By ruthdrysdale January 29, 2016
Uncategorized

 #Digital credentials, #ePortfolios   #Employability #HEAR6.1 #MOOCs #CPD #OpenBadges #InformalLearning   

Building on the previous P2A Employability Skills Match project discussed in blogs below, Jisc is now dipping its toe in the digital credentials arena by exploring its own badge platform. We plan to start designing and issuing badges for delegates who take part in Jisc training, such as the Digital Capability project.

As Jisc develops its own digital credential offering, we will also work with a community of University and College staff that are keen to explore the uses of badges and other digital credentials. This will build on the ALT survey that ‘shows that there is a lot of interest in the use of Open Badges, but the majority of institutions are at an exploratory stage’. We would like to understand what technical support the sector needs in order to further explore the potential of digital credentials as the survey suggested that ‘while the VLE was stated as the method that the majority of institutions were using to issue badges, many commented that upon investigation the solution provided by the VLE needed further development and may not be fit for purpose’.

Basics on badges: Digitising micro credentials started to emerge in 2011 and so there are plenty of introductory resources on the internet such as https://wiki.mozilla.org/Badges. This 2013 post on the Jisc blog gives a good overview of Open Badges, as well  as Joyce Seitzinger TEDX  and EDUCAUSE: 7 Things You Should Know About the Evolution of the Transcript  Plus short explanatory videos such as on Acclaim  and Serge Ravet on Open Badges and Competencies

Jisc RSC Scotland began issuing OpenBadges in 2013, and badges were awarded for digital leadership, digital innovation, and to digital practitioners. Further information about these badge series can be found here. Jisc is currently refreshing the resources that they developed and further information will be available soon.

Compared to paper versions, digital credentials offer new technical challenges such as security for verifying the learner and their achievements, but also opportunities with new ways for learners to choose their own pathways, stay motivated with more frequent rewards and showcase their more granular achievements to new audiences. Also more tailored matching services are being created with the more detailed achievements.

Digital credentials enable organisations to assess and award credentials beyond the traditional transcript. Such credentials enable institutions and learners to differentiate themselves in an increasingly competitive world. There is further discussion about this challenge in previous P2A blogs below. 

Purposes of badges: Badges can be used for various purposes such as motivating the earner with more frequent rewards. Digital games recognised this benefit in enhancing the players sense of achievement and maintain their interest for longer. Players also use digital credentials to demonstrate their mastery to their peers, so digitally sharing their achievements globally is an important motivator too. Now my FITBIT award me badges for exceeding daily fitness goals!

Various parts of the education sector are capitalising on the increasing use of digital credentials to engage learners that might have previously been turned off education. City and Guilds who have created Badges to go into their online CV.  ‘Employers are increasingly recognizing badges as they verify the skills of a learner’.  

ePortfolios are important tools for learners to gather all sorts of evidence to reflect on and substantiate their skills, competencies and achievements not only for personal development but also for showcases to peers and possible employers. Jisc has been a leading proponent of these, helping to embed them within the sector. We are currently exploring whether the Higher Education Achievement Record section 6.1 (additional verifable experience) could be a digital repository to reflect a broader and more consistent view of the learner’s accomplishments and interests that the institution is able to verify, linking into the institution’s student engagement and employability strategies.

Who else is developing digital credentials? 

DigitalMe is a not-for-profit organisation using Mozilla Open Badges to work with teachers, charities and employers to create a new digital currency that recognises all young people’s skills and talents. They support the use of the Open Badges Academy (currently Beta testing) and MakesWaves for under 16 year olds.

BESTR is an Italian digital platform based on Open Badges that aims to valorise one’s own competencies and connect them with companies, Universities and training institutions.

IMS and their partner institutions, including Jisc, have an evolving Competency Based Education (CBE) architecture to enhance the capabilities of the existing education enterprises designed around courses and credit hours.

By Shri Footring November 30, 2015
Uncategorized

The BIS Outcome Based Success Measures Consultation sets out detailed proposals for using student outcomes as a key metric for Further Education. The new experimental data set created by BIS to support this activity provides an indication of sustained student outcomes.

An emphasis on destination and the data available changes the way FE is evaluated and will have significant impact on FE providers. This impact is not yet clear but providers will need to engage with the new metrics and data and use it in a range of activities such as strategic planning, monitoring, understanding local needs and reporting.

