RUGIT meeting, Tuesday 17thNovember 2015, QMU
Attending: Heidi Fraser-Krauss (York, Chair); Stuart Lee (Oxford, Secretary); Martin Bellamy (Cambridge); Chris Day (QMUL); Mark Duff (QMUL); Sean Duffy (Birmingham); John Cartwright (Liverpool – arrived after item 1); John Shemilt (Imperial); Rachel Bence (Bristol – for Darrell Sturley); Malcom Days (Warwick); Nick Leake (KCL); Andy Nixon (Durham); John Gormley (QUB); Alison Clarke (Nottingham – arrived after item 1); Chris Sexton (Sheffield); Mike Cope (UCL); Martin Furner (Russell Group); Arthur Clune (York); Simon Marsden (Edinburgh).
Apologies: Eileen Brandreth (Cardiff); Gerry Pennell (Manchester); Darrell Sturley (Bristol); NickDeyes (LSE).
1. Introduction
The Chair (Heidi Fraser-Krauss) reminded everyone of the requirements under competition law. If conversations strayed into areas inappropriate she would curtail these. Late attendance would be recorded.
2. Minutes and matters arising
The minutes of the last meeting were accepted.
One outstanding action:
Exeter and Cambridge to nominate representatives fro RUGIT Security SIG
3. JISC Update
David Maguire, Paul Feldman, Phil Richards
David began by noting that JISC is in a state of change and that JISC’s agenda is the sector’s agenda.
Paul Feldman outlined JISC’s vision or ‘direction of travel’ and stressed that JISC needs to be valued by sector.
JISC aims to provide shared infrastructure and services; sector wide deals; and trusted advice and assistance. Most funding comes in from HE (funding councils and institutional subscriptions) but a large part from FE. It delivers under three categories: shared infrastructure/services; brokering deals; advice and consultancy.
JISC’s costs have gone from £135m to £77m in five years, and this will continue to go down. This has been achieved with no service reduction. JISC believes it can legitimately state it adds £140m value to the sector. This was questioned by RUGIT members . JISC representatives felt that this figure is actually more realistic than earlier figures that were suggested; it comes from a variety of sources: network, subscriptions, driving down. It was noted that this figureis used a lot in Government discussions, but there is also a lot of value in voices from individual HEIs – need to work through the VCs.
Jisc representatives note that they have set up JISC Comm. This is a venture aimedat delivering some commercial benefits and revenue, to reduce the cost impact on the sector.
Key headline activities:
- the CSR (this is seriously impacting their ability to assess the new subscription rates)Jisc made it clear that until the outcome of the CSR( and potentially the Green Paper ) was understood they are unable to give any indication of what future subscriptions will be.
- JANET mid-term upgrade, funding for this is currently being held up by the CSR
- Scottish regional networks, final insourcing is taking place and requires investment to bring the infrastructure up to date.
- Cloud services– working with MS Azure to reduce the egress charges; also talking to Amazon
- Northern powerhouse data centre, is out to tender
- APC( article processing charges) negotiations with Elsevier have begun.
- Improvements to digital resources
Phil Richards reported on co-design. He outlined some deliverables of this: UK ORCID service; learner analytics and teacher analytics (with TEF possibly in mind); RDM shared service; national BI service/dashboard (with HESA). There will be a 2016 co-design exercise.
JISC asked some high-level questions? How can JISC respond better to RUGIT’s needs? How should JISC be positioned? What are the key directions of travel? How can we collaborate better?
A repeated theme was that JISC has to be faster and clearer at communicating – it was suggested that some of this may need a deeper change within the JISC communication teams which were seen by many (within and without) as a potential blocker to speedy and effective communications. JISC must recognise the differences in the sector also. All that said, it was recognised this is a difficult balancing act as JISC is occasionally criticised as being Russell Group biased.
Rugit Directors expressed the urgentneed for far better engagement with HEIs. Day to day account management is not succeeding at present. This needs to step up considerably. This will enable us to extract better value from JISC.
It is unknown where JISC might end up as a result of Green Paper. Possibly it could remain separate with funding coming from Office for Students, and also from Research. It does not want to be set direction and funding directly by BIS. Would welcome any mention of JISC in our responses.
Action: Invite Paul Feldman to RUGIT away day
Action: Chair to email Paul Feldman to attend the JISC HE Professional Association meeting (9th December).
[Following the meeting Paul Feldman sent the following update 1/12/15:
“Hi Heidi,
Hope you are well. It was good to meet you, albeit briefly, at last month’s RUGIT meeting.
There were a couple of follow ups I promised.
The first was on the contact who is leading Elsevier (and other such) content negotiations. This is Liam >.
