 Rhaid i chi'n gilydd rhaid. Roedd y gallwn hyffordd i chi chi'n gilydd. Wrth gwrth fy ngherif er mwynfa yw'r rhan o'r cwestiwn o gennym hanfod ar y llwyddau. Rydyn ni'n gilydd argyrchu sicrhau'r gyfnod, ac rathoes rydyn ni'n gilydd ar y sgwunnedd ar y sydd. Wrth gwrs, mae hi'n cael ei ddylai'rac Cobiwnol ychydig sy'n cyflreaddol. Dw i wedi ymroed o'r hynny, rydyn ni'n mynd i chi'n gilydd ar y comeddio. I was quite surprised and I hoped that I wouldn't find everybody queuing up to throw a load of custard pies at me or maybe some stocks or even the gallows at the speakers podium. So I'm very grateful to come along and speak to you about some of the things that Jisk's doing and some of the roles that I think CETIS and other organisations should be able to continue to play. And it would be very important from Jisk's perspective that they do continue to play. Just to say a little bit more about myself after doing my degrees, my first jobs were around learning technology, so I spent a year in Cardiff University working for the TLTP stomp project software teaching of modular physics because that was my area. To be honest, I found it a lot more interesting and worthwhile than some of the nuclear physics that I was researching in the previous three or four years, although I learnt a lot of other things during that time as well. That stayed with me a lot more than the nuclear physics and obviously CERN was a very interesting place to be as well during that period. I then moved on to Hull University for two years where I was education technology adviser. Now, I've always been at the quite pragmatic end of the learning technology spectrum, so I must admit I tended to avoid standards. I think they're important, but for me, I saw my own personal strengths being in the more pragmatic area, so at Hull I was working with academics. They tended to be the younger academics, but not universally, to embed computer-assisted learning, Cal as it was called at that stage, into curricula and to try and make that integration a bit more seamless, a bit less of a bolt-on. I then did that for a couple of years and then moved to King's College London as a senior computer-assisted learning coordinator, which I think would probably be called head of e-learning now. That was a more strategic role, so as well as leading a small team, working with academics, managing a strategic fund, we actually got consensus for what I think was the first formal computer-assisted learning strategy that became part of the university's main teaching and learning strategy. Probably, in one of the organisations you wouldn't have necessarily thought would have been first to do that, and then I became a managerialist, and I guess I must have disresided. I come back into the room and I see a lot of faces that I remember from that period in the 1990s up until about 1998, and I guess I probably disappeared off your radar at that point and started wearing suits and ties and things. So, Aberystwyth, Plymouth, and most recently at Loughborough University, where I hope I managed to do a few innovative things in the IT services department there, and I certainly very, very ableist it if I call you, such as Martin Hamilton, who has followed me across to JISC recently, leading to this role as chief innovation officer at JISC. I've been there about nine months now, so I'm finding my feet. It's still relatively new, but I hope that the work we're trying to do is taking some shape. I'm going to try and explain that to you. So, here's an outline of what I'm going to go through. First of all, why does JISC need to innovate? Why does any technology organisation need to innovate? I'm going to give some background to JISC. Some people have heard this already, although possibly not from the perspective that I will give it, and others won't, so I apologise in advance for people who are more familiar with this. Then what we're doing in terms of innovation in JISC now, in a new division called Digital Futures, how we're trying to construct a pipeline and our variation of a co-design process to try and get around, not invent it here, and to try and involve people and build consensus for our innovation work. I'm going to try and explain all that. Now, I'm going to move on to some thoughts around standards, and particularly standards in relation to innovation. I hope some of these ideas will be, some people in the room will find them provocative, because I'm quite keen that we have a discussion. I'm very keen to hear your views, actually, on some of the things JISC should be doing in relation to standards and more widely in our innovation programme. So, I hope by saying a few slightly provocative things at the end, I'll stimulate some kind of discussion around the room that will remain to be seen. Okay. So, why does JISC need to innovate? Or for that matter, why does any technology organisation need to innovate? Now, this is part of the physics department in Oxford University, the Tanzan building, and that window there was where my research group used to live until a few years ago. But what's interesting about this building in terms of the history of physics departments is the first physics laboratory when it was opened in about the early 1910s that had its own dedicated built-in electricity supply throughout the building. Next door to the left, the Clarenland laboratory, which was built a few years earlier, didn't have that, nor did any of the other physics departments in the UK or in the world, as far as I know. So, that was the electrical laboratory for obvious reasons, and the head of the laboratory was Professor Townsend, and next door was the Clarenland laboratory headed by Professor Lindemann. So, at that stage, the ability to have electricity on tap really was quite a fundamental tool to enable and quickly enable research. So, next door, if you were trying to do some electrical research in the Clarenland laboratory, you had to muck around with batteries or get all sorts of rig around, all sorts of other stuff. If you were in the electrical laboratory, you had it all on tap. So, not surprisingly, Professor Lindemann asked Professor Townsend, well, can we share some of this electricity? We made use of it in our lab as well, and Professor Townsend said, no, absolutely not. This is my laboratory, this is my competitive advantage for my department and my research, and of course, world-class researchers are competitive animals. There's no doubt about that at all, and it's a very competitive game and a very competitive sphere. Now, roll the clock on 100 years. Do you know any professors, any world-class eminent professors who worry about where the electricity comes from in their laboratories? I don't, because sometime in the last 110 years, electricity has become a utility commodity. So, I don't know exactly when it happened, it was sometime after the war, maybe in the 1930s in some places through to the 1950s. So, if you track it through from 1910, electricity was a key research technology. Top of the agenda of the head of department was ensuring that he had electricity and no one else did. So, that was absolutely key technology for enabling research. But sometime during the next 15 or 20 years, finally, there was a sharing of that service. There was probably an Oxford University electrical service, OUS, was set up to make this more widely available. It eventually found its way into some of the colleges, despite furious protests from a load of dons about how it would undermine the whole fabric of the university and things like that. But it even made its way into the colleges. And then round about the 1950s, maybe something like that, the Oxford University electrical service, somebody said, well, why do we actually need an electrical service? And they dug in, yes, we need an electrical service, we provide an important