I was delighted to hear over Easter that we had been invited to present at the EUNIS 2014 conference on recent developments at Jisc - read on for the abstract to our talk. For more information about the conference and EUNIS, the European University Information Systems association, please see the conference website.
Most of my regular co-conspirators will be aware by now that I will shortly be moving on from Loughborough University to a new job with Jisc, as their resident Futurist. But who are Jisc, and what does a Futurist do anyway? I'll try to answer both of these questions in this post, which goes all the way from jet packs and holidays on the moon to legal and contractual frameworks and information assurance requirements for cloud services. Buckle up - it's going to be a wild ride!
This poster for the 2014 International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC 2014) in San Francisco was produced by my Loughborough University colleague Sue Manuel, with Sarah Jones and Angus Whyte from Jisc's Digital Curation Centre. It summarises our recent survey of UK Higher Education institutions' planning for Research Data Management in support of the Research Councils UK (RCUK) mandate on open data. For more information on the survey, please see our summary report Metadata is Love Note to the Future and the Loughborough University RDM blog.
I'm delighted to be able to present here the results of our recent survey of the UK Higher Education community's plans for Research Data Management, along with a little initial analysis and an executive summary. To stay true to the spirit of openness, we have made a redacted version of the raw data available, along with our analysis, using the figshare cloud RDM service.
We're doing a survey of UK Higher Education institutions' approaches to Research Data Management. We've had a good response to this so far, but there's always room for more - hence this post to further raise awareness. This work is part of Loughborough University's Research Data Management project, which I've blogged about previously:
If you are leading on RDM or Open Data more generally for your institution, please take a moment to fill out our RDM questionnaire. We'll share a suitably anonymized version of the results in due course.
If data is the new oil, then how do we go about extracting and refining it? And will it come out easily, or will we need to resort to "data fracking"? I'll talk here about my favourite idea that came out of the recent Jisc think tank meeting on Big Data and Analytics, which is all about setting up mechanisms for data and potentially code sharing across academia, government and industry. I'm also setting you up to find out more about the literal Digital Exhaust.
This is a companion piece to my plenary talk at IWMW 2013, looking at the disruptive changes sweeping through the higher education sector and how moving to being open by default may help us to weather the continuing storm. I look at how we are increasingly "crossing the streams" in terms of bringing hitherto unrelated areas and activities of our institutions together, and working with a much broader range of external partners. Historically JISC would have taken a leading role in terms of steering innovation in the community. I discuss whether the new Jisc could and should attempt this once more, or whether it has lost the capability along with the staff members that it has recently shed. All this, and dragonflies with backpacks...
In a couple of weeks' time I'll be one of the plenary speakers at this year's Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 2013). My talk is called The Inside-Out University. It's about how we adapt to a new world where publications, research data and educational resources are open by default, and the catalytic role of the web community. Read on for more... NB: Last call for IWMW bookings is Monday June 17th!
I've blogged in the past about our Research Data Management project and the Higher Education sector's transition to being Open by Default (through Open Access Publications, Research Data and Open Educational Resources). This work is coming on nicely, and we now have a draft institutional policy (developed by my colleague Sue Manuel) that I'd welcome your feedback on. This still has to be further crunched over at an institutional level for formal approval, but it incorporates lots of good ideas from our discussions with other institutions, and I think we're pretty much where we need to be.
HPC Midlands is an exciting new initiative from Loughborough University and the University of Leicester. We have been funded by EPSRC to provide "on demand" supercomputing for University researchers and industry.
I recently presented on the project at the Hartree Centre's HPC As a Service for Industry event. You can see my slides above, and I have broken out some specific comments in this blog post.
I'm leading a session at BETT this year on "The Perfect Storm" of change in the education sector and educational technology - see below for the session abstract.
I'd love to incorporate comments from readers of this blog, so please do post a comment below if you would like to contribute to the conversation.
As we near the year's end, time for a quick look back at the highlights of 2012. My Twitter word cloud for 2012 above (via wordle.net) points at the likes of HPC Midlands, our work on open data and GEUG12 (the Google Apps user group meeting I helped to organize), but misses out one very important thing - winning a Times Higher Award!
What does your research data look like, and what facilities would your researchers welcome to help them manage it? Here are the first fruits of a survey of researchers at Loughborough.
The number one question from today's prospective students - if I come to your institution to study, how likely is that to lead to a decent job afterwards? And anyway, what courses are likely to be the most lucrative for me, and which ones should I avoid like the plague? Thanks to an initiative called the Key Information Set (KIS), all the data you need to answer these and similar questions for yourself is now openly available. Let's take a look...
