We had some great news last month, the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education referenced a number of our (Jisc) resources in its latest publication – UK Quality Code for Higher Education Chapter 4: Enabling student development and achievement.

Underpinned by eight indicators of sound practice the quality code sets out the following expectation:

Higher education providers have in place, monitor and evaluate arrangements and resources which enable students to develop their academic, personal and professional potential.

The eight indicators span three core themes:

1. Strategic approaches;
2. Student transitions; and
3. Facilitating development and achievement.

Our team were very pleased to see the Relationship Management infoKit referenced under theme two – ‘Student transitions’. The infoKit describes some of the challenges faced by institutions in improving and maintaining relationships with a range of different stakeholders, who all have different needs and expectations. In particular, the resource focuses on student lifecycle relationship management i.e. pre-application, application, pre-registration, registration, induction, teaching and learning, pastoral care, employability and careers services, graduation, alumni and post-graduation marketing.

The resource links directly to ‘Indicator 4‘ of the Quality Code Chapter.

Higher education providers inform students before and during their period of study of opportunities designed to enable their development and achievement.

Our resource can help you to achieve that by providing you with advice and guidance, accompanied by examples from across the sector. Take a look for yourself.

This resource will help you succeed in these new challenges, and provide development pathways. The tool is interactive and allows you to carry out a self-assessment of your standing against key professional attributes, derive a personal skills profile and identify targeted professional development resources to enhance your skills. You can also browse the framework and explore, upload and comment on professional development resources.

This FREE workshop will introduce the tool, provide an opportunity to carry out your own self-assessment and allow for reflection on your own, and your team’s development.

Workshops will be held from 11am-3pm on the following dates

• Wednesday 1st May – Newcastle
• Thursday 23rd May – Edinburgh
• Wednesday 19th June – Birmingham
• Wednesday 17th July – London

Click on the links above to find out more about the workshops and to book your place. When booking please use the payment option ‘Voucher with code’ and enter the code BCEPD1

Marc Dobson from the Jisc Advance BCE Team joined colleagues from Jisc Netskills to support an international online event delivered by the University of Oxford called Pi Day Live.

The event was hosted by by Professor Marcus Du Sautoy, the best-selling author, broadcaster and mathematician and filmed at the University of Oxford. Jisc Netskills hosted and supported through a team of experienced moderators, the ‘Online Lecture Theatre’ using BlackBoard Collaborate to allow for participant interaction aided by a series of maths experts. BlackBoard Collaborate is a service which Jisc Netskills provides support to across Jisc and is available for Jisc funded projects to use.

The event attracted hundreds of participants from around the world including school class groups and the general public to find out about a number of methods used over the years to calculate Pi, and crowdsourcing to collate the results of live experiements carried out during the session which resulted in a mean average of Pi of 3.1127 at the time of writing but is still accepting submissions.

The event was a great success, and the support of Jisc Netskills greatly appreciated by the organisers at Oxford. It is hoped that Jisc Netskills will continute to be involved in similar collaborations with the University of Oxford in public engagement.

In the coming years the UK higher and further education sectors will continue to adapt to momentous changes in their markets, growing influence of web technologies and rapidly evolving regulatory environment. In this context, the relationships they have with their students, alumni or business partners and communities will become a defining feature of sustainable success. (Sir Tim Wilson, 2013)

The Relationship Management infoKit describes some of the challenges faced by institutions in improving and maintaining relationships with a range of different stakeholders, who all have different needs and expectations. It looks in more detail at some of the benefits offered from taking a more managed approach with different groups and the kinds of institutional systems, processes and mechanisms that can support this. It highlights good practice in the sector as a result of the Jisc Relationship Management programme, with a particular focus on alumni engagement, student retention, progression and non-completion.  All the examples of good practice and many of the citations contained within the guide come from practitioners in the sector.

Today’s session at the CETIS conference will be interactive and explore common barriers and constraints from delegates’ perspectives, and highlight good practices based on genuine institutional experiences, such as professional service design, that help avoid common pitfalls. By adopting practices outlined within the resource, institutions can improve their student retention and employability, the engagement and support of their alumni, and the benefits from external partnerships.