service to the university. Well, actually, they eventually did get disbanded and now people get electricity in laboratories by arrangement with the national grid and the utility. So, that was a key research technology. And over a period of, I don't know, 50 years, it lost its importance as a key research technology. And the whole thing moved on because there was new things, new research enabling technologies that were at the top of the professor's agenda. So again, if we fast forward now to the 1980s, the first departments that were able to send international email had a tremendous advantage in the way they were able to conduct research, particularly international research. And it was quite difficult actually sending an email internationally back in those days, CBS percent. You had to put the whole routing of the email into the address. But once you've got somebody's address in the right format, you could keep sending it. So individual departments had their own email systems. And if they were set up well, that was a key research technology. Then sometimes during the 1990s, that got the internet came along in internet email addresses, it all became a lot easier. And sometime in the early 2000s, you started to have the free offerings and the cloud offerings. But you still had the people saying, we must provide the email service for our department. This is a key academic tool. But actually the head of department, his attention had moved on. Back in the 80s, he thought it was important. By the 2000s, he didn't. But the services still persisted for quite a long time. But again, I think they're finally going now. And we're seeing people using these cloud-based email services. So despite some quite furious resistance by staff in local IT services and local departmental IT service, some of whom I've managed. So I've seen this at close hand. So technology keeps moving along. And I think what is important, therefore, is if we're working in technology, we do need to keep innovating. We can't stand still or we'll be like the Oxford University Electrical Service or the departmental email providers. We'll render ourselves obsolete. I don't know how long, but 10 years, 20 years. Unless we keep innovating, we won't stay at the forefront of what we're trying to do. So this is my model, which says that. Today's innovation. This is what we're working on now. This conveyor belt turns around. In 20 years time, it will become a commodity. It will become a utility electricity on demand. Hugely innovative 100 years ago. The conveyor belt has now been a commodity for some time. The email on demand. Very few departments in our store, and there are only months. There's still one or two, which is incredible, really, when you think about it. There are days when there are very much moments around. Actually, for people who enjoy innovation, it's important that the conveyor belt turns around. Because now that frees up the resource, frees up the capacity to do the next lot of innovation, which is going to be necessary to enable the next generation, the back of the research, and the next generation of technology enabled them. So I don't know how you measure the pace of innovation, but I suspect, if you could, you'd find that that pace was increasing. So you'd find that the rep, Queen and Alice, were now ready to run faster and faster and faster to innovate more rapidly, just to keep still, just to stay on this in the way about it. So that's why technology organisations need to innovate. If they don't, they'll become the next oxford university electricity service. Now, I've made that point quite a lot, going around and visiting other universities IT services. For example, a couple of universities who wanted to try and persuade their own staff that they really didn't need to keep running their own email system in-house. Actually invited, the director invited me to come and give you a talk and try and tell them what will happen if they, lightly, if they don't try and hand this over and move on to the next thing. I'm having a slightly similar but different conversation in GISC now because in the same way that electricity is becoming a utility, if you think of the range of GISC services, the bottom of the stack is the Janet network, which is still incredibly valuable service, particularly some of the faster research connections. I'm sure it will be for the next few years. But bandwidth is also becoming a utility in the same way that electricity did. And I can't imagine that in 10 years' time, maybe sooner, people will be worrying about having a special university provider of bandwidth, just like they don't worry about having a special university provider of electricity. So within GISC, we're having a conversation, okay, the Janet network, it's a fantastic asset now and let's make the most of that asset for the next few years. But let's not predicate our whole future on that need being there because it won't, it will go away. Even to my house in Madrid in Cornwall now, there's a fibre optic cable. That's pretty incredible. Even five years ago, you wouldn't imagine that. Okay, it's taken a huge subsidy from, and a lot of money to oil the wheels within BT and things like that to get it to happen. So we need to be thinking all the time, what are these areas that are going to be tomorrow's commodities? Let's start shaping up for that, getting ready to offload them and creating the space to do the next round of innovation, which is going to keep our own organisations at the forefront and nationally for GISC to help keep the UK at the forefront of learning and research, which is part of just the future. So for GISC in particular, what direction is it going to have to move in over the next few years? And it must be that if this has this critical level, okay, there'll be some specialist needs for research, which I might more continue, but there's sort of a generic networking bandwidth service. Has that become an utility? The only one we can do is have this stack. And that's where organisations like CITIS come in. Because if you speak to Martin Harrow, and I agree with his analysis, but he's got a strong view that at the moment, GISC has great strengths in that networking area and the lower levels of the OSI stack. And really there's a bit of a gap in the middle. And then it's very strong up at the content area, up at the resources area again. And one of the things I've been asked to do is to try and fill that gap. It's not a massive gap. We just need to get a few people in. You know, we don't want to turn the whole organisation of people that can operate in that different zone. But it is a bit of a gap at the moment. It's actually a gap that people in this room have the skills to fill. So it's really great that despite all of these changes, and changes in funding, this clearly still is a CITIS community that persists. And it's represented by yourselves in the room. And the skills and knowledge that you hold are going to be incredibly important to GISC as it happens. That just makes this journey. So I'm very glad that we're still talking to each other. And I'm sure there will be plenty of positive conversations to have in the future. And finally, I was very keen to... OK, we saw the surveys about the different kinds of technologies. And I think this is the one that really is on the cusp to me. But we need to be realistic about where it is at the moment. So, Martin, I don't think we've got them here today. But at great expense, you managed to get hold of a pair of Google glasses. And it wasn't very easy, was it? I had to use you back. And we've also got colleagues down the road. And we've got colleagues in the room today from Minas, which is part of the GISC family, and will be formally joining the GISC organisation on August 1. That work on augmented reality. And I've seen some of their