Open Access logo - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access
Today I'm
writing about changing expectations. We all have a particular world
view or mental model based on past experiences and our internalized view of
what constitutes "business as usual". What happens when an event
comes along that shakes that mental model to its core? In UK HE we have had a whole series of such events of late,
but I will single out one in particular - and it's not the new fees regime (or
BYOD if you're an IT person :-)
Open By Default
The
momentous change I refer to is the move to being "open by default",
pretty much across the board. Consider
this edict on open access to research data from the EPSRC, that noted hotbed of
radicals: (highlighting is mine)
Research
organisations will ensure that appropriately structured metadata describing the
research data they hold is published (normally within 12 months of the data
being generated) and made freely accessible on the internet; in each case the
metadata must be sufficient to allow others to understand what research data
exists, why, when and how it was generated, and how to access it
Research
organisations will ensure that EPSRC-funded research data is securely preserved
for a minimum of 10-years from the date that any researcher ‘privileged access’ period expires or, if others
have accessed the data, from last date on which access to the data was
requested by a third party
Another
key part of the move to openness by default is the opening up of research
publications following the Finch report. Historically it would have
been difficult to track the cutting edge research in a particular area unless your
institution had subscribed to the relevant journals. You could live in hope that a few scraps of
free content would be thrown your way, or maybe beg the author to send you a
copy of their article. Not ideal if you are an early
stage researcher, and an insurmountable obstacle to ordinary folk. [You might think that ordinary folk would rapidly lose any
interest in published academic material if they were exposed to it - tell that
to my friend who has a child with a rare medical condition and has me keep an eye
out for new papers in the area by (ab)using our institutional journal subscriptions]
One might also say that there are some snakes in the Garden of Eden that is open access publication, since inevitably the traditional journal publishers are unwilling to roll over and die without a fight. Here's a lovely video from Alex Holcombe that unpicks the much vaunted "Gold" model of open access publishing...
MOOCs, OERs and other intimidating new acronyms
Institutions
like MIT, Stanford and the Open University have blazed a trail by making Open Educational Resources available. This movement has led to new ventures such as MitX (and now EdX), Coursera and Udacity, and is itself the
byproduct of a new model for teaching and learning - the Massively Open Online Course or MOOC. Here's a nice video about MOOCs from Dave Cormier, a key figure in the movement:
This new model inverts the
traditional approach to further and higher education by having huge classes
with equally vast dropout rates and a peer-to-peer interaction model rather than the traditional instructor-learner relationship. For those that want to pursue it, accreditation is now becoming a practical option, through a testing centre approach similar to IT certifications such as CCNA and
MCSE. It's telling to see both leadinginstitutions and industry giants with test centre facilities such as Pearson embracing this new model.
Adapt to Survive?
The above
notwithstanding, OER has a different sort of traction to open access
publications and research data - right now there is no mandate that teaching
and learning materials must be shared in the same way as research outputs, and
it is expensive and labour intensive to produce course materials with high
production values. You could simply fling your existing materials onto the open web rather than sequestering them behind a Virtual Learning Environment, but this would be unhelpful and possibly self-defeating if it leaves people with a bad impression.
A case in point at Loughborough: one of our most successful OERs is the mathscard™, a simple piece of card packed with info to help A-Level students with their Maths. Over half the schools in England, Wales and Northern Ireland subscribe to the mathscard, and over 2 million cards have now been distributed. We recently created a mathscard app, which has also been hugely successful - see below for screenshots.
mathscard app on common smartphone platforms
Perhaps more
significantly, the approaches that work for online distribution and learner
engagement with students that the lecturer may never meet in real life are often quite different from those that would be employed in a
conventional face-to-face teaching session based in a classroom. It isn't sufficient to simply point a camera
(or a sophisticated lecture capture system!) at the lecturer delivering their
traditional sage on the stage performance.
Watch the
videos from the likes of Udacity or the Khan Academy and you will see that they have been
shot as short films in their own right. They often feature the lecturer speaking
straight to camera or using graphical devices such as video capture of
diagrams, equations etc being handwritten.
It's a long way away from a video of someone standing in a lecture theatre talking in front of some PowerPoint
slides.
The Wrap-Up
I would venture to say that the practices I have described above are second nature to academics working in certain disciplines. For me the prime example of folk who are accustomed to sharing data sets, source code, pre-prints, presentation slides and so on has been people who are working on the technologies underlying the Internet and the Web - just look at the activities of the Internet Engineering Task Force, for example. However, I am assured by my colleagues that there are parallels in a number of other areas.
If you are not already of this outlook, it will probably take some mental adjustment before it "clicks". However, the benefits are not to be sniffed at. See below for a recent presentation on exploiting openness to everyone's advantage from Brian Kelly. Brian has many strings to his bow, including the most downloaded author in the University of Bath's institutional repository.
One final thought on openness that may be illuminating - can you imagine advocating the opposite? Let's take that contrary viewpoint: (picture you are Mitt Romney here if it helps)
Taxpayer funded research should be locked away where nobody can get at it - there could be all kinds of trouble if people go around "researching" stuff. You can always pay for the work to be done again if someone else needs the results...
Industry should not able to get at and exploit research outputs. Research should be pure as the driven snow, and unsullied by crude notions of commercial gain.
Taxpayers have no right to see the course materials that they have paid for, created by the academics whose salaries they pay.