The second, I followed up on the issue raised about whether we could avoid a Janet upgrade if we used the SURFnet model of optical layer rather than IP connectivity. We do have some take up of the Janet Lightpath (and similar optical layer) offering where that type of direct connection is needed. However standard IP connectivity is by far the most popular, efficient and effective in our overall context, mainly due to the sheer difference in scale, complexity and breadth of users in the UK vs Netherlands; its in part what makes Janet so valuable. I hope this helps and we are very happy to have further conversations to explain this further if any of your members want to.
Best
Paul”]
4. UCISA
Peter Tinson reported.
UCISA works closely with JISC to make sure they support each other in advisory services.
UCISA conference aimed at CIOs, IT Directors, 16-18 March Manchester.
[Full report – see below]
There was some discussion around the ineffectiveness of filtering (in discussion of ‘Prevent’) and the need to make this message clear.
Noted the Higher Education Information Bill (private member’s bill) but not certain this will get passed.
There was some discussion about building up a library of technical specifications. It was suggested UCISA could harvest these.
5. Andy Coulthard (HEFCE)
Andy was unable to attend so sent a brief email update. He specifically asked RUGIT members to respond to three areas:
JISC Stakeholder event – feedback on the January 2015 event was that it was delivering to a very mixed audience, and the opportunity to discuss JISC’s plans was very limited. As this was meant to be the start of the engagement process RUGIT members expressed the view that this event has not delivered its primary purpose. On the positive side , the eventdid launch the Tech and Research Forums which were good, and the dashboards (but it is felt these could be greatly improved as they are rather simplistic at present). At the next event there should be far more scope for discussion.
JISC Account Management – it is felt that this has been very mixed, but the majority of opinion suggested that this is not working well. Apart from one example, there has been little to no value adding contact with account managers.
JISC Shared Services – general opinion is that this is just very slow and very late when it occurs. There are lots of common shared services that we could use (filtering, telephone, network management, etc) but JISC are not very reactive here. The Cloud Brokerage service should be reinvigorated as it seems to have stalled after the launch of the engagement activities (see above). Discussion moved to how RUGIT could help. It was felt this could be from two angles – developing a list of shared services JISC should explore (with RUGIT support) but also aligning these with JISC’s three stated centres of activity: shared infrastructure; brokering; advice.
Under JISC main headings we will collect a list of services and engagement approaches/characteristics to brainstorm at away day. It would be useful to have a facilitator for this.
Action: Chair to email Paul Feldman to suggest a RUGIT list of ‘what’s in the box’ services we would like JISC to explore as a potential shared service.
Action: Follow this with a facilitated workshop on possible JISC activities at RUGIT awayday.
[SL had to leave at this point; minutes taken by Simon Marsden]
6.Mike Cope - Attendance Monitoring Questionnaire
5 questions
13 responses
Outcomes
* Large variation of approaches
* UK/BA home office accept a wide range of approaches to attendance monitoring
* A few do automatic recording
* Currently little structured tracking of on-line activity
* Most applied universally to all students some just to tier 4 visa holders
* Tracking mandatory for some courses e.g. medicine for accreditation bodies
* Broadening it to learner analytics
* Research interest in using the data
* Biometrics not in use in the RG - some in use in other unis - finger tip
UK BA require a defined process - range of checks and auditing but not particularly prescriptive about what. They do not like monitoring that only relies on 'cards'.
Use wireless network and track students connections. A bit big brotherish but workable without special tech.
Main message - be clear about why you were doing it and what action you were going to take with the data you have collected
7) Benchmarking
Heidi - would find it useful to be able to show the scale of what Russell Group Unis do in same way as Sconul stats can do for libraries. Positioning IT HEITS survey discussed as a starting place with the potential for the complexity index to provide comparators. Getting time sequences to show change is important.
JC showed his dashboard - will share it with the group
Action - Chair to gather thoughts and inputs on Benchmarking
UCISA Update
Current activities
- Current consultations
Prevent
UCISA responded to the HEFCE Consultation on monitoring of compliance with the duty placed on higher education institutions by the Counter Terrorism and Security Act (in England and Wales). The response concentrated on the factor relating to the use of IT facilities. We noted that the factor combined two unrelated activities – the use of IT and the management of academic activities. We proposed that these should be separate factors. We also felt that the proposed factor was misleading as it included reference to filtering which is optional, not mandatory, in the guidance issued by the Home Office. We will comment on other monitoring schemes as they are proposed.