demonstrations, and they're quite good for education and for training-based applications. But some of the things I've seen about medical skills, how to operate a particular medical device or carry out a procedure, or mechanical skills, how to replace a component in the car. But the mock-up's always done on a tablet or a phone. I tried it the other week on my car, trying to get my EGR valve out, looking at my phone and using the spanner with one hand. It doesn't really work with those devices. So, the wearable devices are actually quite important to make this technology happen. So, this will look a bit crude, but this is the reality of where that wearable technology is at the moment. And I'm very grateful to Matt Ramirez of Minas for putting this together. He's that handsome chap there. He's certainly a silent movie. And so, this is a mock-up. He's done using the Google Glasses about augmented reality for mending PCs. Okay, so, not quite there yet. And, I mean, Martyn, I don't know if you want to... The glasses are a bit slow. You get very odd looks when you wall them around London. They're still a lot cultural. Maybe in the next couple of years, this technology is actually going to improve to the point where the augmented reality will work as well as it does on Matt Ramirez's iPads and iPhones. And then I think that's the point where this will really start to take off. I think the other thing there is, actually, that's not more augmented reality in the sense that it's not going to be immersive. You've got that little screen wobbling about your right arm. And I gave those glasses to... It's not that exciting. And, of course, the reason was they wear glasses. And Google have only just managed to figure out where glasses... I just give you an idea, you know, you can take them on one land, and say, right, this is here and now, you can nearly find these things at jobs. But you realise something that's basic is can you make it work for someone who wears glasses? That actually turned out to be a hard problem. So, you can see all the science fiction videos on the Microsoft website, and I think the work that Matt's doing and what Martyn's talking about is the reality. I'm not right on the cusp of being solved. So, for me, this is the exciting area over the next couple of years. I think this will really start to break through in the way day. In the same way that you're now 3D printing two or three years ago as science fiction, and now you walk into most departments, certainly at Loughborough University, there are hundreds of the damn things chunkering away around the place. So, I just wanted to throw that in. It's a very interesting piece of innovation work going on just down the road at Minas. Okay, back to more mundane things now, and the changes at Gisc, and it's very important. Apologies again for people who've heard this before, but I think it's important to understand what the changes are and why they've been made. Starting with the Wilson review of Gisc, which has been out, well, over three years now. That was an official Hefke publication. Obviously, it took into account the views of the Association of Colleges and the AFI and the Skills community. There were some positive things about Gisc, particularly its world-class reputation. Certainly in North America, Europe and right around the world, Gisc has got an excellent reputation, which all helps. In a small way, it helps the UK with its own strong international reputation when it comes to higher education, recruiting international students, all those kind of things. So, it's important that we keep that going. Also, Gisc is unique in providing a holistic approach, and that means, as I understand it, starting with the Janet network, from the electrons and the photons going through the network, possibly with that slight dip in the middle of the stack, that sort of technology gap, which I mentioned, but certainly finishing strongly towards the top of the stack in the content area, the resources area, and also the policy in the people areas. So, there's some positive things that made people think that Gisc was worth retaining as an organisation. But there were some specific suggestions around the innovation work that Gisc had been doing. Namely that the portfolio, the innovation portfolio was too large. The philosophy was let 1,000 flowers bloom and deliver a final report, and then probably not track those flowers anymore. Most of them died. A few of them did carry on to grow quite strongly, but some of those we never really kept in touch with, even though we'd helped to grow them. And the suggestion was to move away from that to focusing on a smaller number of big trees, and I'll come back to that in a minute. Gisc, as a funder, Gisc used to give out lots of money through Gisc calls. The Wilson group said that the application process of that was opaque. Remember this is a civil service report written in civil service language. A opaque is actually a very strong word in that lexicon. And whilst the process was one of open calls and bidding, I think the people who wrote the report did an analysis of where the money was going, and it was ending up in a very small number of places, and those are those words, and I think they speak for themselves. Projects aren't translated into life services or take too long to develop. To be fair, those weren't the rules of the game. It was to spend the money to stimulate some thinking, but they're not actually worried too much. With hindsight at the top level, maybe that wasn't the best thing to have done. For the people working in the innovations team, that was what they were asked to do. Just not to see it as a research organisation, the people who wrote the Wilson review and now the funding councils, they have set up and bids. They set up research councils to give money out for people to do research, to bid for academic research, the sort of academic research that might end up in the ref, which is the benchmark of the sort of quality of research that the state, the government wants to firm. The people who wrote the Wilson review thought it was absolutely wrong that JISC was giving out money as a kind of quasi-research council. It might have had value as practitioner research, but not research that was ever going to end up being in a university's ref submission or individual ref submission. So essentially we were told not to do that anymore. We now completely moved away from the traditional JISC call for funding and funding those kind of research projects. We still have money to invest and we're going to do it in a different way, which I'll come back to, but the traditional JISC call is no longer exists, as mandated by the Wilson report. So we're working very hard to try and implement the changes in the Wilson review. Right or wrong, those decisions were made by the people who hold the purse strings three years ago. That debate took place, finished, and now we're trying our best to implement it. Whether you agree with it or not, please be assured that we're doing our best to implement it. It's not easy, and even if you do agree with it, to change a large, diverse organisation, to change its direction, to change some of its culture. But we are trying very hard to implement what's in the Wilson review to make sure that JISC continues to do new, innovative things that will help keep the UK higher education, African skills right at the forefront on the world stage, which of course is where it is at the moment, and obviously in the areas of digital technology. And we will need your help to do that, which is what I'm going to come to shortly. So JISC used to just be a committee. It had no staff, but it had a very complicated series of funding contracts, and some of those funding contracts were in so many times that they became de facto staff contracts. So they were de facto