1. Open license: Most MOOC content is not openly licensed so it cannot be reused in different contexts. There are, however, a few examples of institutions using Creative Commons licences for their courses – meaning they can be taken and re-used elsewhere. In addition, there is a trend for MOOC to be made available ‘on demand’ after the course has finished, where they in effect become another source of online content that is openly available. Those OERs and online content can be used to develop blended learning courses or support a flipped classroom approach in face-to-face teaching.
2. Online learning pedagogy: New pedagogical experiments in online distance learning can be identified in addition to the c/xMOOC with variants including SPOCs (Small Private Open Courses), DOCCs (Distributed Open Collaborative Course) and SOOCs (Social Online Open Course or Small Open Online Course). It is likely that they will evolve to more closely resemble regular online courses with flexible learning pathways. These will provide a range of paid-for services, including learning support on demand, qualitative feedback on assignments, and certification and credits (Yuan and Powell 2014).
3. New educational provisions: The disruptive effect of MOOCs will be felt most significantly in the development of new forms of provision that go beyond the traditional HE market. For example, the commercial MOOC providers, such as Udacity and Coursera, have moved on to professional and corporate training, broadening their offerings to appeal to employers (Chafkin, 2013). In an HE context, platforms are creating space for exam-based credit and competency-based programs which will enable commercial online learning providers to produce a variety of convenient, customizable, and targeted programs for the emergent needs of the job market backed by awards from recognised institutions.
4. Add-on Services: The development of online courses is an evolving model with the market re-working itself to offer a broader range of solutions to deliver services at a range of price levels to a range of student types. There is great potential for add-on content services and the creation of new revenue models through building partnerships with institutions and other educational service providers. As these trends continue to unfold, we can expect to see even more entrepreneurial innovation and change in the online learning landscape.

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1. is the term in JACS3?
2. is there evidence of use of the term in HESA data returns?
3. is the term’s definition and scope sufficiently clear and comprehensive to allow classification?
4. is the term reliably distinguishable from other terms?

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There are a number of perspectives to take on IT and its place in an organisation, but for further and higher education institutions, the procurement or sourcing of services – in the widest sense of the word ‘services’ – may be among the most important ones. With the ongoing move to cloud provisioning, determining where a particular service is going to come from and how it is managed is crucial.

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“The project, as a change management initiative, has contributed to the University [of Southampton's] understanding of its institutional context. Opening up our data silos is more political and cultural than technical, and these domains are starting to change. There is little concrete evidence of the fruits of the change yet, but the change process has begun… We have been able to make extensive preparation for change, and there is commitment within the University to continue with it.” (Moore, I. and Paull, A. (2012). JISC Relationship Management Programme – Impact Analysis: Strands 2 and 3. (Not publicly available)

Taking an institution-wide approach to relationship management presents opportunities to identify where existing cultural approaches and practices may be ineffective. Sometimes the introduction of a new software system can highlight areas where cultural change needs to occur. It can show where current procedures inhibit agility, or where collaboration and innovation initiatives are not working. Introducing new software often acts as a catalyst for change in policies, practice and culture, whilst improving access to data can encourage the organisational culture to be more innovative and transparent. Changing an organisation’s culture is not without its problems:

“For context we would note that the staff and student population of an average university is equivalent to that of a small town (and the largest universities to small cities). Planning for change on this scale is not easy.” (Moore, I. and Paull, A. (2012). JISC Relationship Management Programme – Impact Analysis: Strands 2 and 3. (Not publicly available)

Cultural change comes with a myriad of challenges and is probably one of the hardest aspects of relationship management to address. For example:

• staff may view changes in processes and the introduction of new software systems as threatening to their working practices; eg at Loughborough University, some staff who considered their own processes to be fit for purpose were concerned about proposed changes
• concerns around budget reductions
• resulting staff turnover

Champions can help drive change. At the University of Nottingham, for example, senior management is encouraged to champion good practice for placements, with the placement co-ordinator acting as the central conduit for relationships and communication. Senior management buy-in or sponsorship can help to raise the importance of relationship management within the institution, but it must be sincere, otherwise an institution’s organisational structure will remain a barrier no matter what improvements are suggested:

“The process of change needs to be managed with care to ensure that all stakeholder are positively engaged, especially those who have the power to implement the change (primary stakeholders), and those who have influence over opinion within the organization. Hence it is essential to carry out a full stakeholder analysis. As with any change management, when it comes to implementing the change it is important to identify champions in each of the stakeholder groups, coupled with clear and regular communication.” (Davis, H., Howard, Y., and Prince, R. (2012). Ninjas and Dragons. University of Southampton)

Consultation with a wide range of departments and stakeholders can also help to identify new champions. For example, new enthusiasts at the University of Nottingham were instrumental in spreading the word about placements and sources of expertise. As a result, existing good practice (for example from the School of Veterinary Medicine) has now been incorporated into the placements process and at least five academic schools in the University have expressed interest in using ePortfolios to support placements or work-based activity.

The co-creation aspects of the service design approach can help to improve staff buy-in, because it empowers staff to take ownership of any process improvements with a good chance of long-term impact. Taking this approach and talking to people on their own terms may also win over ‘difficult’ institutional characters, thereby enabling ‘change by stealth’. Sometimes, it is necessary to establish new organisational structures to facilitate change and create new staff roles to reflect changing priorities. Communication is vital for promoting an understanding of what people are doing and why.