To keep up with what’s going on at the conference follow the twitter hashtag #cetis13. Some of the sessions are being streamed live too. If you have any comments on the Relationship Management infoKit please let us know via the commenting facility below!

ENGAGE is usually a packed, lively and uplifting event and this year’s conference proved no exception, despite the decidedly non-uplifting nature of the sector’s struggles in ‘Responding to Change’ (the conference theme) in their markets, in accounting to the public and in managing the pressures of financial austerity.

The increasing pressure of public accountability for publicly-funded higher education institutions is widely observed. ENGAGE, which showcased the work of hundreds of organisations and individuals striving to demonstrate and improve the public value and standing of HE, helped to relieve some of this pressure.

There were over 200 delegates at the Bristol Hotel representing a diverse range of people from the higher education sector and beyond involved either in public engagement specifically or external engagement, more broadly. These included funders, sector stakeholders, membership and professional bodies, institutional engagement staff both from within disciplines and from broader engagement functions, community groups, voluntary organisations and international engagement specialists.

Such diversity among participants made for interesting and wide ranging sessions, comment and debate, but nevertheless some key themes and areas of consensus emerged.

Quality assurance

One such overarching theme was: how to ensure quality in engagement activities, now that they are becoming more mainstream? (Though we shall return to the question of how mainstream engagement is later).

Jisc’s Simon Whittemore delivered a joint workshop session, ‘Breaking down the Barriers’ with Dr Lucy Leiper and Heather Doran, both of Aberdeen University, on the integration of public engagement – and engagement in general – in standards and frameworks such as the Vitae Researcher Development Framework (RDF). Here, public engagement is present but confined to a relatively small quadrant, though it could be argued that it fits in many ways across the whole Framework; indeed Lucy and Heather encouraged the delegates to look at the Framework through a PE lens. Delegates expressed some barriers to usage of the RDF, but agreed that this was a step forward in embedding PE into research practice.

Simon presented the Professional Development Diagnostic Tool for BCE, developed by Jisc and AURIL, in partnership with over 25 national bodies and with the input of hundreds of engagement practitioners. This was received with much interest, and had the effect of focussing the debate on the twin pillars on which quality engagement depends: skills and infrastructure.

Professional Development Resource for BCE

There was a concluding consensus in the session that embedding quality-assured engagement remains a challenge because engagement exposes structural issues in institutions.

In the later plenary debate, Nevin Brown, Senior Fellow at the International Center for Intercultural Exchange in Siena, made the very good point that universities needed to pay more attention to understanding their own culture to better understand how it can contribute effective engagement in the wider community.

Is engagement now ‘mainstream’?

Stephen West, Vice-Chancellor of UWE, provided the finale to the first day at the evening NCCPE launch event, the Future of the Engaged University. He had just come from a joint meeting with Eric Thomas, VC of University of Bristol at the Local Enterprise Partnership – evidence of the commitment UWE and Univ Bristol both have to the university playing a key and active role in civic leadership. This public responsibility, Steve West emphasised, ensures that engagement is no longer an optional extra for any university. UWE and Bristol, had come a long way since they jointly and successfully bidded to host the NCCPE in 2008. Partnerships between universities are also essential in furthering this agenda and ensuring an effective, joined-up response to social and economic needs; this is amply illustrated by the increasing number of regional research and knowledge exchange partnerships recently forming, the latest being GW4, similar in its purpose to N8.

Paul Clark’s (UUK, Director of Policy) presentation described some scenario planning UUK had undertaken with other stakeholders exploring the resilience and success of universities in the changing societal, economic and environmental context. Two key issues emerged from this work, related to quality and perception:

• ensuring public confidence in what universities do;
• what does society need from universities – do universities know?

The final word on whether quality engagement is embedded or not, came from April MacMahon, VC of Aberystwyth University towards the end of the conference, who reiterated the message that engagement is now the norm and has been mainstreamed. She commended the practitioners in the audience for having driven forward this ‘movement for change’. However, despite some shining lights of successful recognition and embeddedness, such as CUPP at University of Brighton, some members of the audience expressed their doubts, citing their frustration in struggling to secure recognition and coherent resourcing for engagement in their own universities.

