Digital Student

One of the JISC projects to come out of the codesign process is Digital Student, which is exploring students expectations and experiences in using technology, and they have recently published almost 50 exemplars of effective practice in support of students’ digital experiences. You can see them here, and I'm pleased to see that Sheffield is represented by All About Linguistics. There's some really good ones, and a real variety of case studies - a good set of resources for anyone interested in improving the students digital experience. They are categorised under the following headings:

    •    Prepare and support students to study successfully with digital technologies
    •    Deliver a relevant digital curriculum
    •    Ensure an inclusive student experience, using technology to overcome disadvantage
    •    Provide a robust, flexible digital environment
    •    Develop coherent policies for ‘Bring Your Own’
    •    Engage students in dialogue about their digital experience and empower them to make changes
    •    Take a strategic, whole-institution approach to the digital student experience

Build and deliver, your money or your life

After the JISC Stakeholder forum on Tuesday I went to the Chemistry Club, for an evening networking with colleagues from other sectors. it's an informal event, and I got to talk to many interesting people, including from the Cabinet Office where we talked about the Government's "Digital by Design" initiative, some CIOs from Local Authorities who are moving to cloud based solutions and wanted to talk about how we'd done it, and a number of suppliers. We also had a talk from Chi Onwurah, Labour MP and shadow minister for digital government & cyber security.

Yesterday I visited  colleagues from London Universities to talk to them about a number of joint issues, especially around how we organise and shape our departments to deliver services. A common theme was separating out "Build" and "Deliver", and handling the transition between the two. I like to walk wherever possible, and my meetings yesterday were on opposite sides of London - I walked to all of them, and when I checked my fitibit before collapsing into bed, realised I'd clocked up just over 10 miles - I slept well!

Today was the UCISA Executive meeting, also in London, so I missed all the snow, although did get stuck on a delayed train coming home. The main item on today's agenda was looking at the business plans for all of the UCISA groups.They do a great job, including producing guidance and organising lot of events which are of great benefit to the sector. I do encourage staff to get involved with them, and am always pleased to see that Sheffield is well represented.

(btw, apologies to readers who are to young too get the significance of the title of this post...)

JISC Stakeholder Forum

Today I've been at the JISC Stakeholder Forum meeting in London. A range of people present including PVCs, CIOs, Librarians, and from across the sector, including FE as well as HE. The meeting was for JISC to tell us what they've been doing, as well as to get feedback from us on the direction we'd like them to take. They've undergone quite a transition over the last couple of years, and I think are now beginning to gel into a single organisation serving the sector. Lots of talk about engagement, and how they are going to work with us to deliver services.

We had a look at some of the last years achievements. Including the shared London data centre, a tier 3 data centre based in Slough with a number of anchor tenants already agreed. Hugely successful development, saving the sector about £20m over 5 years.

We also looked at the Summer of Student innovation and some of the successful projects that have come out of that. JISC have a new R and D web page which lists all of their projects which makes interesting reading.

We had a good round table discussion about how we can work together and how we can get the best value out of JISC services. Knowing what the services are, how much they cost and much they save us was probably the most important point to come out of the discussions.

This video looking back over the past year is worth a look and has some interesting figures in it




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Students, Power and Excellence

On an early train to London at the moment on route to JISC Stakeholder meeting, more on that later.

Yesterday was a real roller coaster day of meetings, I had 8! That will teach me to go away for a week.

In the morning I went to a consultation event with the Vice Chancellor and a good cross section of staff about our current review of our strategic plan, and the topic was The Student Experience. Some interesting presentation with some quite provocative ideas. By focusing on putting current students at the heart of everything, are we failing to meet the needs of other stakeholders, for example employers? Are we giving students what they want, rather than what they need? They want easy As, but they need a good education. What will the University of the future look like, and how will developments in technology change the way we teach?A very good session, with some excellent group discussions. One theme that emerged was the need to look at how we transition students from school to University, and also the need to radically review the way we teach to increase our flexibility to deal with non standard students and courses, which are increasingly becoming standard.

As well as updates on projects for which I am sponsor, I also caught up on an incident last week, where some electrical work caused us to loose power to one of our data centres. Because of the nature of the fault, the generator didn't kick in, correctly, so we ran on our UPS for 40 minutes, which had 3 minutes left when colleagues got the power restored. I think we can class that as a near miss.

Recently we launched our Customer Service Strategy which comes out of a lot of work we did last year within the department. Looking at the results of our recent staff survey, it's obvious that we do provide excellent customer service in some areas, but as in all things, there is always some room for improvement, and that's what we'll be working on this year.