JISC staff, subject to GP regulations and things like that, although they formally held contracts within a number of host universities, particularly Bristol and King's College London, but also Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Barth, etc. So a very complicated set of arrangements, and Martin Harrow, as the executive, was asked to change just to stop being a committee and start being an organisation. So now JISC is a company limited by guarantee, which also has charitable status and its charitable purposes around enabling education and research in HEFE and skills. And there's a company that has a management structure. And I'll just try and explain how that works. I'll try and do this. Martin will know this one. It's to use the analogy for forests. So, again, we were talking about innovation. We're not letting 1,000 flowers bloom anymore. We're trying to grow a small number of big trees. So let's say the whole of JISC is a forest. Chief executive forester, Martin Harrow, and then you've got the internal back-of-house functions from Alice and Mark. So they're making the irrigation work in the forest, making sure the fence is in order around the forest. The car park is sorted out. That kind of thing. You're very important, but internal functions. Not things you necessarily need to be aware of. But then there's three production zones. There's three big clusters in the forest. There's the technology cluster, which includes the genetic network, which is the marshal of these. And there's the digital resources cluster, which Lorraine leads. And then there's the customer service. And I think it's one of the regional support centre, things like TACDIS, Infranet, those kind of services, which we all consider. So those are the three main production areas of the forest. What those three foresters are trying to do at the moment is to prune those existing trees and give their bit of the forest a nice coherent shape. Fire remains a continual service improvement. And then also trying to do something which they've never done before, which is to actually cut down the old tree. Because we all know in our own organisations shutting down service is a really difficult thing to do. Even if there's one or two people still using it, it's like those old email systems, there'll always be someone who'll come along and say, you must keep us going. It's essential for me to do my work. But hopefully as well as the third system, please, they might come one or two days to cut down. Because we really need to focus on doing a smaller number of things well. So they'll be bring away trying to keep their bit of the forest intact. Then over here is Chief Innovation Officer. I'm running the nursery. What I'm trying to do is to grow the new trees. And those trees, some of them will start off quite well, but they'll start to fizzle out a bit. And what we need to do when that happens is very quickly say, okay, fair enough, we're going to learn some lessons from that, but now let's just pick this tree up and get it out of the way into the compost. We're not going to take it any further. Some of these trees are going to grow and they're going to keep growing. And they're obviously going to have potential to become new services. And at that point, what I'm trying to do is if we were transplanting them, one of the three foresters, depending on what kind of tree it is, if it's a new digital resources or research data management tree, it would really end up here. If it's something to do with training products or advice, it would end up here. And if it's something to do with new, for example, new e-learning systems or new student information systems, it will eventually end up here. We're not quite sure we're going to grow because there's a bit of a gap there at the moment. Anyway, so I'm responsible for growing those new trees and trying to transplant them so those are the three areas of the forest. And hopefully, in a way, that fits in with the rest of the trees that are already there. And those new trees that I've grown over a sort of three-year cycle need to span. This is a circular representation of that wide holistic spirit that Wilson would be talking about. The centre of that customer is making teaching research for this particular time efficiency and then spanning the particular technology-laking areas around the site. So if all of our innovation was just around the open agenda or just around academic leadership, that wouldn't be a very balanced portfolio. So we've got to try and spread the investment over a period and try and hit all the parts of that target reasonably evenly within some kind of common-sense measure. My part of the forest is called Digital Futures Division. We've been working hard to fill posts, create a new team. Some of the people come from the old full-regist innovation area, and other people have come from within the sector but outside GISC. But they're all friends of GISC and they've been involved in GISC in its communities over a number of years. So we're not a funder anymore and the new chair of the GISC board who's the Vice Chancellor just down the road at Salford University, Martin Hall, he's very clear GISC needs to be a solution provider. It's not a funder. So what we're trying to do is find new national-scale shared technology services. I think there's some out there waiting to be discovered. We want to find them. We want to build consensus with you. We want to build the services at prototype and then embed them in an appropriate way. We want to use a co-design type of process to do that, to make sure that you as users feel some kind of ownership and if we do it well you will actually use the services. So we're trying to construct a pipeline of work, a pipeline of small trees in my forest which will hopefully grow. First of all we're going to try and do that in a way that joins up internally. So in the past I could think we've had people within GANET within the GISC family who were working on AIM, access and identity management. We've had people working on new content services and the authentication system that the content review has been different from the authentication system that the GANET people have been working on. So even within our family we haven't managed to join up our own thinking. Now we just can't afford financially to do that. If we're concentrating on a few big trees we need to have the interlore coherence where people are working higher up the cake, higher up the stack, they're actually building on the foundations here. So I think that's an important part of my job which no one seemed to have that responsibility before. So trying to join up all of our technologies in a coherent way, certainly something we'll be focusing on in future and I think it can only benefit our users and our communities. You have got money to invest. We've got, well, several million pounds per annum and actually using the co-design process the one benefit of the old GISC funding what the old GISC called you could pretty well guarantee spending your budget at a particular time because you offer people a bit of those money and at the moment we're actually spending money more slowly than our finance director would like. Not by much, it's about, right? So we certainly still have money to invest and what we've been told is trying to invest money more at the low risk than at the spectrum. So a low risk project, innovation project is one that's most likely to be something that's practical, useful or turned into a production service. But notice this graph doesn't take it down to zero. We're still allowed a small number of very high risk speculative projects. So Martin with his job title as futurist he still has some chance to get some money for some sort of learning science fiction or something like that at that end of the scale. But in that kind of