You don't know what you've got til it's gone – RIP Jorum 

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Typcial! The day I on holiday is the day that the announcement about the retirement and refresh of our national open learning repository, Jorum, is announced. I think the news came as a surprise to many, partly because it’s not quite clear just what the refreshed version will actually be, and just what kind of open it will be.

Unlike some of my former Cetis colleagues like Lorna, I haven’t had any direct involvement with the development of Jorum. However, I have always had a bit of a soft spot for it. Mainly because I felt it got an lot of unfair press in its early days, and that was due it being an idea just a little bit ahead of its time in terms of easy implementation and adoption. I remember the struggles trying to get instituitions to sign up to use it – legal-ese heaven for some; the struggles with content packages, the metadata, the federated searche engines – happy days😉

Back in the day, there was always a bit of eye rolling and sighing from certain quarters whenever JORUM ( and at that time it was upper case) was mentioned. I think many of those people forgot that any system at that time would have had to contend with the early licence issues, the technical issues of uploading content etc. Despite all of this, Jorum kept going, growing and developing. Its transition form into an open repository was a testament to all who worked on it, and also to Jisc in terms of supporting open education. Like many others, the news this week has surprised me and made me feel a little bit sad.

This is where I have to “fess up”. I have never put anything into Jorum, and can’t actually remember the last time I looked at it. But, and of course there has to be a but, I have always encouraged others to use it whenever and wherever I could. It was like Elvis said, always on my mind, when taking about OERs and indeed educational resources in general. 

So, maybe a new app/refresh approach might actually help me and others like me to share my stuff in/on whatever the new Jorum might be. It could be another step forward in the cultural and practice issues around sharing “stuff” which is at the heart of opened education.

In the meantime tho’, it does feel a bit like that Joni Mitchell song  . . . You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone . . . And maybe in this case it’s a bit orange taxi . . . 

Students, customers, service user?  What's in a name?

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image (image https://pixabay.com/en/marketing-advertisment-ads-791202/ : CC0 Public Domain)

The thorny issue of students as customers has been raised a notch over the past month. Firstly at the Jisc Student Experience Creativity Workshop  and in matters closer to home that I will expand on later in this post.  Due to undergraduate fees, my colleagues in Universities south of the border are probably slightly more comfortable with the term, it does still irk me a bit. However we do have fee paying students at my institution, we need more to survive, and whatever way fees are paid, we certainly all need to be meeting and exceeding our students expectations of their university experience.

Last week I was lucky enough to meet and spend some time with Jim Groom along with some of my favourite ed tech commentators including Audrey Watters and Martin Weller at the Eden conference. Not surprisingly, lots of our conversations centred around, APIs, the domain of one’s own project and Jim’s new venture reclaim hosting.

A couple of years ago whilst doing some work for the OER Research Hub , I used the API analogy for researchers within the project.  Just like APIs, researchers provide hooks into research and its applicability in the real world. Or in the case of any educational research, the classroom.

Of course we can think of the university in a similar way. It could be seen as a massive API providing links between numerous services including learning and teaching, research, support, administration and many more.

Just now at GCU our new CIO is starting work on developing our Digital Strategy. Unsurprisingly there are many references to the “customer journey” usually preceded by words like  “improving” and  “transformation”.  Ensuring our student facing customer journeys are aligned with our establishing and constantly evolving learning journeys and curriculum development journeys is going to be crucial. This is where I think the term service user may be more appropriate.

Much of the work that needs to be done in our context is around our technical infrastructure and improving the integration and interoperability of our existing systems – our basic service provision if you like.

At this stage, the focus is very much on the “digital ” too. As we still have to come to consensus about what being a “digital university” means in our context ( I have one or two thoughts on that as you, dear reader will know and that was the reason I was at the Eden conference), why not be a bit more up front and talk about “service users” just now instead of customers?

I think that would be more meaningful and help us frame some of the conversations around just what being a digital university means in our context.

As part of the research that Evelyn McElhinney and I did last year around students use of technology, highlighted that we need to be thinking more about how we interact with what we called boundary spaces – the spaces we all find useful (e.g. youtube) – but don’t own and our bounded spaces (e.g. VLEs) in terms of learning activity. You can read more in our final case study.