Local engagement, communities and heritage

The Future of the Engaged University’ launch had included a sort of group speed-dating activity where small groups had the opportunity to listen to and comment on different engagement practitioners’ work and point of view, each in the space of 7 minutes. There were some strong themes to emerge from these discussions, voiced in the plenary. These included local engagement; overcoming class barriers in public engagement; digital engagement.

The importance of local engagement by universities – however global their profile is – was a point persuasively made by Erinma Ochu, co-founder and CEO of Carisma, on behalf of local communities. Others highlighted the key role of students in this local dynamic, and the massive economic and social impact of a large university on its locality, simply by virtue of its presence there, was widely acknowledged.

Another of the ‘speed-dating’ presenters, Anna Russell, from the National Trust, put the question to the group: how do we get the numerous rich and defining stories of our heritage out there for wider understanding? For example Tyntesfield has a vast range of physical and  intellectual historical assets which tell a compelling story. Digitisation was mentioned as a potential means of achieving this. Carole Souter, of the Heritage Lottery Fund stressed the bonding effect of heritage and how it needs to be presented in such a way as to overcome class barriers – and those in HE need to be aware of the trepidation many members of the public have in engaging with academics.

Digital engagement

Digital engagement was the subject of an interactive showcase presented by Kent McClymont (Associate Research Fellow, University of Exeter), Monae Verbake (Project manager University of Warwick) and chaired by Simon Whittemore. This session highlighted Embedding Research Impact projects funded by Jisc and facilitated by the NCCPE, which had brought together tripartite partnerships comprising research groups, business and community engagement ‘impact analysts’ and information management specialists.

In order for researchers to record, embed and monitor the impact of their knowledge, effective digital engagement is vital - and this requires a range of skills sets that the funded partnerships embodied. Kent described the Tracking Digital Impact tool developed in the Exeter-led partnership, a tool which enables researchers to plan and implement, in a methodical way, their digital engagement strategy. Monae highlighted the University of Warwick-led PERO project, which successfully developed a framework for evaluating the impacts of online engagement in research. Whilst there was some resistance in the workshop to obligatory use of social media such as Facebook and Twitter, delegates agreed that there is a digital world out there and researchers who did not engage with and through could be left behind. In fact, delegates noted, these social media present strong opportunities for listening or market sampling, not merely for promotion and dissemination.

Democratising Knowledge on a Bicycle

Perhaps the most original contribution to the conference came from Jesús Granados (above) of GUNI in the closing plenary. He used the modest but pleasantly transporting metaphor of a bicycle and the spokes of its wheels to illustrate the key steps needed for engagement to sustain and enhance its direction of travel in universities, and hence increase its positive impact on society. Jesús’ points all revolved around the objective that we need to ‘democratise knowledge’ for a better society. His proposals rang many bells for a UK audience that had the public value of publicly-funded research, open access, REF and pathways to impact in the forefront of the mind. His ‘bicycle manifesto’ proposed the following journeys and destinations:

• from the mono-culture of scientific knowledge to an ecology of knowledge;
• from rational knowledge to integral human knowledge;
• from partial knowledge to holistic and complex knowledge;
• from isolated knowledge creation to social co-creation of knowledge;
• from discipline-bound to cross-disciplinary and multiple perspectives;
• from static use of knowledge to dynamic and creative use of knowledge.

Jesús’s  presentation quietly confronted a whole range of issues in this unconventional way, including some elephants in the room, as it were, and left the audience with much food for thought.

All in all an excellent conference, well compèred as ever partly by Paul Manners (Director, NCCPE) but mainly by Sophie Duncan, (above, Deputy Director NCCPE) whose delightfully engaging continuity presence helped sustain the energy and dynamism of the whole event. Compliments to the whole NCCPE team for organising a rich and high quality event.

