Data-driven approaches to teaching excellence
Jisc is developing a service allowing universities that don’t routinely collect and analyse learning data to begin to do so. Jisc's Phil Richards writes in Universities Business how learning analytics already offer a practical way to demonstrate student engagement and could bring more benefits in the future.
Partnership expands for Jisc’s open research data shared service
Jisc's research data shared service pilot now involves 17 partners after four more institutions joined in with the project. A blog by Jisc's Rachel Bruce says the service aims to serve a variety of needs, including providing repositories for deposit and access to research data and encouraging data reuse in the long term.
We call it data – students call it life
Big data will back up the new breed of personal tutors in universities. But Brian Hipkin worries that relying on statistics without a meaningful human context will create a support system that will ultimately fail students.
Student surveys are a waste of everyone’s time
"Students have to answer 25 questionnaires a year and they are sick of it", an academic complains. In a post for the Guardian's Academics Anonymous blog, the unnamed physiology lecturer asks why universities are so obsessed with pointless data.
Road map published for the higher education information landscape
The New Landscape project seeks to create a design for the information landscape, something that has never previously existed in higher education. Rosie Niven rounds up the main points set out in the publication of a report setting out the roadmap for data in higher education.
WHAT DOES GDPR MEAN FOR HIGHER EDUCATION
Rob Hunter is Managing Director and Founder of Hunterlodge Advertising. In this piece he draws our attention to the changing landscape of personal data management and the need for the HE sector as a whole to prepare for effective compliance with the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation).
Not engaging with open data is ‘a loser’s game’
Following Universities UK’s (UUK) recent open data mashup day in partnership with Jisc and the Open Data Institute, Ian Morton of UUK reflects on how smarter use of data by universities could play a significant part in answering the objectives of the government’s green paper on higher education – and also much more.
Jisc secures networks to enable safe sharing of medical research data
Jisc is enabling researchers across the UK to safely and securely share health data for their collaborative research projects. The UK’s research and education network Janet, provided by Jisc, is providing an efficient solution that secures the networks linking participating institutions and eliminates the need for them to develop and manage their own authentication systems.
Why blockchain could be the future in knowledge procurement
More applications are emerging for blockchain - a formerly obscure technology that underpins the digital currency Bitcoin. Nick Petford, chair of the Procurement UK forum and vice chancellor of the University of Northampton, is excited about its potential for procurement.
Data capability toolkit
This toolkit outlines a process to guide higher education data collectors and providers through an assessment of data management maturity and the development of an improvement plan to achieve the benefits of operating at a higher maturity level and mitigate the risks of doing nothing.