Jisc is exploring the newly published data and is interested to understand what new information, insights and opportunities it offers for FE providers.

We are taking an agile co-design approach and wish to engage FE providers in the exploration of this data and its potential. We will be developing experiments with the data to make it useful and usable to managers in their future work. This will include asking for feedback on concepts, insight into your concerns and good ideas and validation/challenge of our assumptions.

There is place for Jisc to bring together this destination data set with other information we are working with to make it more valuable to our customers.

We call the stage we are at the “alpha’. This means we will evaluate where we stand in Feb 2016 and decide if there is a place for Jisc to support the sector.

Get Involved

Jisc use a co-design approach for all our developments and would value collaboration with managers and decision makers (deputy principles, MIS managers, vice principles, curriculum managers) in FE colleges.

1. willing to feedback on our working assumptions and give us insight into your anticipated needs and opportunities
2. willing to review concepts for how the data could be presented to you in useful ways

Our first request is for your input/feedback on what we think will be the areas where destination data will be used. These are:

• strategic planning
  How do you feel you will  be making decision about sources provided in light of the new data and evaluation framework?
• understanding local needs
  How might the data be used to help you meet the needs of local populations, businesses etc?
• monitoring
  How might the data be used in monitoring quality and demand for our courses?
• reporting
  How might the data available impact on the way you report?
• other
  Are there other areas where you feel the data will be used, where you have needs or ideas?

By Simon Whittemore June 19, 2015
Uncategorized

Why are we focussing on soft skills for the Employability Skills match service (ESMS) we are designing and developing here at Jisc in the Prospect to Alumnus co-design challenge?

An early screen prototype of our Employability Skills match service, with thanks to our service design partners, Livework

Scarcely a day goes past without an article or event which draws attention to the disconnect between the worlds of education and employment, and highlights soft skills as at the core of this. The most common observation in this debate is that employers of all types are struggling to get recognition, in the world of education, of the soft skills, qualities and attitudes that are fundamental for an effective employee/ organisation member. Typically these vital qualities are empathy, resilience, versatility, cross-cultural awareness, initiative and the like. A recent study concluded that soft skills are worth £88 billion to the UK economy. The UKCES has concluded in a report that these qualities will only become more essential in the future: “skills and attributes that will be at a premium in future, including resilience, adaptability, cognitive skills (such as problem solving), and the core business skills for project based employment”.

However, for those, perhaps in academia or in other less economically-driven fields, these qualities have an equal significance. In short, the happy accident is that, as the weight of evidence shows, the skills valued most by employers are the skills that are most valuable in society. These are in fact life skills. And we are all lifelong learners.

Personal develpment is not an academic pursuit but a responsibility we each have to ourselves, and to society in general.

Our employability skills-match service will benefit institutions, learners and employers alike, as it is founded on three principles:

• helping HE and FE institutions demonstrate the employability of their learners and graduates;
• getting the employer voice into education, especially through employer consortia – we are collaborating with a wide range of organisations from Deloitte to Medecins sans Frontiers;
• providing a means by which learners’ non-academic achievements such as p/t jobs, sport and musical activities, volunteering, work with NGOs etc can be recognised and valued.

For it is actually often these extra-curricular activities that are most formative in developing the core life skills and soft skills so valued by employers and so valuable for the individual.

We have developed a very simple three-category skills framework that underpins our ESMS service. Think of the three categories as the layers of an onion, with Qualities at the core. These qualities have been expertly broken down by Simon Grant into their component behaviours that learners can demonstrate and self-appraise, which will provide the learner pathways in our ESMS service.

In the context of the education to employment gap, we often talk about the need for T-shaped graduates and T-shaped employees: those with both domain/discipline depth and cross-domain/culture breadth. This ideal combination requires the qualities and behaviours that underpin these qualities to be applied effectively and sensitively. Bryan Mathers has recently  applied a bit of his creative ‘visual thinkery’ to this concept:

Open badges are a valuable tool in recognsing these non-academic qualities, so our service will be based on open badges, defined by employer consortia. Courtesy of CINECA’s blog for their .Bestr service, which shares features and concepts with ours, here is a philosophical take on open badges from a leading expert in learning technologies, Serge Ravet.

