This is a talk about risk management. The speaker (Gill Ferrell), hass already said that 2001: A Space Odessey is a terrible film, and misquoted Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I’ll try not to hold this against her…

She is just relating the Monty Hall dilemma (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/MontyHallProblem.html) – this seems to be popular at the moment – Shan Wareing – head of our Educational Development Centre – used it in a talk on e-learning

She seems to be drawing all the wrong conclusions from it though – she says it is human nature to stick to the original decision – I don’t think this is the case – the point of the story is that it goes against instinct that changing or sticking affects the outcome at all – the reason this became such an issue is that professional mathematicians have argued wrongly) that it make no difference to your chances of winning.

OK – lets get on to the real stuff of the talk:

Worth saying from the start that there is a JISC Infokit covering all this stuff, which is what the talk seems to be based around:

http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/InfoKits/risk-management

Risk can only be managed – not eliminated. The first stage of risk management is to identify risk.

Risk registers – need to look at cause and effect:
Condition
Cause
Consequence
Context

Often the consequence is identified (e.g. a ‘risk’ the project may go over budget), rather than the actual risk.

So, try the following:
Risk – staff may leave before the end of the project
Re-phrase as:
There is a risk that staff may leave before the end of the project, caused by xxx, resulting in xxx

Unless you record the risk in a meaningful way, risk management is not useful

Ways of looking at risk analysis – probability and impact

E.g. – a very low risk would have low probability and negligible impact

Also the immediacy of a risk is important – identifying risk early, usually means more options – Risk Response Planning.

Risk Response Options:
Risk Avoidance – choose a different option which doesn’t have the risk
Risk Transference – make someone else take the risk for you
Risk Mitigation – take some action to minimise the impact of the risk
Risk Deferral – put off the decision, hope that conditions change
Risk Acceptance – decide you are going to risk it

Iterative Risk Management
Nice diagram here, but can’t quite capture it (camera phone not up to it) – see the infokit for the detail (referenced above) – but basically saying you need to go round the process of defining risks, and thinking about response.

All forms of Risk Response are going to cost something – there is a problem in budgeting for risks that actually occur – how do you set this budget?

Introducing the concept of ‘Expected Monetary Value’ – basically working out probability of risk and how much it will cost you to cope with the risk happening. Multiply the cost of the risk happening, and the probability of the risk happening to work out the EMV of the risk.

When you budget a project, you need to include the cost of project work, plus risk response cost plus contingency – otherwise you haven’t budgeted for the real world.

Some interesting results from a Gartner survey – Senior Management see IT as a barrier to business, and see IT managers as ‘risk averse’ – are IT professionals playing it safe at the expense of business opportunities?

How do we overcome this? How about ‘Service Oriented Approaches’ – http://www.elearning.ac.uk/frameworks

SOA – is about bringing together disparate systems to deliver service – especially important in systems that need to be agile – e.g. e-learning.

Just to reference Scott Wilson’s VLE vision:

http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=20050125170206

So many ideas brought together – a great vision – a lot seems to be based around open source and social software.

It takes us some much further forward than the type of thing called a VLE at the moment. However, it doesn’t capture (for me) some quite important stuff – interface, MLE, and different tools such as mentioned by Curtis Bonk at the conference yesterday.

Mirapoint is a company specialising in email server appliances and other messaging technologies.

Mark Murphy from Waune State University is going to talk about their experience using Mirapoint.

Wayne State Uni has a population of around 40K people – 10K employees and 30K students.

Went from a homegrown email solution, with many servers, ‘turf wars’ etc, to a single Mirapoint solution.

Basically – bought the product, very happy with it. However, they were bringing in quite a bit of stuff we already have – anti-virus, anti-spam, webmail.

Did integration with Campus Pipeline (what Luminis used to be), have seen reduced support calls, only one outage due to power loss, no messages lost in the 4 years that it has been running.

This is a yearly survey of the ‘top concerns’ of UCISA members. The idea is to capture the issues, technologies, threats, opportunities and other things that are on the mind of staff in IT in Education sector.

So the slide of top concerns just got put up, but I could get it all down – it will be on the UCISA website next week. Anyway, here are the first 13 that I managed to get down:

Network technologies
Super Janet 5
Network Security
Anytime anywhere computing
Strategic approach to infrastructure
Systems resilience and availability
User management
Data management
Grid technologies
Enterprise portals
Business continuity
Information security
Extended hours

The analysis of all this still needs finalising, but a crude top 10 is:

But as a summary
Anytime, anywhere computing
Systems resilience
Network security
Strategic approach
Learning support
Network technologies
Enterprise portal
User management
Ensuring sufficient funding
Data management
IT institution planning

Some other ways of looking at it are…

Seen as most important to the success of the institution NOW were:
Network security
Strategic approach to infrastructure
Systems resilience and availability
Anytime anywhere computing
Learning Support
Ensuring sufficient funding
IT Institutions planning
Enterprise portals
… – more I couldn’t get down

Seen as likely to become more signifcant in next 12 months

Anytime, anywhere
Extended hours
Enterprise portals
Services management formal approach
User management
Document management
… – more I couldn’t get down

This is a talk by Craig Samuel from Hewlett Packard.

