 Yn ychydig yw Llywodraeth Cymru, mae'n mynd i'r meddwl i chi'n gweithio y dweud hynny, ond wedi'i gwneud hynny i'r gweithio'r dweud hynny i'r gweithio, ac mae'n gweithio'r 50 o gweithio, mae'r cyfnodol yn hynny'n gweithio. Yn y sefydlu, mae'n gweithio'n ddechrau ddod yn dweud hynny i ddweud â dweud, ac mae'n ddweud hynny i ddweud hynny i dr Melcom Reed, gyda'r gweithio cyfnodion ystyried y Comitiynau ddiogelio gyda'r UK, ac Josie Fraser, yma'r strategi o Lester City Council. Yn gynghoro gyda Dr Reeds, ac malkum yn gallu gwneud yma o gweithio gyda'r gweithio ar y cyfrifol gyda'r gyfnodol, o'r ddod o ddod o'r gyfrifol gwneud a'r ddod o'r ddod o'r ddod o'r ddod o'r gyfrifol gwneud. Malcolm is executive secretary of JISC and he is strong involved in driving policy and strategy development in the use of digital technology in post 16 education and research. Is also chairman of the European networking policy group and he was awarded an OBE in 2010. So look forward very much to hearing Malcolm's talk. Thank you. Thank you Linda. Creation is encouraging isn't it? There's more people coming in through the internet than actually here... ...cos that's the way it's meant to be, although personally I never wished to miss an opportunity to travel to Yorkshire and to Leeds. And indeed I will be talking a bit about Leeds in a minute. I've got an awful lot of slides to cover so I won't race through. I assume the down arrow. Meet it very briefly mention the review of thewei sperm and its outcomes because I think you might appreciate an update on that. It will certainly mean quite significant changes to the gysg in years to come. Then I'll race through a sort of a catalogue of some of our current or new activities that I think would be relevant for ar y lastig AOT, ac iddyn nhw'n byw'r cynnig o'r cymryd wedi'u oes ffordd o bobl ar yr oes cymhwyl, ac o plan o'r irmwyngio'r gyfnod oed o ran oedd oedol o'r lliwyr a'r bythur cymrydau hynny. Mae'rstrategiaid â mynd ynghylch o'r lefel am peryfrin o gondol ychydig. First, let me take you back to 1906, which I guess not many of you will remember too well, because that was the year, the first year of graduation from Leeds University and it also happens to be a year which has quite a bit of similarities with our current predicament. It was about to go into a double dip recession. There were riots in London, the Brown Dog Affair was to do with 50 sections, so that was quite interesting that that was a topic that caused riots at the time. Developments in Distance Learning, even then, but despite the rather difficult economic period in 2006, two significant acts that you might consider socially progressive, certainly very much in keeping with the Open Movements, the Open Spaces Act and the Education Provision of Meals Act. That's the Charter for Leeds, which was founded in 1904, and you'll see that in its way it represents a form of open university at the time, along with universities like Manchester and Edinburgh and a number of others, they were making university places available that in a sense were rather more open than the traditional Oxbridge places, which is all that was available before. So the idea of openness in higher education goes back in fact well into the 19th century. But let me actually move on a bit to the GESC review, and I just want to very briefly update you. The review was carried out by Sir Alan Wilson, who used to be the Vice Chancellor of Leeds, I think back in the 90s. The principal recommendation, the purpose of the review was partly to give the funding council's assurance that the GESC was a good thing, that we weren't running off with the money to South America and so forth, but rather more constructively perhaps looking at ways that the GESC can change to meet the changing HE environment, certainly the changing HE funding environment in England, I know it's hurt. It's somewhat different in Scotland, but that was a big driver. So how the GESC can be shaped to be appropriate for what I think we have to see as an increasingly private sector HE provision. So its principal recommendation was that we should become a separate legal entity and various simplifications and rationalisations. For some reason that I can't quite understand, when people from outside at the GESC look at the things we do, they tend to feel that we're a somewhat complicated organisation, I've no idea why. I personally really quite enjoy the complexity, but there we are. So there were a number of key recommendations, which the funding councils, and of course we are part of the funding council structure, any change to our governance and so forth will, those changes will be made by the funding councils, they hold the final say. There were sort of three recommendations that they weren't prepared to agree to without more evidence, so we have recently got three consultancies underway. The first one is looking at governance models. What kind of organisation could the GESC become? Issues here about tax implications about charity law, for instance if it became a charity, would that be restrictive, would that not be restrictive? Can we have a governance model such that the ownership of the new GESC can change to reflect changing funding routes? So the second recommendation was about how more of the GESC funding would have to come from the community for the services that we provide. I think if you look at that within the HEFCI, within the HEP England context, that's fairly inevitable, their learning and teaching grant, which is where the GESC budget comes from, is falling over the next four or five years from seven billion pounds to not much over one billion I think. Although