Eportfolios are also an important tool in the world of learner personal development, and Jisc has been a leading proponent of these, helping to embed them within the sector. Our skills- match service will complement ePortfolios and also the Higher Education Achievement Record, and these components will be inter-linked in future development phases.

In fact, Jisc is very busy in the economically-critical areas of employability and digital skills at the moment; our Digital Capability co-design challenge has developed a framework of digital skills, including Digital Innovation/entrepreneurship and Digital Learning, with which our employability skills-match service strongly resonates. The reality of the wider context of lifelong learning and life skills rather than just graduate employability has been demonstrated in the Technology for Employability work.

We hope these combined initiatives, as we work with our partners and stakeholders, can help equip learners, HE and FE institutions and indeed ‘UK Plc’ for the knowledge economy and learning society of the future.

By Simon Whittemore April 3, 2015
Uncategorized

The education to employment gap and Prospect to Alumnus employability services

Project three of the Jisc Prospect to alumnus is all about employability.
Working with a range of partners and stakeholders, we are designing exciting and innovative new services which will empower students’ employability, meet employers’ needs and enable institutions to track and demonstrate the employability of their students.

Prospect to Alumnus (P2A) employability work is focussed on delivering a dynamic online employability skills-match service, an employability data service in the medium term and, in the longer term, a learner cradle to grave data service. This blog post deals mainly with the first of these three services. The work complements Jisc’s Technology for Employability project which is investigating and uncovering themes for development such as the need for better partnership working with employers (Jisc’s Business and Community Engagement resources are also relevant in this regard).

Our vision for P2A has been shaped by three contextual factors. These are: the current pressures on universities, colleges, learners and graduates around employability (with expectations heightened in the tuition fees environment); recent findings from the CBI and others such as McKinsey that make abundantly clear the Europe-wide education to employment gap; and the national economic and social imperative for sustainable improvement in employment prospects.

Soft skills in demand

CBI Pearson 2014: What Employers Want

A 2014 CBI Pearson survey found that employers value attitudes and aptitudes above all in school and college leavers. Indeed attitudes, (as in character) were valued the highest, with qualifications considered half as important. Attitudes and aptitudes also emerged as vital when employers were asked about the most important factors considered when recruiting graduates. In the same CBI report, a quarter of employers surveyed stated that they were dissatisfied with graduates’ problem-solving skills and the same proportion dissatisfied with their communication skills. More than half of employers were dissatisfied with graduates’ business and customer awareness and a similar proportion with their foreign language skills. There were also notable deficits of satisfaction in graduates’ relevant work experience, intercultural awareness and self-management/resilience. Most large graduate recruiters prefer to invest up to a year of training in recruits to make them job-ready. In their Report ‘Education to employment: Getting Europe’s youth into work’ (P.45 of Report, Exhibit 22) McKinsey found that, across Europe, the deficit between skills needed and competencies apparent in entry-level employees was by and large greater for soft skills than for hard skills.

In a recent NCUB Fuse event I attended, two renowned entrepreneurs leading creative, media and digital SMEs highlighted what they value in graduates. Simon Morris of Bareface Media stressed the need for ‘graduates to be able to think/work across subjects/boundaries’, and for Naveed Parvez of Andiamo, the single most important quality for people in building and developing a business is empathy. Naveed called for ‘a greater mixing of disciplines within universities’, while David Dunn, Chief Executive of Sunderland Software City said we need ‘T-shaped people who have a vertical discipline and lateral appreciation of what others do and what motivates them’. Several speakers highlighted the forgotten value of arts and humanities as making a major contribution to some of the qualities sought.

The skills and qualities sought by employers have a strong correlation with the professional attributes collaboratively defined with university engagement professionals by Jisc and Auril:

Life skills for employability

The recurring theme is that soft skills are critical for employability and vital to the economy, as is ‘interdisciplinarity’. Reflecting on all this, and wider context, led me to conclude that, crudely, there are three levels of skills and behaviours that can be defined:
i) qualities or character attitudes such as determination, empathy, resilience, versatility;
ii) soft skills or aptitudes such as problem-solving, communication skills, customer awareness;
iii) domain specific (or sub-domain) skills such as IT expertise, economics, illustration/drawing etc.