Increase in available information leads to problems of information overload, and also issues of getting to ‘authenticated’ information

The idea of ‘millenials’ people who have grown up with technology. A survey showed that 40% said they preferred to discuss stuff by sms (with friends) than f2f

CS emphasising that the technology is the small part of the problem – the tip of the iceberg. We need to consider the Process, the People and the Culture. The technology is just an opportunity to challenge established practice.

OK – so now to the meat of the talk – CS is going to talk about:
Virtual Collaboration
Grid Computing
IPv6
Digital Preservation
Next Generation Web
Nanotechnology and computing

Virtual Collaboration
Can we create a virtual presence that is ‘better than being there’. Collaboration is around us – telephone, email, f2f – all of these are collaboration.

HP have been building virtual collaboration technology – but he skipped over the detail, so I’m not really sure how it all goes together  – sounds good, but would be great to see it in action.

Grid Computing
HP have been working on The Paua Grid Project – a Decentralised and Open computing grids using peer-to-peer technology (this based in Brazil)

OK – CS seems to be skipping across these pretty quickly – I’d like a bit more detail really.

IPv6
Apparently a Good Thing – he really isn’t given enough detail here to be interesting

Digital Preservation
Talking about DSpace – open source solution that HP have worked on with partners like MIT. I’ve seen this – currently being used in the UK in some eprint projects. However, I can’t see that it is a viable alternative to Enterprise records management and content management – that is software that applies across the whole enterprise, and is just integrated into daily work – e.g. when you hit save, you shouldn’t be worrying about where the document is saved – it is saved with appropriate permissions in a central space – so you, or others, can access the document whenever necessary.

Next generation web
Semantic web – HP looking at this to solve their own problems in managing information internally.

Again – apparently ‘very important’ and ‘very interesting’ – he really needs to explain a bit more what he is talking about!

Croquet – the next gen web? – True collaborative computing? Croquet is a joint project with UC Berkley, I’ve not come across this, so probably could do with finding out a bit more. Looking at areas of visualisation and exploration, avatars etc.

http://www.opencroquet.org

An interesting point here – technology is connecting us ‘faster’ but not making us ‘more connected’. I think this is coming back to something that was common through the talks yesterday – that is, the technology is not the issue – it is the application of the technology and the people/culture issues that are holding back progress.

Nanotechnology
Apparently already pervasive – microprocessors, cleaning detergents etc.

First products could be a replacement for flash memory. Silicon isn’t going away – but molecular scale ships will be used to supplement silicon structures – basically "you ain’t seen nothin’ yet"

This is a talk by Craig Samuel from Hewlett Packard.

Increase in available information leads to problems of information overload, and also issues of getting to ‘authenticated’ information

The idea of ‘millenials’ people who have grown up with technology. A survey showed that 40% said they preferred to discuss stuff by sms (with friends) than f2f

CS emphasising that the technology is the small part of the problem – the tip of the iceberg. We need to consider the Process, the People and the Culture. The technology is just an opportunity to challenge established practice.

OK – so now to the meat of the talk – CS is going to talk about:
Virtual Collaboration
Grid Computing
IPv6
Digital Preservation
Next Generation Web
Nanotechnology and computing

Virtual Collaboration
Can we create a virtual presence that is ‘better than being there’. Collaboration is around us – telephone, email, f2f – all of these are collaboration.

HP have been building virtual collaboration technology – but he skipped over the detail, so I’m not really sure how it all goes together  – sounds good, but would be great to see it in action.

Grid Computing
HP have been working on The Paua Grid Project – a Decentralised and Open computing grids using peer-to-peer technology (this based in Brazil)

OK – CS seems to be skipping across these pretty quickly – I’d like a bit more detail really.

IPv6
Apparently a Good Thing – he really isn’t given enough detail here to be interesting

Digital Preservation
Talking about DSpace – open source solution that HP have worked on with partners like MIT. I’ve seen this – currently being used in the UK in some eprint projects. However, I can’t see that it is a viable alternative to Enterprise records management and content management – that is software that applies across the whole enterprise, and is just integrated into daily work – e.g. when you hit save, you shouldn’t be worrying about where the document is saved – it is saved with appropriate permissions in a central space – so you, or others, can access the document whenever necessary.

Next generation web
Semantic web – HP looking at this to solve their own problems in managing information internally.

Again – apparently ‘very important’ and ‘very interesting’ – he really needs to explain a bit more what he is talking about!

Croquet – the next gen web? – True collaborative computing? Croquet is a joint project with UC Berkley, I’ve not come across this, so probably could do with finding out a bit more. Looking at areas of visualisation and exploration, avatars etc.

http://www.opencroquet.org

An interesting point here – technology is connecting us ‘faster’ but not making us ‘more connected’. I think this is coming back to something that was common through the talks yesterday – that is, the technology is not the issue – it is the application of the technology and the people/culture issues that are holding back progress.

