Co-Design

Today's meeting was the JISC Futures Forum - the body steering the co-design innovation process which I've blogged about before. We looked at progress on all projects - including the identity management one I posted about yesterday.

One of the most exciting ones to be funded as far as I'm concerned was the Student Innovation one - or the Summer of Student Innovation as it became. We gave groups of students free reign to come up with an innovation, and from the 36,  21 were chosen to be funded, and help given to take the development forward. You can see the successful ones here. Of these, six are being funded to produce useable services with pilots running in institutions from February to September 2014. These will be showcased at the JISC Digital Festival in March, and we're already planning the next round. A great project and we're really looking forward to seeing what students come up with next time.

Another strand to this project was The Digital Student - investigating the digital expectations and requirements of students as they come to University. The project has completed its initial investigation, and is now testing the recommendations on the community. The initial recommendations (in summary) are:

• Manage student expectations
• Equip students to learn effectively with digital technology
• Support students and staff to use their own devices (BYOD)
• Ensure digital content is device neutral where appropriate
• Enhance the curriculum with digital activities and experiences
• Engage students in projects to enhance their digital experience
• Develop and reward innovators – models of accreditation
• Encourage a culture of continuous organisational research
• Consider digital experiences alongside other aspects of the student experience – importance of joining up with other support services including IT, Libraries, Estates etc

No real surprises there, but the second phase will look at these in more detail. There's a blog just started here which has more information.

As well as looking at current projects, we spent much of the day discussing the co-design process in general, and how to take it forward. This has been a new departure for the JISC, working in partnership with stakeholders, which up until now have included RUGIT, CURL, SCONUL and UCISA. New partners will now come on board and the innovation process expanded. Lots of discussion on what type of projects can be classed as innovation, how to generate a pipeline of ideas, top down vs bottom up, communication, prioritisation etc.


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