Level ii) and iii) skills remain important (STEM skills to name an obvious example), but it is apparent from the above that there is an acute need for the level i) qualities. Yet these are not currently reflected in any meaningful way (other than through e-Portfolios) in the education to employment system. This conclusion is somewhat counter-intuitive, given the legitimate fears many academics have about losing academic integrity and independence through stronger business influence. The skills we are talking about are life skills, so are not a threat to this, yet they are precisely what employers are crying out for.

Vision for the employability skills-match service

In Prospect to Alumnus, we plan to provide a digital employability skills-match service that can address this employer need, and can at the same time empower students and graduates by building their employability capital. How do we propose to do this?

Open badges have great potential so they are part of the answer, but we are adopting a hybrid approach, and utilising the power of digital technologies to create a dynamic service. We are building an online platform that we envisage will enable:

• employers consortia to publish and define open badges, and badge classes, which will specify and group the requisite soft skills and qualities in a form that suits their needs;
• learners and graduates to claim, using third-party attested examples, that they have demonstrated particular soft skills and qualities in their non-formal learning and experience.

Learners could also potentially self-assert that they qualify for a badge, and employers consortia could endorse this assertion. The examples cited will need to be in a consistent and very concise format, accessible to, and co-designed with employers.

The key features of this are:

• it values the soft skills and qualities used by learners in part-time jobs, voluntary work, placements, secondments and other non-formal settings – experience that generally is currently not captured by institutions;
• endorsement of a badge is not dependent on a institutionally-validated accreditation process but on recognition and digitally moderated negotiation between learner and employer;
• the service is designed to increase employability and soft skills valuation rather than match candidates with opportunities, though the process may lead to opportunities;
• badges will be created and defined by employers consortia rather than individual employers.

Based on this pilot service, which we plan to deliver in the autumn, we will develop a more extensive and sophisticated Employability Data Service initially for further education (in response to demand), then subsequently for higher education. There is scope to improve education to employment vocational pathways, so that these become more attractive and fruitful to students, learning from elements of the German and Austrian models. The Employability Data Service is likely to involve level ii) aptitudes and skills as defined above, and will involve institutions in the supporting and tracking the process, but we are open-minded about how it will work and its features, and welcome your comments and involvement in the process.

Our modus operandi is by necessity rapid and agile. We recognise the need to be flexible, with iterative and overlapping phases of design, develop and user test, and we may need to redesign some aspects of the service. We are currently collaborating with our Italian development partners CINECA, our service design partners Livework, student representative groups and employer consortia, as well as expert consultants and key stakeholders to design this exciting digital service.

By Simon Whittemore February 23, 2015
Uncategorized

The Prospect to Alumnus projects are taking shape. Our extensive consultation, from the first co-design workshop to the regional workshops summarised in this blog, the online questionnaire, a major student consultation and numerous staff interviews, has confirmed the appetite for Jisc interventions in this area.

Once all the consultation inputs were synthesised, and confirmed with stakeholders, four areas of focus emerged which we have grouped into three projects:
1. Mapping and optimising the student journey experience:
Supporting project capturing use cases and student profiles through institutions’ lifecycle analysis to identify problem areas
2. Data model and system integration solutions:
Minimum data sets and solutions in key problem areas, standards, suppliers engagement
3a. Employability skills-match service:
Employer demand-driven skills discovery service empowering students; developing into an employability data service
3b. Learner cradle to learning grave data service:
Lifelong online student data service supporting mobility.

Projects will undertaken in the short (2015), medium (until August 2016) and longer term (beyond August 2016) as follows:
Data model and system integration will kick-off in March; exploratory work is already under way. We already know some of the key problem areas which would benefit from common, defined data sets, such as:
• management of international student data;
• improving the continuum of student digital identities;
• enabling easier data reporting to national agencies
• embedding the tools and culture to track and develop employability capabilities and data from admission to graduation and beyond.

The Employability Skills Match Service will also start in March. This aims to deliver a dynamic skills matching platform for employer consortia and students/graduates using open badges, to better recognise and reward the attributes employers need in candidates, especially soft skills. We are working with colleagues in Italy at CINECA to realise this solution, as well as key sector players and employers groups in the UK. This service will be developed, with other features, into an employability data service initially focussed on further education, then extended to higher education.
The Learner Cradle to Grave data service is a longer term goal, which will build on the employability data service, as well as on evolving national standards such as the Higher Education Achievement Record (HEAR), the Personal Learner Record (PLR), the Enterprise Passport and the Unique Learner Number (ULN).

