A new dawn, a new day, a new site
New design The first thing you’ll notice is the visual design, carrying the new Jisc brand and logo. We have a lovely colour palette and elegant font to play with, which has helped us to create spacious, flexible canvases for our content. We put a lot of emphasis on typography. You told us that it was hard to read the... >>
How will Jisc help me use data in the future?
Using data in different ways is critical to education and research, but it also has a use in informing important organisational and business decisions. It’s fair to say that data is fast becoming ‘king’ in the digital environment, from educational analytics to open government data , to linked data , to data produced through research that is then becoming a... >>
DIY augmented reality apps
Many learning providers focus on adapting existing learning content for these smart devices. Although, we are seeing pockets of really innovative and exemplar augmented reality (AR) based learning solutions that are not only improving students’ experience but are also proving to be a medium through which the learning providers are communicating more interactively with their students. But, I believe we... >>
The year MOOCs got real
Despite this, many core issues around pedagogy and business models are yet to be resolved. And it is the gaps in these areas that are most usefully highlighted by today’s report from Universities UK . Positioning the debate within a wider climate of the rush to get online across a number of industries, it notes that xMOOC platforms are exploring... >>
No need for angst over analytics
The Wikipedia definition is a bit dry – ‘the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data’ – but at its most practical, analytics offers a means for universities and colleges to examine the reams of routinely collected data in new ways, to gain insights that can help to improve student and teacher experience, and bring about greater operational efficiencies... >>
Identifying resources for students, by students
You may have noticed that search engines don’t always place the most useful stuff at the top. Actually, the most useful resources are often those that have been shared by the students themselves, which they normally just post on Facebook or send their fellow coursemates a link. At the School of Engineering in the University of Liverpool , we were... >>
A customer-focused Jisc redesigns the future
This post gives an update on how we are testing new methods to help deliver products and services that will have high value for you in the future. This is in response to our Wilson Review which stated that there should be a set of focused Jisc projects that create clear outcomes for our customers, the learning and skills sector,... >>
Top tips for legal compliance in using image sharing websites
Most of us are already familiar with websites like Facebook and Flickr but Pinterest is a fairly new kid on the block which is becoming increasingly popular for sharing images online. In education, image sharing websites like Pinterest can be used by staff and students to post and share images as an open educational resource and a tool for teaching... >>
Climate change – pulling the figures out of murky waters
At the start of March the Environment Agency warned that Britain needs to become more resilient to drought and flooding, as extremes of weather may be on the increase. That didn’t come as a surprise to me, as someone who has spent the last eight months in flood-prone Yorkshire, working on a project to help climate scientists unearth reliable information... >>
How digitised 'special' collections are boosting experiences of teaching and learning
The recent media frenzy that surrounded the launch of the Jisc-funded Bomb Sight website, which saw visitor numbers soar to about 200k in just one day, is testimony to the wide-spread public interest in the type of content that is, in fact, often hard for people to access, if not impossible. Until now, the only way for me to find... >>