proportion and also during this first few months that I'm in post I'm feeling very keen to go and meet and speak to as many people as possible which is doubly grateful to have the invitation today to try and explain the changes it just can then to get your feedback to help shape what we're going to do because we've set some of the top level parameters but the detail is to emerge. So putting all that together we've got a sort of we've got a convolution of strategic impact here so we've got to hit all the zones on the target we've got to come with this risk distribution so we've got the mainly low risk business of work with some high risk. Most importantly it's got to be in line with sector's priorities trying to solve the problems the teaching problems and the research problems that are communities to say the most pressing. We've got to distill that down into a pipeline which has this internal coherence so we're building on higher up the stack and some of the technologies we have in place lower in the stack and we're joining up that conversation that's actually a co-design development cycle working very closely with potential users of the service so they feel they've got ownership sometimes those innovations will fail, the trees will go on to the compost in which case we can still learn lessons there's always valuable lessons one can learn the worst thing that happens with a fail technology project is when you see this happen all the time in the public sector is when it just quietly gets swept under the carpet because those lessons don't get learned properly we're not going to do that innovations are allowed to fail we'll admit it and we'll try and learn as in as many places as possible we're being at the innovation we're going to do will lead to new trees that get transplanted across into the other parts of the forest and actually they end up in the Gisc product catalogue hands up who knew Gisc had a product catalogue that's pretty good actually you're an informed audience but that's still about 20% of the room just to go off a slight tangent did anybody see the a couple of weeks ago the higher education policy institutes in the National Union of Students announced the results of their big student survey anyone see those okay now I thought what was interesting there is if you looked at some of the fundamental the total amount of money going into funding teaching and learning in the sector last year from last year to this year hadn't changed very much not the grant it had actually gone up a little bit but it's about the same the number of contact hours in courses was about the same the number of students was about the same there was one measure in that survey which had really changed all the fundamentals were the same the one thing that really changed was the student's perception of value for money and in that one year period that had gone from about 90% thinking they were getting value for money whatever that means to about 50% so all the fundamentals were the same in terms of the grand total budget but of course the one thing that had changed is that those £9,000 fees £6,000 by that £9,000 used to go straight from the tuth theory straight from the funding council into the universities now it comes via a student loan company in the way that the student believes it's their own money there is a student somewhere and that one change although the teaching they're getting the experience, the funding everything else has stayed the same that change in terms of the transparency the funding has had a huge impact in the way the students perceive the value for money of what they're getting something similar has unless you've got an alternative explanation but I think that's what looks that's certainly this the perception of value has changed by that much and none of the other parameters have changed at all in the past all the fundings used to come from in higher education used to come from the funding councils from the tuth theory and actually people didn't seem to be worried then was just spending that money well? well people used to bid for the grants they used to bank the cheques I don't think they used to worry too much about whether the right things were being invested in until the Wilson review and that said what it said but now as a result of the Wilson review 20% of gysg's funding instead of coming straight from the funding councils it goes through the university so it's completely analogous to the fees the nine grand fees going through the student loans through the students in sight of the students so they feel it's their money just 20% of gysg's funding is now coming not straight from the funding council to gysg but via the universities so they're exposed to that 20% and they feel it's their own money has that had an impact on the perception of gysg has it ever so that people are now primarily it's a very positive thing people are now very focused on ok we know this is just 20% of the picture but now we're really interested to know what are we getting for our money is just spending our money on I think this is precisely what people who wrote the Wilson report hope now I must admit well not two universities have been a bit overzealous in the way they perceive this the norm has been a healthy enquiry into how it just spends its money which was wholly lacking in the previous years when hundreds of millions of pounds were of your money of the sector's money was spent so people are saying what do I get for my subscription I pay a subscription I want to know what my entail can do so we're putting together for the first time a product catalogue we're listing on place all the different gys services but what we need to add to that so this is work in progress what will appear over the next six months is what value does one get from that first of all for the sector as a whole you're paying x but you're getting y where y is three or four times x it's hopefully where we can end up so it's a no-brainer that you're getting value from your subscription and eventually for individual institutions to be able to drill down and see based on some simple metrics of usage what their own value is that they're getting from their gys subscription and also a simple predictive model which shows some of the extra services they could easily use to increase that value so a complete focus for us over the next three years is to try and refine this product catalogue not just to list all the products and services but also the value that they're providing the individual universities and colleges a lot of effort is going to be going in a direction y three years any one know the answer to that apart from Martin because in three years that's when the next review actually we don't know whether the money's gone or not but in three years there'll be a so at the moment people have to pay the subscription but it's a non-voluntary subscription so it's universe so you can see it going through your bank account but it's like a direct debit and you can't control it now in three years time all of those rules will be renegotiated and everybody expects the non-voluntary to disappear it's almost certain and whether it remains an 80-20 split we don't know but we're all pretty certain that the non-voluntary clause we've actually got three years to prove our value in this way which isn't very long and that's what we're trying to focus on so we really want to do useful things that you will value and you will see the benefit of within that time period and the way we want to try and do our innovation therefore to fit in with that is via co-design which is a more agile partnership based focus process which involves working with representatives of stakeholder groups at an early stage to pilot, develop and then deliver and hand over new products and services we did a pilot well, I didn't because it was before