they could still fund the GESC from the one billion, because enormously expensive though you might think we are, you still get quite a lot of change out of a billion if you fund the GESC. But nonetheless the government of course are giving the funding councils a very clear instructions about where that billion should go, and in particular it's there to help subsidise those courses that would cost a great deal more than 9000 a year, for instance to provide medicine and engineering and a lot of the sciences. So as HEFCI's ability to fund the GESC, and we are more or less totally funded by the funding councils, as the funding councils' ability to fund the GESC falls, then we have to look to an environment where the community itself will have to pay more for our services. But of course the argument goes, certainly in England, the universities will be raising more money and fees, but this process would have to be phased in. So the second review is looking at our services, it's partly deciding to what extent we should still be providing those services. Remember one of the recommendations is that we should simplify and rationalise, so that might mean that we stop doing some things. We have a separate services portfolio review process we carry out every year, so we tend to have a fairly good handle on what our services are doing and how they need to change and whether they're still relevant and so forth. But the review is also looking at whether our services should become part of, should in effect be merged into the GESC, which services, would that make sense, in which cases would it not? So that's a particularly important strategy. Then there's also a review of Janet itself. Janet is where a little less, 40 odd per cent of our funding goes, it is a very expensive network, it's a very highly valued network, but there are certain technology changes in the network field. We have to look in terms of where Janet and the network can go, given that funding becomes more constrained and given that the community itself, certainly in some years' time, will end up having to pay more for the cost of Janet, so we have to have a fairly fundamental review to ensure it's fit for purpose. So a new GESC has to reflect the different funding environment that HE is already finding itself in, but will of course be a very different kind of funding environment once student fees kick in, and certainly once we're into the process of three years worth of student fees and central funding falling. So, you know, we've got to be more agile, we've got to be more customer focused after all we are part of the funding structure at the moment, and not really so used to getting funding in from the people that we provide the services to. None of our services is incidentally a compulsory, a university doesn't have to be connected to Janet, for instance, but as Janet is virtually free, it's a little unsurprising that every university is. How can we maintain the integrity of a single integrated network when it won't be as relatively cheap as it is at the moment? The HE sector only pays about 10% to 15% of the cost of Janet in HE. The HE sector at the moment gets a certain minimum bandwidth, 100 megathing for free, and only pays for additional bandwidth on top. So there are different funding models even within our current arrangements. But let me move on to some of our programmes, so it's sort of a catalogue, as it were, of a few programmes I think might interest you. This one is perhaps more of interest to people in administration. It's about enabling course data to move around, particularly data that describes courses, part of the marketing activities of a university, and we're working with UCAS and HESA on this project. We're not interested, we're not particularly involved with the UCAS courses, that is the rather traditional ones. We're looking at how to improve the marketing information that universities provide for distance learning courses, online learning courses, which at the moment are predominantly postgraduate. So there's a programme there, I won't say too much about them because if they do interest you then of course you look at our website and you will learn probably more than you want to. Now just transformation programme is phased to something that we used to call building capacities programme, which some of you may have come across. We recognise a year or two ago that there was an awful lot of resources available to universities, not just from the GISC, but to help them exploit IT, which universities simply don't know about. It's not that they're reluctant to use them, it's just that they, various movers and shakers and the people who do the real work in universities tend not to know about the full range of activities available. So this project is very small sums of money, but very small sums of money if you like to stimulate universities to look rather more deeply and carefully at what is available. You might feel that that money shouldn't be necessary, but we experience tells us that it is. Now our discovery programme is something that I think has, this is principally to do with helping people find online resources that might have been digitised online resources that have been procured one way or another from publishers for instance, and we as you might know certainly have used a lot of capital funding over the years to acquire such resources. It's often very difficult to find them. So this is a programme more to improve finding tools. Now although it's aimed at those kind of large data sets, bibliographic data, library type resources quite often, it does seem to me that we need to do much more work in