Final thoughts on strategy forum

A quick round up of a couple of other sessions from the Higher Education Strategy Forum, and a summary of thoughts about the event.

We had a really good session from the VC of the University of Greenwich on Universities in the Digital Age. He outlined the key drivers that are impacting us at the moment, ( these are not new btw...)
Cloud computing, Mobile, Social Media, Openness and MOOCs and how we can turn our Information Systems from liabilities to assets
His conclusions were that the speed of technology development is scary but exciting, student expectations are high and Universities are struggling to keep up. His final point was that technology is a means to an end, not the end itself. which is of course true. Great talk from a VC who is obviously very clued  up about technology.


We also had a session from Chris Hale, Assistant Director of Policy at Universities UK about the efficiency agenda.
The Efficiency and Modernisation Task Force was established in 2010, (I was a member of it) and it produced a report with 17 recommendations, commonly referred to as the Diamond Report. It set out a challenging agenda and there have been several successful outcomes, especially around collaborative procurement where sector wide savings of £435m have been demonstrated in two years.
Phase 2 started in November 2013, which identified 6 key work streams and the report was published last week. You can download and read a copy from here. Starts with an interesting infographic about the economic impact of Higher Education.

As well as the sessions I've posted about, we had a number of presentations from the vendors who had sponsored the event, individual business meetings with them and a "speed dating" hour where each vendor had 4 minutes to pitch to a small group of us. Overall I found it very useful. It wasn't just aimed at IT Directors, and there were VCs, PVCs, Deans and Directors of other professional services there, so some good networking opportunities. Most of the vendors were also pretty clued up on what we wanted to discuss. There were some excellent talks, and some not so good, quite a mixed bag, as often happens at these events. There were several things which could have been improved - the wifi coverage was dreadful, one of the days was too long( 0850 to 1905 with very short breaks only), and everything was very regimented. But, the venue was lovely, and when I did manage to escape for a short walk, I found this fantastic carpet of snowdrops and aconites under some trees.

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Space...

Moving away from technology, this morning's sessions were on space.

First up was the University of Warwick's PVC for planning talking about estates planning
Some interesting figures about UK University estate (all figures exclude student accommodation)
Capital expenditure on estate was £2bn in 2012/13. Revenue cost of supporting the estate is £1.9bn/yr
Size of HE estate is just behind NHS. About 7 times the size of Tesco estate!

Currently there is pressure on capital expenditure, little government funding now, most has to come from reserves or borrowing.
But there is a massive investment in the University estate because space is:
Central to operational effectiveness
Crucial to staff and student experience
Critical in ensuring ability to meet many different demands
Provides a competitive advantage
A third of students have rejected an institution based on the facilities they observed
80% of students say the quality of the facilities have influenced them to accept an offer.

Are issues about how we creatively use space, and space use and utilisation is very important. The effective use of our space is a particular concern of government
Analysis of space usage indicators over last decade tells a positive story, the total net space per fte student is down by 9%. However, the office space for academics is only down by 0.6 % We are not using office space efficiently.

Space norms and metrics can provide information against which opportunities and constraints offered by existing buildings can be reviewed.
Expansion of the estate in relation to growth can be forecast.
Expectations regarding space allocation between departments and amongst colleagues can be managed
But difficult to benchmark as few universities publish space use

Estate is core to the delivery of the academic mission
Student expectation, staff recruitment, retention all depend on high quality facilities.
Capital spending has to be linked to improvements in space management and utilisation
You need space norms, metrics and benchmarking to inform decision making
The sustainability agenda is very important

Last week's UUK efficiency report has a section on delivering value from the HE estate, and emphasises the need for academics and estates departments to work closely together. You can read the report here.


This was followed by talk on helping students to use technology in learning spaces. Primarily it focused on providing power for mobile devices using USB, not 240volts!

Previously discussions have focused around raised floors and floor boxes, but this is now unrealistic. Devices are less hungry for power and USB is fine.
They have some neat little devices, including this which is basically a big battery, which when charged up will provide 8 students with power all day. There are lots of configurations for using them - in middle of round tables or near soft seating and they can be built into furniture or a building.
I was quite impressed with them- so much better than floor boxes!!
They also had some neat collapsible computers in desks, can use space for computers or as desk space.


Finally we had a talk from DBS who design and install technology in teaching areas, residential areas and hotels. They shard a case study on what they'd done at Kings college for some new student accommodation.
They had had built 700 bedrooms, and put enough infrastructure in for at least 7 devices per student.
All the rooms had a flexible digital screen, and wired and wireless networks so all devices can connect to it. It delivered free IPTV and gave access to learning materials, streamed lectures etc

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From free to fee

Next session is a speaker from the Open University talking about changes in Higher Education, and how we should respond.
OU has been on a journey from late night BBC programmes, (they are proud of training the most number of inebriated physicists ) to co producing programmes like Frozen Planet with the BBC. 45% of people in UK watched at least one episode of it. The OU built on this to sell their Frozen Planet course. From free to fee.