If the first step on this journey is to improve our technical service offerings, get the quick wins to our essential service then why not make the shift to thinking of our IT infrastructure as an API?

Once that first layer is in place, then we can start to think about the more complex learning and teaching, research, administration journeys in the wider context of digital transformation through  digital participation and our mission for the common good.  Just like with software, the Universiy API provides the basic connections that allow the really exciting stuff to happen.

At the ALT Scotland SIG meeting this week, it was interesting to hear that GLOW (the Scottish Schools digital environment) is taken the API approach too.

I realise this isn’t ground breaking stuff, and it’s one of the reasons I like Mark Stubb’s tube map. I think that pretty much sums up the journeys most universities need to be thinking about.

“Customer” or “service user” may appeal or oppose in equal measure. But just now, I think the latter might be more appealing and engaging for where we are at in GCU.  It might also help separate the technical infrastructure from the people driven transformation that we aspire to.

Dave White has also written another take on this, the student as product. Even more food for thought.

Digital Participation and the Digital Common Good (#scotinfolit)

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Last week I attended the Scottish Government’s Digital Participation Advisory Group at Holyrood.  The Group advises the Cabinet Secretary for Culture, Fiona Hyslop who chairs the group.  I was there  as part of a mini delegation (well there were 3 of us, Bill Johnston, John Crawford and me)  from the Information Skills for a 21st Century Scotland Community of Practice.

We were fortunate to have been allocated quite a bit of the meeting to discuss information and digital literacy and the potential for closer links between this Advisory Group and the CoP. You can read our briefing paper Scotland’s Information Culture briefing paper (feel free to add any comments too).

There were a number of updates from other projects including the Let’s Get On campaign which has been traveling the length and breadth of the country and encouraging people to get online.  Whilst listening to the update  from the Wheatley Group on their pilot project offering low cost broad band access to their tenants in a Kirkton project in Glasgow.

The findings of the evaluation are showing that if you provide low cost access and in some cases devices, people will go online and start reaping benefits. These include saving money in taxi bills by doing online grocery shopping and using comparison websites. The requirement for online searching as part of job seekers allowance is also more easily fulfilled.

I was humbled whilst listening to  the difference having access to a reliable and low cost wireless connection can make to peoples lives.  I was reminded just how privileged a life I lead.  Wifi is ubiquitous in my life, both at home and work. I don’t have to make a choice about eating or getting online. Comparison websites are more a game than a necessity for me.

It seems though, that there is still a disconnect between interactions with other key public services. The next steps are to explore that more fully. It might be due to the fact that many government services aren’t fully useable with mobile devices.

So whilst it is great to see these initiatives and the confidence and opportunities they are bringing people (particularly children who in the project come out as very much being digital champions) there is still a lot of work to be done in terms of sustaining greater digital participation and the developing of peoples confidence and ergo their digital capabilities.

Digital participation is where Universities can play a pivotal role in the digital agenda.  Particularly a university like my own, GCU, whose mission is “for the common good” or  as it was originally stated ‘the common weal”. We should be a key part or digital hub if you like, looking for more ways to link initiatives like the ones mentioned above with our own work in widening participation for example the Caledonian Club and GCU College Connect far deeper into our formal and informal curriculum.

Last year I proposed this model of engagement for us, pitching us as a digital agora, or hub

 screen shot of diagram

In the week when UNESCO released its Rethinking Education: Towards a Global Common Good? report, embracing digital participation could be a crucial way forward for all of us.

I’ll be exploring the understandings of the digital university later this week at the EDEN conference where I look forward to extending this discussion more.

Open Data Glasgow #5 (#opendatagla)

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The Open Data Glasgow meet ups are now back on track, and last night saw the 5th meet up of the group. Thanks to the UBDC for hosting the event and providing refreshments.

I really enjoyed the mix of speakers at the event, and the focus from them all on how open data can help communities and people. That makes a nice change from the big data, big money commercial focus of many data conversations. It also raises key issues about data literacy and how we need to ensure the everyone can access and keep getting access to public data and in turn be more aware and empowered about how their own data is being used.

Thanks to Graham Steel not only for doing much of the co-ordination for the meeting but also for live streaming the event.

I’ve  collated tweets from the evening into this storify, and you below is the recording of all the speakers.