? Well of course not, presentations at conferences are not delivered so I could draw a fancy sketchnote! However the talk didn’t work for me.

conference

How do students use their time?

Leave a comment

Back in March 2024 I attended Wonkhe’s Secret Life of Students at the Shaw Theatre in London. There was a range of interesting sessions, and for some I made some sketch notes.

I attended the session What do we know about what’s shaping how students spend their time?

The latest and most powerful insights on the student condition from Wonkhe and Cibyl’s Belong student survey platform and from across the HE sector.

There was a lot of things in there, about sleep, travel time, working, and time travelling to work.

Of course time isn’t everything, space is important too. Time and space go together. Some interesting commentary about students (who don’t live on campus) needing space on campus to rest or even sleep.