Change must be managed carefully to ensure that all stakeholders are engaged, especially those who have power or influence in the institution. For example, rather than imposing wholesale change across the whole institution, the University of Nottingham has taken a ‘hub and spoke’ approach in which new developments are conceived centrally and delivered locally. The primary focus is on the spokes, rather than the hub, which start to establish change across the institution. Similarly, encouraging staff to make bite-sized changes that do not take them away from day-to-day operations can reduce resentment to any new methods of working.

Changing the mindset of staff can have a huge impact, even if significant changes to processes are still to be made. For example, instead of just providing advice and guidance to students thinking of leaving, staff at the University of Derby now pro-actively reach out to students who wish to withdraw. This helps the student, who may not be able to articulate their reasons for withdrawal and who may just need additional support. It also provides the institution with useful feedback for making further improvements.

How to approach culture change

• Establish champions to drive through changes
• Senior management buy-in or sponsorship must be sincere
• Talk to people on their own terms
• Communicate, communicate, communicate
• Use co-creation to encourage staff to take ownership of process improvements
• Aim for small-scale rather than large-scale changes

Further information

• JISC infoKit on Change Management
• Loughborough University: Case Study of the Pedestal for Progression Project and Pedestal for Progression video
• North Glasgow College: Support For All and Support for All video
• Service design in higher and further education. JISC CETIS
• University of Derby: Student Experience Traffic Lighting and Student Experience Traffic Lighting – Engagement Analytics video and Personas video
• University of Nottingham: ESCAPES Case Study and ESCAPES video
• University of Southampton: Ninjas and Dragons

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Integrating a load of data in a specialised tool or data warehouse is not new, and many institutions have been using them for a while. What Bolton is trying in its JISC sponsored course data project is to see whether such a warehouse can be built out of Linked Data components. Using such tools promises three major advantages over existing data warehouse technology:

It expects data to be messy, and it expects it to change. As a consequence, adding new data sources, or coping with changes in data sources, or generating new reports or queries should not be a big deal. There are no schemas to break, so no major re-engineering required.

It is built on the same technology as the emergent web of data. Which means that increasing numbers of datasets – particularly from the UK government – should be easily thrown into the mix to answer bigger questions, and public excerpts from Bolton’s data should be easy to contribute back.

It is standards based. At every step from extracting the data, transforming it and loading it to querying, analysing and visualising it, there’s a choice of open and closed source tools. If one turns out not to be up to the job, we should be able to slot another in.

But we did spend a day kicking the tires, and making some initial choices. Since the project is just to pilot a Linked Enterprise Data (LED) approach, we’ve limited ourselves to evaluate just open source tools. We know there plenty of good closed source options in any of the following areas, but we’re going to test the whole approach before deciding on committing to license fees.

Data sources

Before we can mash, query and visualise, we need to do some data extraction from the sources, and we’ve come down on two tools for that: Google Refine and D2RQ. They do slightly different jobs.

Refine is Google’s power tool for anyone who has to deal with malformed data, or who just wants to transform or excerpt from format to another. It takes in CSV or output from a range of APIs, and puts it in table form. In that table form, you can perform a wide range of transformations on the data, and then export in a range of formats. The plug-in from DERI Galway, allows you to specify exactly how the RDF – the linked data format, and heart of the approach – should look when exported.

What Refine doesn’t really do (yet?) is transform data automatically, as a piece of middleware. All your operations are saved as a script that can be re-applied, but it won’t re-apply the operations entirely automagically. D2RQ does do that, and works more like middleware.

Although I’ve known D2RQ for a couple of years, it still looks like magic to me: you download, unzip it, tell it where your common or garden relational database is, and what username and password it can use to get in. It’ll go off, inspect the contents of the database, and come back with a mapping of the contents to RDF. Then start the server that comes with it, and the relational database can be browsed and queried like any other Linked Data source.

Since practically all relevant data in Bolton are in a range of relational databases, we’re expecting to use D2R to create RDF data dumps that will be imported into the data warehouse via a script. For a quick start, though, we’ve already made some transforms with Refine. We might also use scripts such as Oxford’s XCRI XML to RDF transform.

Storage, querying and visualisation

We expected to pick different tools for each of these functions, but ended up choosing one, that does it all- after a fashion. Callimachus is designed specifically for rapid development of LED applications, and the standard download includes a version of the Sesame triplestore (or RDF database) for storage. Other triple stores can also be used with Callimachus, but Sesame was on the list anyway, so we’ll see how far that takes us.

Callimachus itself is more of a web application on top that allows quick visualisations of data excerpts- be they straight records of one dataset or a collection of data about one thing from multiple sets. The queries that power the Callimachus visualisations have limitations – compared to the full power of SPARQL, the linked data query language – but are good enough to knock up some pages quickly. For the more involved visualisations, Callimachus SPARQL 1.1 implementation allows the results a query to be put out as common or garden JSON, for which many different tools exist.

Next steps

We’ve made some templates already that pull together course information from a variety of sources, on which I’ll report later. While that’s going on, the main other task will be to set up the processes of extracting data from the relational databases using D2R, and then loading it into Callimachus using timed scripts.

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