The purpose of the Student Mapping project is to inform the two projects above in the medium term, by providing use cases and student profiles , identifying the common problem and opportunity areas, for which project 2 in particular will develop solutions. We will work with those institutions undertaking major student experience and student systems reviews; we have already been talking to a number of these.
Meanwhile we will gather evidence, perspectives and intelligence to form a consensus on what future, next generation student information management might look like.

Here is the proposed timeline for the projects during 2015 (click on the diagram to see detail):

Our aim is to help you resolve current pains and requirements now, whilst keeping our eyes on the future. What, for example, would an end-to-end student relationship management service look like? In short, we hope to get you through the MOTs, while together we can all build a shared picture of what the next model (think driverless car) will look like.

In addition to our core and extended group of stakeholders, we are already talking to a number of key partners with an interest in these areas, in particular the HEDIIP team, those involved in the HEAR, and international partners that provide and manage student information systems across a large numbers of institutions.

We are in the process of forming an Advisory Group, comprised of key stakeholder representatives, to provide governance over the work, and we are currently forming the project plans and project teams that will take each project area forward.

If you are keen to get involved in any one of these projects, then please get in touch with
Deirdre Kelly, kellydeirdre19@gmail.com (support and facilitation) or
Simon Whittemore, simon.whittemore@jisc.ac.uk (lead),
Shri Footring, shri.footring@jisc.ac.uk or Ruth Drysdale, ruth.drysdale@jisc.ac.uk (project managers).

Finally, though P2A is dealing primarily with the transactional (information management and exchange) dimension of the student lifecycle rather than the transformational (learning) dimension, improving the student experience remains the ultimate objective. Accordingly, we have completed the first of several HE and FE student consultations we plan to undertake, which builds on Jisc’s extensive work to date in the digital student experience.
Student Hubs undertook 100 interviews for us of a diverse range of HE students, asking about our plans for P2A, and the results are illuminating. These will be highlighted in the next P2A post!

By Simon Whittemore February 20, 2015
Uncategorized

We recently commissioned a study on the The Management and Administrative Computing (MAC) Initiative in order to inform our Digital Futures activities, especially those, like From Prospect to Alumnus, in the area of Enterprise computing and corporate information management.
The MAC Report, by Tim Philips, former Director of IT at the University of Bristol, is now available, and it synthesises the lessons learnt from the MAC initiative and highlights the implications for current and future collaborative activities, including From Prospect to Alumnus.

The MAC initiative, started by the University Grants Committee in 1988, ran until 1995 and set out to promote the development of a new generation of corporate information systems for UK universities in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As a formal change programme, it was not generally regarded as a success, however as the Report makes clear, there are some benefits that emerged from it.

Phil Richards, Jisc’s Chief Innovation Officer, welcomed the Report: “As a neutral broker and service provider, committed to delivering shared services and digital solutions which benefit our customers and stakeholders, Jisc is keen to learn from past interventions such as the MAC initiative. There are also useful findings for other related initiatives like the Higher Education Data and Information Improvement Programme (HEDIIP).
This Report concisely summarises some of the challenges and opportunities inherent in such endeavours. The landscape and technology may have moved on, but sustaining an ecosystem which harnesses the creative tension of ‘co-opetition’ to overcome barriers to sharing remains vital for any sector-wide innovation to succeed.”

Here a a few key points from the Report to give you a flavour:
• MAC suffered from inadequate governance structures, an insufficiently strong business case, lack of focus on business process change and strategic alignment, and inadequate programme and project management. Target business benefits were also not adequately identified.
• MAC was progressive in enabling more professional business systems management and collaboration between institutions. Some elements are still in use today.
• ‘MAC should have started from the customer requirements and worked towards the technology, not the other way round’ (quote from interviewee);
• ‘Establishment of families on the basis of technology preferences and the resulting large and diverse family groups made agreement of common business solutions problematic’. (ibid.)
• Common standards in such shared service initiatives are a key enabler;
• The role of Jisc in enabling effective collaboration for innovation in digital services in information management is self-evident.