On 28 November the Jisc BCE Access to Resources Ingenuity KnowledgeHub project held a press launch for the redesigned Ingenuity website which includes two new tools built as a result of project work. Discover enables semantic searching to surface relevant content from the depths of university websites and web accessible repositories; the Fishbowl is showcasing the ‘human interest’ story of three local SMEs and social enterprises interacting with the University and receiving help and advice from a hand-picked panel of local experts drawn from both academia and the local business community. The site is now available at http://www.ingenuitygateway.com/

For our Centre, one of the triumphs of this project is the fact that after many years of project work, we’ve finally found something that catches the imagination of our central Marketing and Communications department. This has been helped by our building a relationship with the department as a result of consultation over our recent rebranding exercise, ensuring that we meet corporate expectations, and involving Nick King, the Business Engagement and Innovation Services marketing projects manager, in meetings and planning from an early stage. A climate in which universities are being actively encouraged to focus on business engagement, coupled with the University of Nottingham’s stated policy area of engaging with the local community, has paved the way for the Fishbowl idea capturing the imagination. So hey, presto! Suddenly we had support to organise a public press launch, Marketing and Comms wrote us a press release and we even featured for several days on the rolling news feed on the home page of the main University website. We were able to secure the PVC for Business Engagement to open the event.

As a Centre, we have a successful track record in event organisation, developed through supporting project work over more than 10 years. This is the particular forte of Carina, our administrator, whose reputation for calm efficiency and thoroughness has spread through the Jisc community and beyond. Over the years she has developed an armoury of checklists and processes to ensure everything runs smoothly. On this occasion we were also able to draw on the machinery supporting the regular Ingenuity Business Breakfast events, and use of space in the Sir Colin Campbell building on our Jubilee Campus, which was built with the remit of becoming a focus for University/business engagement and also hosts a number of incubator businesses, one or two of whom came along on the day to see what was happening. We decided a twilight event would be most suitable, aiming to catch people at the end of the working day and send them home feeling good about the project.

Initially we planned that the launch should be invitation only, selecting from the joint networks of Marketing, Ingenuity, fish and experts, with the idea that this would contain and target the audience and we would have tight control over numbers. Marketing crafted us an HTML email invitation (which we felt most appropriate as Ingenuity eschews the use of printed materials) which we distributed However despite a promising start, response was slow and we had a short period of concern that we could be partying among ourselves. We therefore took the decision to open the list further, distributing across the wider Ingenuity network, asking the local LEPs, Chambers of Commerce and business networks (all of whom endorsed the project at its inception) and using Twitter (we joined ‘notts chat’ as well as distribution across our usual audiences). This was a useful lesson learned, and for future events we will plan in a similar sliding scale for invitations.

As a result, the event was well attended with over 50 people coming along to have a look and network (so much so that some had to be encouraged to go home even though the bubbly had run out). We kept the format short and snappy: an opening address from the Pro Vice-Chancellor, a few minutes about Ingenuity from Steve and a quick run-through of the site and tools from Kirstie before we let guests have a go for themselves using a set of laptops at display tables. At the time we were disappointed that we didn’t get many press: however Marketing assured us this wasn’t anything to worry about, and indeed they were proved right. Steve from Ingenuity was invited to speak on Radio Nottingham as the launch party opened, and within days we’d featured in both the Nottingham Post and Midlands Insider, with the promise of more to come. Hits on the Ingenuity site were up on annual figures by over 1000 during November, which we take as an encouraging sign that people are dropping in to have a look. The true value of the project tools will be realised by evaluation exercises and metrics over the next few months, but we feel things have certainly got off to a promising start. And if all else fails, maybe we could have a promising future in consultancy for event management!

The outcomes of the evaluation will be made publicly available and used by the IPO to inform future policy development relating to improving intellectual property dealmaking and knowledge exchange. Whether you have come across the Toolkit or not, IP Pragmatics are interested in your opinions. Take 15-20 minutes out of your day and have your say: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/Lambert_Web

Vicki Purewal from Nesta provided outlined the benefits of using challenge prizes to seek solutions to well-defined problem from a much wider pool of expertise than can be accessed through traditional grant funding. She explained that there was flexibility in the way that prizes can be awarded and that winner-takes-all was not the only model. She also emphasised that winning a prize will generate excitement for the winner, whereas someone awarded grant funding my initially feel daunted by the task they have undertaken. She summarised the support that can be offered through the Nesta Centre for Challenge Prizes.