We don't all have relationship with the BBC, buth there are other Free to Fee channels we can use. For example, YouTube. one of worlds top search engines. The OU have created lots of very short courses as tasters for their substantial ones. We cod all do the same.

Another channel is iTunes. OU have been on iTunesU for 2 years and have just passed 75m downloads. They are the most downloaded university in the world, beating institutions including Harvard.

We all need to embrace these new methods of delivery and marketing to leverage from free to fee.

The OU Anywhere app was launched last year, and provides everything for a course in one place, lecture notes, videos etc. available on a mobile device. The world has moved to mobile and tablet - 75% of logins to facebook now are from mobiles - we have to accept that the desktop is dying and we need to move to mobile delivery.

The OU was a partner in establishing Futurelearn, the UK MOOC delivery platform which currently has 41 Universities set up, and partners with BBC and British Library. They built it for mobile first, had an engaging environment and had employment outcomes at the start of the journey. Completion rate is 3 times higher than major rival and it hs a 75% student satisfaction rating.

There is a huge appetite for a UK education globally, and we should capitalise on that.

From free to fee. :-)



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Higher Education Strategy Forum- Student Experience and Digital Lancaster

I'm at a Higher Education Strategy Forum at the moment, which is an interesting event, but more on that later...

Lots of short presentations, so I'll see how I get on posting about them.

First up is about the student experience, particularly in relation to their learning experience, and what we should be doing to improve it. Important to understand the current experience, concentrate on what you can do something about and take action. Need to engage with students and gain their trust. Needs to be a much deeper engagement than just talking to student officers. Engage them in course design and development. They can bring elements around the curriculum, a broader picture to make sure it is engaging and relevant. Involve students in co production of knowledge, not just about the flipped classroom, but creating a space where students and staff can interact. My question was how do you get students to accept this way of interactive learning, our experience in some areas has been " I've paid £9,000, now teach me". If something isn't credit bearing, or it involves a lot of work, they're not interested. Of course, I've exaggerated slightly, but our recent experience of "Achieve More", where all of our first year students had to take part in a week long cross faculty exercise designed to teach them a number of transferable skills including team work, problem solving etc was very illuminating. The biggest complaint was that it had no credit attached to it, so why did they have to do it. Their learning experience didn't come into it. If it didn't contribute to their marks, they didn't want to do it. I found that really sad.

Next up was Paul Harness from Lancaster University, talking about Digital Lancaster. They have a five point Digital Strategy.
The world in changing, and many organisations have had to change and develop digital strategies including the music industry, retail, banking, cities and even the government. Universities are no different, and a digital strategy should attempt to answer the question:
How will our organisation survive and thrive in a digital world?
They used a model from Gartner, which was a lens on the university strategy to look at digital opportunities and threats facing the institution, and then looked at capabilities and gaps.
Vision is aspirational and ambitious. Trying to use digital technology innovatively to give them an edge, and make the institution think differently, ie about culture, not about technology.

They've put together a number of resources, including a one page summary and a video which you can see here.

Important that this isn't seen as an IT strategy, but a University strategy. Different parts of the strategy are assigned to different senior managers to oversee implementation.

Some examples of implementation:
1 Mobile applicant engagement.
Have a mobile app, 0.5 FTE working on it, rest of team are students. Have built a lot of functionality. Have developed an app tailored to the needs of applicants. iLancaster. Went into schools and talked to students about what they wanted. Information sent to them about the app with offer letter. Hoping it will improve offer take up. It contains welcome information, accommodation information, 3d tours, booking for visit days etc. Each academic dept can put their own content into the app. Also can initiate live chat sessions.

2 Innovation Hub
Small team of two people looking at innovation and ideas generation, operate in highly agile and flexible way. Operate like a start up, challenging existing processes. Partnering with computer science software development programme. Have created on line ideas platform where ideas can be submitted and voted on.
One of the ideas which came out of this was the Minecraft campus.
The student gaming team comes into their department one afternoon a week and are building the campus in Minecraft from info provided by estates. Can fly through etc. Has cost very little apart from engaging with students.

Some great ideas from Paul. I'm very keen to develop a Digital Strategy, and am hopeful that we can deploy our ideas platform, Ideascale very shortly. I also like the idea of partnering with computer science, and we have our very own company EpiGenysis, who might get a call when I get back. And as for building the campus in Minecraft, genius!





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