One component of the duty is to have appropriate regulations for the use of IT facilities and networks; the UCISA Model Regulations were cited in our response. We will be looking at these to ensure that there is appropriate wording included to meet the requirements of the Act. We will also be reviewing the recent Investigatory Powers Act to see if there are any further implications for our template regulations.
Green paper on Higher Education
We will be responding to the Green Paper on Higher Education published earlier this month. Although this paper only applies to English Higher Education, it is anticipated that it will have an impact on the other home nations (particularly the introduction of the Teaching Excellence Framework).
NSS and Unistats
HEFCE issued a consultation on the proposed new National Students Survey and Unistats data. UCISA will be responding to the consultation (responses are due by 4 December).
HESA Data Landscape
HESA has issued a consultation on the proposed new Data Landscape (which was derived from the HEDIIP programme workstream). UCISA promoted a seminar at HESA for software suppliers and those institutions with bespoke student records systems to allow them to consider the implications of the proposals (and so help shape their own responses). UCISA will be responding to this consultation (18 December).
- Information Security Management Toolkit and training
UCISA continues to promote the Toolkit most recently at the virtual EDUCAUSE Conference in October.It is pleasing to note that EDUCAUSE are also promoting the Toolkit amongst their members as it complements their work. UCISA and EDUCAUSE are looking at possible collaboration in this area.
There have been a number of discussions with the preferred supplier of the information security trainingwith the most recent offer presented to the UCISA Trustees earlier this month. Discussions are ongoing.
- Disability Support Allowance and BIS
UCISA has been in discussion with Microsoft, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Crown Commercial Services about the availability of Office 365 for students but specifically for those who qualify for the DSA. Since students at all universities (bar one) are eligible for free copies of Office365, the current focus is on BIS saving the cost of installing copies of Office on the equipment they supply to students for the DSA, whilst ensuring that there are processes in place to allow the equipment (with software) to be delivered to the qualifying students in a timely fashion (well before the start of term). Investigations by a number of the companies who prepare the equipment for those eligible suggests that the installation can be completed prior to registration (although registration will still be required by the student).
- Surveys
HEITS
Data is now being collected for the 2014/5 HEITS survey. The results of the 2013/4 survey have been published. UCISA has been working with other IT associations worldwide on developing a complexity index to facilitate international comparison of institutions. A paper on this work was delivered at EDUCAUSE and there was a good level of interest in collecting data from more countries and carrying out further work. The complexity indices have been calculated for all UK institutions and will be published shortly. In addition CHEITA, the Coalition of Higher Education IT Associations, will be publishing a complexity index calculator on its website shortly.
TEL Survey
The Academic Support Group have prepared the questions for the 2016 TEL (Technology Enhanced Learning) Survey. The Group sought input from the wider community through social media and will continue to liaise with members of the Heads of e-Learning Forum (HeLF) and Jisc. The survey will be launched in January 2016.
Out of hours survey
The report on the survey carried out by the Networking Group earlier in the year on arrangements for out of hours support has now been published. The report concluded that there were out of hours operations are “predominantly supported under a reasonable endeavours type agreement” with a wide range of solutions being deployed. The report has been forwarded to Universities HR and we will follow up to promote good practice identified by UHR.
Digital capabilities
The Group has begun planning the 2017 Digital Capabilities survey.
- Publications
Learning spaces toolkit
This is a collaboration between UCISA, SCHOMS and AUDE. The bulk of the material for the Toolkit has been drafted by a consultant and is currently being reviewed by the community (closing date is the end of this week). The Toolkit includes reference to a number of Jisc resources and is intended to be complementary to the recently published Jisc guide. This resource will be delivered in the next quarter.
Social media toolkit
The text for the Social Media Toolkit is now complete with final revisions suggested by the Steering Group now incorporated. A mock-up of website is in production and initial discussions have been held with the publishers for layup.
Setting up a Project Management Office
The Toolkit was published in October and has been well received both here and in the US where it was promoted on EDUCAUSE lists.
Strategic challenges
In 2013, UCISA held a workshop attended by nine CIOs/IT Directors which resulted in the publication of Strategic Challenges for IT Services, a resource for member institutions to use when reviewing and developing their department’s activities.It was our intention to review the Strategic Challenges every two years, in the same way as the Top Concerns survey (the predecessor of Strategic Challenges) was carried out biennially. A workshop was held on 12 October to explore and define the strategic challenges IT departments are facing in 2015.The work will be written up with a view to publishing in Q1 2016.
Specification templates
UCISA is looking to build a library of specifications for applications for institutions to re-use. The University of Edinburgh submitted the sole specification to date - for a library management system - but a sample specification for campus wireless has also been offered by another institution. Further examples are being sought. In addition we are also looking at accessibility questions to be used with software procurement.