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TEL, SAP, Value and TechQual

I posted the other day about TELFest which has been hugely successful - congrats to the whole team. The team have also just launched a new website - the TELHub - a website which provides information about technologies available to all staff to enhance their teaching as well as case studies showcasing the innovative use and effective practice of learning technology from colleagues across the University. Another great resource.

Other stuff happening this week - our Corporate System team completed an upgrade of our eRecruitment System delivering some real enhancements to the service, and they completed it ahead of schedule. Congrats all round.

I went to the first meeting of a new University committee to look at Public Value. I'm really quite excited about this group. It will look at how the University creates Public Value by looking at questions including  - what is the value of what we do, what are we for, who do we serve? It is intended to demonstrate that our activities make a difference and ensure that our stakeholders can engage with us. It will also look at difficult issues - where we might have different views from some of our stakeholders - and encourage an open debate. Some issues we discussed yesterday included whether we should disinvest from fossil fuels and how we might help asylum seekers in Sheffield.

The other interesting discussion this week was a first look at the results of a recent survey we've done of our services to staff using TechQual. This doesn't just measure satisfaction with our services, but it measures our customers expectations. Not surprisingly these have rocketed in the last year or two, and we are struggling to meet them.

OK, off on leave now for a week. See you soon.

Tiny Twins at Winter Graduation

Always a nice buzz on campus when it's graduation, and this week its our Winter Graduation ceremonies. As usual we're filming it, live streaming, and selling the ceremony on DVD and USB stick. Glad to see the team scrubbed up well ;-)


Also got a great range of gifts on sale from Print and Design Services


And for the first time, something new - meet Tiny Twin. You can have a whole scan, and then a model of you in your gown produced using 3D printing technology.


Cool!  And I'm told 3D photoshopping is possible, so you can have those few extra pounds removed ;-)

SSB Highlights

First Service Strategy Board of the year today - not a lot of project reports as we don't bother in January as it covers the Christmas period. However we do look at any projects having difficulty and try and solve any resourcing issues. We also get updates from each Service Manager on whats been happening in their area. A few things of note to report.

Today Winter TELfest started - organised and run by our Technology Enhanced Learning team, it follows the very successful one we ran in September and provides workshops, drop in sessions and networking sessions for staff who want to develop their technology enhanced teaching.  There's a great buzz over there at the moment, and it looks like being extremely interesting - there's sessions on our VLE, on Pebblepad, on getting the most from Google Apps, MOOCs, Twitter, lecture capture and mobile learning tools.

On the research side, we're working with one of our very successful professors who's just received a large MRC grant to set up an imaging lab, and we will be helping him with the computation and storage requirements.  The lab will use innovative and state of the art techniques developed here to produce high quality images of lungs which involve patients inhaling small amounts of noble gases before an MRI scan.


We also looked at a proposal to implement an event booking system for our performance space, buying some desktop scanners as a pilot for our student eFile project, and going through our release checklist for some new Google features which people have asked us for.

Annual Report

Welcome to our Annual Report - read about what we've been doing over the  last year!  Something for everyone - a review of achievements in our seven service areas, and some interesting facts and figures.

Happy New Year, and welcome to the Internet of Things

A Happy New Year to all of you, and welcome back!  I hope 2015 brings you peace, health and happiness.

A brand new year is ahead of us, and I've been giving some thought to what my priorities are in the first few months. I will be concentrating on:

• The action plan following the staff survey and all of the data we have collected about the results
• Implementing our Customer Service Strategy which we circulated to our staff just before Christmas and will be launching more widely soon
• Improving our stakeholder relationships
• A common framework for IT support across the university
• Putting in place processes to better plan, design, build, transition and deliver services

My colleagues on the Exec also have priorities that they will be taking forward, and I'll share them with you over the next few days.

One thing I haven't managed to achieve yet, is a trip to CES - the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It's the place where all the new gadgets and inventions are showcased, and the consumer space is definitely the place to look. Being a bit of a gadget girl, I'd love to go. Big thing this year - well, everything. The Internet of things has really taken off.  Everything that can be connected to the internet, will be. Everything is now in place to link our phones, TVs, appliances, cars, and homes. Computers, storage sensors, and wireless network connections have all become cheap enough to add networked intelligence to practically anything.

For example, Whirlpool has a new washer/dryer that speaks to the Nest thermostat. With its motion-sensing technology, the Nest knows when nobody is home. It tells the dryer, which then switches to a lower-temperature setting. The clothes dry more slowly to save energy because no one is in a hurry to put them on. The user does not have to program this behavior; the dryer and thermostat work it out for themselves. Is that a bit spooky? Or just very clever? 

Apparently they're also working on a coffee maker that will connect to your fitbit, to turn itself on as you're coming in from a run, or makes stronger coffee if you've had a bad night sleep!