discoverability areas in terms of online educational resources as well. But I'll get on to that in a few minutes. This is a set of programmes about digitising or making available broader amounts of content. As I say, we have spent a lot of money in this area, most of capital funding. Capital funding is now getting much, much harder to get. So I do fear that our ability to add online content from capital resources might become rather limited, but nonetheless we've still got a content programme running at the moment. Those are some of the details to look at. The OER programme, which incidentally is not technically a GIST programme, it's a HEFGI programme which the GIST and HEA jointly manage, is now moved into its third year. So we're enormously pleased that a programme which I think was considered relatively high risk a couple of years ago was seen as something that we knew that there were definite enthusiasts in the community about open educational resources. But some real concerns that it would become generic and really catch on more broadly across universities, it clearly has done, many academics will do it. There's not too many universities, in fact I'm not entirely sure there's any universities that mandate open educational resources across the whole university. Are there? And there will know. But not whole universities. And I do think that that's an issue and I'll come to that in a minute, that university management should look at. So we have, I'm pleased to say, got a third year of funding. It's still around £4 million. It's still a HEFGI only programme I'm afraid, so it's not available in the other countries. But there's more details there and there's just been a call out where I gather we've had something like 25 bids. So I suspect there'll be a fair few disappointed people, but I mean, three minutes, okay. I'll skip that slide I think because, but I do now want to move on to some arguments about why universities should consider open, more broadly than just open education resources. Making, for instance, learning outcomes available openly as part of the course. Generally trying to give students a much better understanding of the academic experience they're going to let themselves in for. And also link it up with the open access environment in the research community, which is a big movement to make research papers available. We should be able to link those two activities together. In particular universities should be able to make common policies. Whereas at the moment I don't think we see that happening too much. It's still very much left at the departmental level and not institutional level. I had got some slides about copyright and about how Mark Twain is partly an excuse to get a little witty system by Mark Twain at the top of the slide. And also the fact that he was trying to protect his copyright back in 1906, which is the year we're focused on here. It turned out, because he wanted, he thought that maybe he could protect copyright and get income for his estate for about 50 years. It turns out that the University of California, sorry, the publisher, owned the rights now and they managed through a little quirk in the Copyright Act. To produce microfeas versions, microfilm versions, which were then bought and that changed the format, therefore the copyright could start all over again. I cannot imagine that that was what the legislators of the original Copyright Act back in 1906 actually had in mind. And it's much the same in this country and that's why the Hargreaves report is particularly important. There's a lot of effort from JISC and the British Library has gone into trying to persuade the government and certainly the who set up the Hargreaves report and the Hargreaves himself and the panel to look at a much broader set of IPR restrictions to help in areas for instance such as text mining, data mining, which at the moment you cannot feasibly do because if any owner of a journal wishes to, publisher of a journal wishes to block it from text mining, then the text mining tools cannot go into that resource. And quite a lot of useful exemptions for archiving and a number of other areas I'll let you look through and rather a busy slide so you might want to check on our website because we've got a few pages devoted to Hargreaves because this really does matter and what really matters is that although the government has accepted the Hargreaves recommendation it's still got to be brought into law so there's still quite a lot of work to be done. So coming to my final point, which I think is to, we want to encourage the senior management of institutions to consider the policy issues about openness across their institution at a much more strategic level. It's about marketing, it's about helping students have a better understanding of the experience they'd be letting themselves in for, the academic experience. It's about knowledge transfer and promoting particularly research outcomes. We do find that some universities, some departments have the view that their content is of value and some content of course is, but it would have to be enormously sophisticated content to be saleable as such, particularly given how much content is already openly available, huge resources of course from the open university in open. And also if the charter of your university and many universities charters are to provide education more broadly than to just the students you take in, this is an important way of meeting that requirement. And I'm told I've run out of time, which I think is okay because that was my last slide. And now I think I can take questions, is that right? Yes, we do have a few minutes