I started at GESC and the pilot started almost a year ago last August and the pilot involved getting these five organisations the Search Libraries UK, Russell Group by T-Directors College, the Club of Libraries and the Society of the Club of University by T-Directors and GESC getting them to nominate people on a budget, lock themselves in a room and come up with some list of problems that they wanted to try and solve in their own institutions and to propose projects to try and address those this is what they came up with I think that the important point to note for me is rather than the list which there are some things that have been most of those have moved forward quite well some have been more successful than those particularly the national student innovation competition but GESC is now here as an equal partner in the process with the other stakeholders now in the past we used to dole out money but then we just used to perform a quality assurance role and invite people to give a presentation at this dissemination event but we'd step back during the execution of that work now we're not there to dominate the conversation but we're there as an equal partner in this innovation process alongside the representatives and the other groups and that's very different from how we've worked in the past I think that again the area that people were most pleased with coming out of that pilot was the student summer of innovation where we won a national competition and we repeated it again this year and we've asked the students to come up with their own ideas of things that will improve their experience and with things like gamification it's actually quite difficult for universities to do this themselves it's kind of ethical if Loughborough University decided to put on its VLE leaderboards of courseware and opt students into it without them saying they'd be an outcry they'd have all sorts of ethical considerations but if the students set something up like that of themselves and it's up to students whether they opt in or not that can actually be quite good sidesteps any of those ethical concerns and the university in question can keep an eye and make sure that it's gamifying inappropriate activities relevant academic and social activities that can work quite better so there were some projects around a voluntary gamification but actually the big success so far has been in the research area which is at the moment this company has charged larger amounts of money to academic researchers to find cohorts which tend to be university students most mules and guinea pigs tend to be students themselves and this is a sort of crowd sourcing social tool for doing it so as a student or a volunteer you can register with the system and say the sort of research you'd like to help and as an academic you can go in and register and say what sort of cohort you're looking for and the system will do the rest so we're piloting that at the moment we've given two additional chances of funding and we're hoping to see that continue to grow not just in the UK but around the world and those students are still very keen to keep working with Jisk, I'm pleased to say we haven't put a contractual straight jacket around them they are able to walk away if they want but they don't they're actually post graduates from Nottingham University so there's a successful pilot of co-design but we were still running the traditional Jisk calls in parallel with that we had a decision to make in November do we keep that parallel track or do we just say the Wilson report absolutely slated the traditional Jisk call we know we want to phase it out quickly should we just do it now we made the choice yes let's just do it now which meant very quickly scaling up the co-design process so the co-design process became a sole process for innovation first that involved trying to retrofit the existing portfolio of projects into co-design hard and then launching a new co-design year and we had various discussions rather than just having one budget and one blank piece of paper so we were talking with various stakeholders and also the Jisk board and the funders they said we'll split it up into four can I form a theme that that this consensus in the sector wanted to try and address and then structure some projects under those using the co-design methodology so they'll be four blank pieces of paper so they're not quite blank, they've just got a heading on the top now which has a theme type and these notional budgets and then groups of relevant stakeholders we'll see in a minute the Cetus community rather than the department could be a stakeholder group in quite a meaningful way in a couple of these as we go through them and then those groups together have ownership Jisk provides the money Jisk's an equal partner around the table not a dominant partner and these groups decide what particular areas they want to address for some of these themes that's going to be easier than others we went through a quite rigorous process of intelligence gathering and workshops and posted notes and brainstorming the full Jisk shooting match of tools for which is some kind of shared for you and I think the outcome was there's people in the room that are involved in that small number I think I was quite surprised, some of the it's a couple of the things I wasn't very surprised at and a couple of the things I was so let's have a look what came out of this exercise remember, these were groups such as Sconaw Rugget Usiza Association of Colleges Association of Learning Technology National Union of Students Buff Dug and we had two pro-vice chances in the room as well so we had a good spread of stakeholder groups senior managers from universities the first thing they came up with if you can't read all of this hopefully the slides will be going around the detail isn't really important this wasn't such a surprise for me it's around research personally the fact that the current approaches to research data management within individual institutions tends to be just about ensuring short-term compliance with the current research council policies in order to avoid the risk of funding being stopped because although it hasn't happened there's a threat that if policies aren't complied then research council funding may be with with health people felt this isn't necessarily a jiscuit, this was the view of quite a knowledgeable group of people up in the room that these piecemeal approaches probably weren't the most efficient and effective way for the sector as a whole to achieve the aims of open research that the policies, the research council policies were primarily about and there might be a better way if efforts were coordinated more nationally and just could have a role to play in that so we'll have to be decided so far as this is a theme that needs to be addressed and we'll predict all sorts of things that might come out of that but that would be to pre-empt the process so I'm not going to go into too much detail but that's a clear problem that people want to try and solve obviously standards have a bit, not so much educational standards but research standards in this case potentially an important part of that addressing that challenge and then this was another one that I wasn't surprised at so much people have been talking a lot about learner analytics and individual institutions some institutions have done a great deal of work I think Bolton has done a lot of work in this area for example, is that correct? but there's a lot of universities and a lot of colleges who haven't done as much so I think people are saying just can help disseminate that good practice but then also look at a national level service, maybe around benchmarking see to be anonymised you don't want to, your competitors won't want to disclose exactly where they are clustering of different