Carl Reynolds described himself as a ‘doctor and a geek’ and he spoke about NHS Hack Days in which doctors, developers and designers got together for intensive one or two day sessions to develop prototypes to promote health and support healthcare practitioners. His motivation in becoming involved in this was frustration with the poor use of IT in the NHS. He saw this as a low-risk venture as systems could not become much worse and since the first of these was held in May 2012, a number of products have been developed looking at issues like checklists, bleepers and reporting bugs.

There were two presentations that looked at use of community and staff engagement in local government. Heather Niven spoke about GenIUS York and Jenny Parkin on the Camden Council Innovation and Development Fund. Both of these sought to use the engagement of staff and the wider community to help them to resolve strategic and operational issues they faced. One of the key messages was that there was a need for changes in organisational culture to make this approach work and also some bravery. Heather’s advice to anyone trying this approach was to ‘be brave and proceed until apprehended’. Heather also provided the powerful image of York City Council having moved from being a ‘big tanker to flotilla of active networked organisations and individuals’. Jenny stressed the process of innovation was as important as the end result.

The final presentation came from David Townson who talked about the Design Council’s Design Leadership Programme. David emphasised the importance of design as a framework for innovation. He introduced the Double Diamond concept in which innovation is separated into 2 distinct stages; the first Diamond being about defining the problem to be solved and the second about solving it.

These key messages about using open innovation techniques were reflected in all the presentations and subsequent panel discussions.

• It is about active learning and not perfect planning. The process of engagement is about learning from doing; being open about what you have learned.
• Success is heavily dependent on cultural changes within an organisation.
• It is essential to be clear about the problems you are trying to solve and your end goal but very open when considering the means by which those problems can be solved.
• No-one spoke about the challenges in technical terms; in fact there was almost no talk of technology at all. Whilst she did admit that their first pilot was hurried Heather Niven said that the first GenIUS York platform took 3 days only to develop.
• The final over-riding message was that any public service provider can benefit from using these approaches but that in doing so they will have to view their relationship with their user communities in a different way.

Nigel Spencer
Research and Business Development Manager
British Library

1. To enhance institutions’ efficiency, effectiveness and opportunities in BCE activities
2. To improve access to institution’s knowledge and expertise for business and community organisations

More on the context/history of the programme can be found on our ‘about’ page.

Since its inception, the programme has delivered well over 150 products/resources contributing to the realisation of the challenges listed above. A comprehensive list of BCE outputs and ongoing projects can be found via the Jisc Advance BCE Team’s high level plan (see worksheet 2—BCE programme output inventory).

Made up of case studies, final reports, blogs and much more, findings help to illustrate how IT can:

• make sharing knowledge and communicating with partners easier and more sustainable
• facilitate networking and managing relationships
• support the sharing and aggregation of information relating to BCE activities
• support research collaboration through off-site access and the effective management of information

Why not see for yourself? Explore some of the resources available and get in touch if you have any questions!

The session, titled lifelong learning in a digital age: New audiences, new needs, new approaches allowed delegates to hear about and discuss the need for flexibility and responsiveness when delivering lifelong learning and to consider the barriers that exist in institutions.

The session also offered delegates an opportunity to see how colleagues from the universities of Oxford and Wolverhampton are developing flexible and responsive provision for adult learners through the Cascade project at Oxford and the ePPSME project at Wolverhampton.

In addition to the above projects, JISC through its lifelong learning and workforce development programme has produced a work based learning maturity toolkit to allow insitutions to assess their performance in work based learning.

A JISC publication learning in a digital age – extending higher education opportunities for lifelong learning is also available which signposts some of the effective higher education practice taking place in the UK and addresses the benefits and challenges that arise in a digital age.