for questions. I'm wishing to ask a question, could you remember to say who you are and where you're from? And we'll also take some questions from our online listeners and watchers as well. Dylan of the University of Bolton. In terms of the universities starting to increasingly fungist out of their resources, is there a disincentive for people to fund the innovation side? Because presumably the results of innovation will be available to everyone regardless of whether or not they contribute. I don't think we see, as it stands at the moment, that innovation would be funded by the universities. I think they're only really going to be prepared to pay for the services that are delivered, Janet obviously, quite a lot of library services as well. But I think we would expect subscriptions to cover some of our advisory services and things like that. But personally I feel that the innovation would have to be funded centrally by people who had the national strategic interest rather than the institutional interest in mind. Apart from anything else, you'd be a brave university who put money into a pot in the hope that you'd get something out of it. So it is the services that we were thinking of. Any more questions from the floor? David White, University of Oxford. There's something going on in terms of universities that charge higher fee rates have to be seen to be engaging with the world in different ways as part of their responsibility. The widening access. Where do you see GISC in that context and against what you were talking about in terms of openness? Is that something that GISC is going to be getting involved in? Well, I don't think, I mean I'll read it of course, it essentially is tied to the technology. But openness of course can certainly help and try to address concerns that students from those areas of society which traditionally think of university is not for the likes of us. If they're bright in the sixth form for instance, I believe they should be given ready access to the kind of academic and scholarly materials they would be exposed to at university and they might well find that it isn't so daunting after all. Let's face it, if you're expected to be able to read a scientific paper in the autumn of one year then I suspect you could probably cope in the spring as well. Now how many students you may or may not feel would be motivated to do that? Actually if you come from Oxford you don't really of course deal with students who'd be motivated to do that. But I guess that remains to be seen. But if you can't make the material available to entice them in the first place then clearly they do take a leap in the dark. Especially out of thought if they want to go in for a subject that's not even taught at a level. I mean how do you really know if you're, what it would be, 18 or something what accountancy is like or what law is like or what dentistry is like. I've never worked out why anybody would go in for dentistry. A couple of questions from our online listeners so I'm going to pass over to James. The first one is from Philip Butler who's asking, the leadership presentation suggested senior management was still largely out of touch and he feels the regional support centres have been delivering an excellent service and still have a critical role in sector development, probably FE sector. Does Malcolm C. Jisk supporting the RSCs in the future? Oh yes, that's unambiguously the case. The RSCs are very highly regarded across the FE sector. They do an enormously good job of actually getting into the colleges and addressing the problems within the institution. Much harder to do in HE but in many ways we do want a new Jisk particularly to do more embedding work within the institution more. So the building, sorry, it used to be called the building capacities programme. It's now called the transformation programme which I mentioned on the slide. That is very much designed to put people inside an institution to help them find resources. I mean I guess the take up there is, the enthusiasm is likely to be greater at smaller universities in the first instance but we see real potential. So the question is not so much are we committed to the RSCs in FE. The question is how can we get a similar degree of engagement within institutions in HE? We've got time for a very short final question if anyone has any burning issues that they would like to overhear. Thank you. Tom Franklin consulting. There used to be the Computers in Technology initiative. Then there was the HEA had subject centres and they provided information to institutions. With their demise, do you see their sort of scope for Jisk to take on some of that role? Perhaps reinvent the CTIs and do some really helpful supportive work in institutions? Well, probably not. I think the Wilson review when it talked about us having to prioritise and rationalise and simplify and all that generally be neater and tidier than we are. The review did provide guidance about the kind of activities that we should focus on. There the emphasis was put on things that have a generic impact across an institution rather than specifically related to one or more disciplines. Obviously Janet falls into that category. A lot of work on sporting admin systems would fall into that category. Library materials does in aggregate. I can't see that in our current funding position we would be in a position to support individual disciplines in the way that the subject centres do. Thank you. We are all going to be watching Jisk as it evolves to see what happens in the future. It's a very interesting stage for all of us. Can you join me in thanking Malcolm for his interesting work?