types of universities and also taking a national view on predictive models for identifying students at risk it's quite interesting that I was invited to Russell Group programised chances for learning and teaching and I put one of my slides which I haven't got today but it was about the competitive market that just can't give money to the individual universities it's got to try and spread money across the piece now and because these, we don't want to skew the market we don't want to skew competition so I asked those progress chances so for example, just say one of you had a really good predictive model for that spotted your students that are about to drop out you wouldn't want to, that would really help you retain your students, you'd want to keep hold of that wouldn't you, you wouldn't want to share that with everyone else and they all thought and I was quite surprised they came back very quickly and said actually you're right there's some things we wouldn't share to the market, but not that we still would share our predictive model for analytics and I said okay fine so therefore that is something which even in the new competitive world people are still happy to share and collaborate on that kind of thing so I think it's good news, it means that just to therefore get involved and try and do that so hopefully those are the sorts of things that could come out at a national scale from this kind of work and now we're going on, so this is the one that I wasn't expecting not because I didn't understand the challenge I just think it's potentially very big and very ambitious okay so we've got any representatives from tribal or sits or anything in the room okay so this is what interests me because I think what people are saying is that they see and again don't blame the messenger but they see student information systems which are designed on first of all on the mainframe paradigm so there's no element of multi-tenancy or of ability to share results and also they're very much driven by the administrator as king or queen so there are administrative systems there have been some self-service functionality added it doesn't get always the best feedback well you know what the feedback self-service functionality gets the student isn't at the centre of the system both in terms of the data model and in terms of the tools that are provided so people are starting to think well you know we're talking about putting the students at the centre all the time perhaps we should do it with our student information systems and is there some next big thing some next generation systems that actually does this there are starting to be some candidate things happening inevitably in North America and I'm sure there are in other parts of the world as well so is there a new generation of systems that will better support the student journey and if so just can spot that and can help bring it over and you know this could be an opportunity if a supplier was itself a struggling with a platform that the supplier itself thinks has gone beyond its paradigm and is hoping that this thing also could come on and it could migrate to use us on that because it's finding it more and more difficult to pitch that paradigm aligned to the expectations of its customers and it could also be rolled for a supplier whereas if a supplier just wanted to keep flogging their system for as long as possible knowing that eventually the wheels are going to come off I'm not sure but I think there are possibilities for very much for corporates to work for people who are interested in these new generations of systems that have certainly North American universities to be quite harder so joining a CRM with a sort of traditional student records functionality with the alumnus system and also a national level and this is where it gets a bit difficult I really don't know how this is going to pan out but another thing that came out quite clearly from that national union of students happy survey was that students themselves now are wanting to bring back cats they want to be able to maybe do a couple of years doing HE courses at their local FE college and they may be spending a year in a London university and then get a degree at the end of it and why not if it's difficult to afford why shouldn't this system be run for their benefit whereas individual universities are putting a huge amount of effort into recruiting and then retaining students for the whole period of course so there's a bit of a tension between what the customer wants what the supplier wants certainly in terms of the universities maybe the colleges as HE providers will have a different perspective on that and can this system we've talked about unique learner numbers and higher education achievement records is it possible to have some sort of widening with that which would help this to happen there'll certainly be demand from the national union of students and I know if the NUS is taking part in putting people on to the COVID-19 group I know that's the direction that they're going to be pushing and it'll be different from possibly what the universities themselves might want so that's very ambitious I don't know where that's going to lead to be honest it's not something that Jess's really done before and hugely relevant to people in the room if you want to participate I think there's every opportunity and then again I didn't expect this one to come out but I was quite glad that it did it's axiomatic that the best way to get your professional tool on any system is to invest in the people and processes and skills and there's a particular issue coming out of all these tuned services that the way lecturers use technology doesn't match the aspirations of the kids coming into the ocean there's loads of other that they've disappointed et cetera so how can we help with that the new digital pedagogy and the leadership experience that's also needed at senior levels in universities and colleges so again not something that Jess's done a huge amount of in the past although it has been involved in changing the learning landscape just stuff like that changing the changes around higher education academy and things like that there may be an opportunity here for Jess to do something quite useful working closely with other groups with leadership foundation higher education academy and other relevant stakeholders so those are the four challenges that stakeholders came up with and you're very welcome to get involved so finally I'm going to spend five minutes trying to be a little bit provocative around standards and innovation first of all let's start off with an example from outside the sector so hopefully this is safe um the title the perfect is the enemy of the good this might give you a clue where what my take on standards is going to be NHS connected for health budget 11 billion uptake well you can answer that but it created a date again some of the information has disappeared which is in terms of lessons learned I think there are opportunities to learn lessons and they're either taken or they aren't but there was a very detailed date of spire it was probably quite bloody difficult to implement anyway what happens next anyone minister council's whole project and writes off 11 billion ok so this is an example of a project with a very micro-defined set of standards and the outcome that it had coincidence or causality I don't know but true and not in this sector let's look at something else something which didn't have an example of learning on the face of it it doesn't appear to have any standards at all there are a lot of people in the room who have seen about Sigarta Meecher and his whole in the wall self-organised learning do you know what I'm talking about so anyone not have a clue what I'm talking about so this is the computer put in a particular environment with kids in in