In response to the announcement close colleague and former chair of our Board, Professor Mark Stiles said:
“CETIS is recognised internationally as an invaluable centre of expertise. As universities struggle to address the very real challenges confronting them, CETIS will be an essential source of guidance and support. The need for universities to take an enterprise view of their information, not just for learning and teaching but also organisationally, will place standards and interoperability high on the national agenda, and I am confident that CETIS will be more than able to respond to this and become ever more successful. Whilst the Board has been wound up, its members, including myself, are committed to continuing to work with, and support, CETIS in its reborn form.”

We will continue to work with Jisc, and other agencies and organisations in the sector. Many of our partners see us as a “trusted” broker for information and future developments of educational technology and standards in education, and we aim to maintain that role. We are currently working with a number of our partners with a view to funding future activities.

Over the next seven months CETIS and Jisc will work together to develop a new relationship. We are also actively seeking out new collaboration opportunities with a range of stakeholders in the education sector and looking forward to maintaining and extending our valued position in national and international developments around the use of educational technology, interoperability and standards.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Jisc for supporting our work in the sector over the last decade and look forward to continuing to working together in key areas in future years.

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“To teach you stuff, so when you grow up you know what to do and everything! You wouldn’t be able to read and write and do stuff like that.”

This was the quite succinct response to the question offered by my ten year old son and on reflection I’m not convinced that I could provide a more pithy statement. Unlike many of my colleagues my focus in this post is on Education as a system as opposed to ideal. From a cybernetic perspective systems are defined by what they “do”. What is it exactly that education does? What attributes do we assign to an educated person?

It would be easy for me to write a scathing critique of the education “system”. A system designed in and a relic of the Victorian era to produce the well educated workforce required to fuel industrial manufacturing output. As Ken Robinson et al argue it is a system that stifles creativity and innovation, one shaped by political doctrine. I could offer a list of worthy ideals, my own particular favourite being “enlightenment”, not purely in the Ionian sense but in the spiritual, others would include curiosity, creativity, connectedness and magic, ideals that undoubtedly resonate with my peers in the academic community. The purpose of education should be all of these things and more … the process by which wisdom is attained an ability to think beyond what is “given”. John Dewey suggested the primary purpose of education is the transfer of established conventions of knowledge and values across generations.

For me though, Education is about compromise, a negotiated social contract, one that deals with the complexity of expectation management. Ask the stakeholder constituents, and you will find a series of conflicting expectations and that’s why education is unavoidably political. Governments of all persuasions want, indeed need be seen, to care and provide “good education” of one flavour or another in an attempt to satisfy, through compromise, the conflicting demands and expectations of society for their own political purpose. Teachers invariably want to provide a “good” education based on their personal constructs of what that should constitute, compromised by such things as the requirements of state examination regimes and national curricula. Administrators may characterise good education as one of safety, order and control. Industry and employers demand “good” education that provides them with a variety of educated, able, skilled workers and students want a “good” education in order to get one of these jobs and, quoting my son, so that they know “what to do and everything” These disparate groups have from their individual perspectives perfectly valid expectations of education and all are constituent parts of an extremely complex system, with the associated variety management, that is education.

If we as a society continue to fund state education through central taxation and do not adopt the illichian ideal of de-schooling society then our education system will remain one characterised by compromise

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I have previously “blogged” about, what I see as, often poorly informed and quite “Draconian” policies regarding internet usage within FE colleges including, for example the wholesale blocking of students’ internet access to social networking sites. It’s easy and too simplistic to suggest that this is resolved solely by increased knowledge amongst administrators, education, or by a more sophisticated understanding of ICT by those responsible for policy. There are major issues at the policy level, which Colleges are obliged to deal with.

There is some discussion as to what level of technical understanding should senior Management in institutions have. Lawrie Phipps, JISC programme Manager “blogged” about this very subject earlier this week. And he raises some important issues and questions.

What has prompted my current thinking on this situation are recent guidelines produced by Ofsted in structuring grades for College Assessment within the Leadership and Management effectiveness. Two of the criteria “Safeguarding” and “Equality and Diversity” are what are termed as Limiting grades; which in effect means should a college receive an “ineffective” grade on one of these criteria it is unlikely that overall effectiveness of the college would be assessed as anything but “inadequate” which in turn triggers a series of requirements of the college.

Whilst these two criteria are clearly extremely important the emphasis of college’s maybe, understandably, concentrated on these criteria. Quality of provision, which falls within the teaching, learning, and Assessment criteria, could be compromised. Whilst Ofsted recognizes the need to equip students with the skills necessary to navigate the digital space safely; the balance is precarious.

Clearly any college that blocks access to all sensitive sites and social networking sites is “effective” with its safeguarding policy but would, in my view, be quite inadequate with its teaching, Learning and assessment provision. The former however carries much greater weight.

I’m sure there is good practice in dealing with this in the FE sector but it does present a real challenge to senior Management

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UCISA Business Intelligence event in Bristol In the context of current CETIS work in the support and synthesis project for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Student Life-cycle support project.

There were a variety of speakers at the event and a great deal consistency of issues raised, issues relevant to our work in CRM/SLRM. There were however also some quite notable inconsistencies.
One of the speakers described business intelligence in Higher Education (HE) as being a “mature “ area whilst another revealed when conducting an ad hoc straw poll of those attending the event (largely UCISA members ,Management and Information Systems Managers/Directors in HE) asking the audience to categorise where they believed their institutions were with Business Intelligence as Crawlers (Very much at the early scoping stage) Walkers (Scoping and pre-planning stage) and Runners (Planning and implementation stage) Out of an audience there were no runners about six or seven confessed walkers with the rest of us admitting to being crawlers, which I think is probably a more accurate reflection as to where institutions are just now.

William Liew and Martine Carter talked about Business intelligence activities at the University of Bristol which were driven from a financial measurement perspective and their attempts to integrate systems across research, procurement and student data and in their words “eliminate” local systems in order striving for the very bold ambition of“true” data for financial purposes. In their work they recognised multi stakeholder perspectives and quite honestly detailed the barriers they encountered. I must confess to having a little difficulty when one approach or one model is presented as THE model. Models from my perspective are a useful tool “A way of presenting a particular view of the world or representation from a particular perspective “too often they presented as THE view of THE organisations, it is one of the inherent deficiencies of modelling of any persuasion.

I was also very interested in David Sowerby’s presentation regarding the University of Bedfordshire’s student retention system and recognised the potential significance of this approach, in particular given the current Border Agency requirements of institutions to monitor foreign student attendance. Metrics relating to student “engagement” were presented, metrics based on consistent parameters being applied across the institution and values set against these parameters to define levels of student “Engagement” in order to flag up potential retention issues… all interesting stuff.
Some of the key points in BI implementation highlighted were:
1. Stakeholder Engagement buy-in ownership was essential.
2. The need for (process) modelling.
3. Data Quality – Bad data in Bad data out.
4. The need for meaningful Key Performance Indicators (KPI)
I am mindful that I will be attending the IMS GLC Learning Impact conference in the US in May 2010 and contributing to the Analytics discussions at this event.

I suspect our US colleagues are, using the earlier analogy, runners and they will indeed be running with Business Intelligence, although whether this is in the right direction will be the big question.

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