an Indian village who were able to undertake quite sophisticated learning tasks obviously the system didn't incorporate IMS but it did have some standards and actually what if you take a casual look at this word what it appears to say is we don't need teachers we don't need any of this stuff at all but actually what he's found is that this kind of learning only works in a very particular context in a particular environment and you have to create the environment and if you create the right environment then that system of learners will self-organise itself and this is well understood to people who study complexity in mathematics and self-organised criticality if you see the system in a complex system in a particular way then it can organise itself and create meaningful structure but if you get that initial seeding wrong then it won't and actually the way the way you first set up this whole in the wall was a very important that precise configuration of getting those kids to interact in a particular way and if you get that seeding which allowed the learning to emerge and that was the emerging property and for me that was the standard you may not have realised at that time but if you set purpose to the learning system in that standard way you can get a self-organised early effect which is very powerful so actually if you understand what he's saying he will expand this to his model of education and it's the way you set up that whole in the wall in an environment in a village with kids who interact in a particularly boisterous manner if you don't have any of those ingredients it doesn't work so you could regard that as a set of standards albeit a fairly loose set of standards but that's obviously a very powerful method of learning I don't think anyone can deny the learning outcomes that were achieved there wicked media my wife's now a junior doctor in Trillis Cospet, in Truro and during her medical degree she got a session from somebody in the library said don't look at Wikipedia when you're doing your coursework and she said I don't know, I'll shut up but what a stupid thing to say everything looks at Wikipedia and she spent the rest of her degree every time she's been on the wards with doctors the first thing they do when they don't know is to go on to Wikipedia it was a library it started off as a very simple open system no real set of standards at first just a simple web-based system for putting up material and editing but relatively quickly a culture emerges there's a culture in the community like the Sintis community and actually it's that that creates the formal standards it's just the way that web system works the culture that emerges it's a self-organising system it's actually very strong and makes this a resource that if you ask doctors in the UK do they use Wikipedia a very large majority will say yes so I don't know what the librarian's problem was can someone explain it to me can someone tell me this doesn't have a strong set of rules now no I didn't understand that but it's true so I think this is a really good example of when that starts off with a very an empty system with a simple set of technical tools for editing content where very quickly a culture emerges and a very powerful tool arrives so again there are standards there but they're relatively light touch and the rest of it is left to emerge and now we are getting close to home and we know about LTI as a rigorous standard basically a need and then we also know about a couple of years ago basic LTI and I was told last night that Charles Severance was involved and it was quite contentious for us and his involvement was to make it pragmatic, light touch and as a result I think there's been a lot of innovation around it for example the cameras for the LE and the app centre full of innovative things that people can plug in to the cameras for LE so I think that intervention has had a really marked effect in improving the innovation, the capacity for innovation and leaving that space in those LTI standards well maybe there's another explanation and I'll be interested in what people think of that there's certainly been a change in the last couple of years and in a way that seems to have stimulated innovation finally penultimately we've got all standards addressing sort of a problem we heard about standards for coursework submission we've got an absolutely critical problem with a company that's just been taken over for $700 million can probably afford expensive lawyers so I won't name them but we all know that a leading UK provider in plagiarism and coursework submission is attracting comments about how well its systems are performing under load at the moment and we all know that most of us know that other solutions are available Martin you've just come back from the UNIS conference and there's a number of systems in work and for example you can you could peel off some of the existing standards and actually solutions to the problem a company of our dear long name talking about making sure that all of their products are LTI compatible so if anybody is interested in running a pilot to create an abstraction layer it's very easy to migrate from product page to product page whether you actually end up doing it or not just that we're taking it seriously might make this company give a project problem a bit more potential if anybody is interested in doing some work around that we've just been asked what can we do to solve the problem yes we can go to yet another solution and then deliver or we can actually make it possible for people easily to move away from that supply to another believe me money tools that's the one thing just can do that could really help based on standards but based on the pragmatic use of them so my final concluding point is we said right at the start that technology organisations need to innovate okay we also need standards to get in the way of the innovation then that's a clash so a technology organisation must use standards that continue to allow innovation because technology organisations must need to innovate so my hypothesis completely unproven maybe some truth in it maybe nonsense the best standards particularly that help innovation are around seeding complex systems they only define the things that need to be defined particularly they light a touch and they leave space they leave room for innovation in a way that the micro define standards the canonical type of fine grain standards simply don't leave any room for maneuver at all they don't leave any space for innovation so the best standards from an innovation point of view are light a touch they appeal to the self-organising nature of the systems and the cultures that we work in and they leave space for innovation they do not become ends in themselves they are about solving problems they are about solving learning and teaching problems and research problems as soon as they start to become ends in themselves people will quickly listen that's my hypothesis innovation is important these are the sort of standards I think that help innovation I think other standards don't I'm really happy to work with people on the sets of standards that help innovation and help our technology continue to grow and flourish we talk about the need for innovation in a technology organisation then we went off on a sidetrack about GISC and its structure talking about digital futures my part of GISC and how we are running innovation now particularly using a co-design process as a replacement to the traditional GISC call for funding how we have scaled that up and the four challenges that we are running in 2014 research at risk from prospect to alumnus learner analytics digital capabilities and then finally we have looked at the kind of standards that help to see innovation rather than the style of innovation or not you may not agree that's it