Nanotechnology
Apparently already pervasive – microprocessors, cleaning detergents etc.

First products could be a replacement for flash memory. Silicon isn’t going away – but molecular scale ships will be used to supplement silicon structures – basically "you ain’t seen nothin’ yet"

Slightly different presentation this time – the presenter (under the seemingly unlikely name of Curtis Bonk) has come on dressed as Dr Evil!

Disagrees with previous speaker about ‘distance learning’ being flat – SUNY Network shows it growing

A question – from an IT perspective, what can you differently online?
Personalisation, individualisation etc…
Anytime, anyplace, anywhere
Materials available and updatable
More economical? Reusable
Non-linear – just in time syllabus, just in time teaching
Learning styles – (ref r2d2 on Curtis’s website)
Guest experts
Extend classroom
Sharing the curriculum – e.g. Merlot

Changing methods of learning. However, skills needed are teaching based

Talked about SAKAI and Chef

Critique of WebCT and Blackboard – describes them as ‘warehousing students online’
Lists of stuff not in these pacakges – timeline, venn diagramming, debate tools – in fact says they have added nothing to learning – only replicated tools that already existed.

Have to demand better tools from them, working with them, or working round them.

He really doesn’t like WebCT and Blackboard! Interesting point about the tools that could be useful for online learning.

For e-learning – students need to mature, independent learners.
However the instructor needs to be flexible, enthusiastic, patient, innovative, creative, provide prompt feedback, builds communities …

Unfortunately at this point the power on my laptop gave up – I’ve got paper notes of 10 trends in e-learning, but don’t have time to put these up now. I’ll try to get these done before tomorrow.

Ironically one of the questions David Farqhuar raised in his presentation was when we are providing e-learning in developing countries, who provides the electricity. In this case – if we provide a wireless network, who provides the electricity?

Slightly different presentation this time – the presenter (under the seemingly unlikely name of Curtis Bonk) has come on dressed as Dr Evil!

Disagrees with previous speaker about ‘distance learning’ being flat – SUNY Network shows it growing

A question – from an IT perspective, what can you differently online?
Personalisation, individualisation etc…
Anytime, anyplace, anywhere
Materials available and updatable
More economical? Reusable
Non-linear – just in time syllabus, just in time teaching
Learning styles – (ref r2d2 on Curtis’s website)
Guest experts
Extend classroom
Sharing the curriculum – e.g. Merlot

Changing methods of learning. However, skills needed are teaching based

Talked about SAKAI and Chef

Critique of WebCT and Blackboard – describes them as ‘warehousing students online’
Lists of stuff not in these pacakges – timeline, venn diagramming, debate tools – in fact says they have added nothing to learning – only replicated tools that already existed.

Have to demand better tools from them, working with them, or working round them.

He really doesn’t like WebCT and Blackboard! Interesting point about the tools that could be useful for online learning.

For e-learning – students need to mature, independent learners.
However the instructor needs to be flexible, enthusiastic, patient, innovative, creative, provide prompt feedback, builds communities …

Unfortunately at this point the power on my laptop gave up – I’ve got paper notes of 10 trends in e-learning, but don’t have time to put these up now. I’ll try to get these done before tomorrow.

Ironically one of the questions David Farqhuar raised in his presentation was when we are providing e-learning in developing countries, who provides the electricity. In this case – if we provide a wireless network, who provides the electricity?

This section presented by David Farquhar who has recently has been running the ‘Interactive University’ – a global e-Learning publisher which publishes and distributes Scottish Higher and Further Education sector.

DF is drawing comparison between IU (Interactive University) and the UKeU – the former having a 30th of the funding of the latter. IU was not looking at educational standards – it was just there to maximise the international distribution of Scottish Education. The Target Market was accdredited post-compulsory education in the developing world. IU is not-for-profit – any profit has to be reinvested in the business. Has partnerships with a significant part of the Scottish HE sector.

IU has developed a ‘scholar’ programme with around 70,000 students – they believe it to be the largest single e-learning programme in the world (although – should this be distance learning?)

DF outlines a key challenge for HE sector, which is between educational excellence, and business survival.

The educational philosophy behind the IU is geared around ‘content is central, but not sufficient’; ‘context is crucial, and is essential’; ‘communities are captivating; and increase motivation’

DF sees the ‘contextualisation’ as a major challenge – personalisation and localisation is key to effective use of the content by the students.

Seem to be some similarity to the OKI idea – this is the MIT initiative to put their ‘courses’ online for free. They basically argue that it is the contextualisation that MIT staff bring to the courses (and the MIT qualification) that adds the value that you get when you attend MIT.

DF also sees the technology as basically ‘done’ – we shouldn’t be worrying about the tech, but rather about the customers (a.k.a students). He thinks we just need to start getting the stuff out there (in the marketplace), and we need to do more of this.

Interestingly the global competition is from Australia and Canada – both large countries with sparse populations – perhaps this is because they already have domestic experience? But apparently also a lot more local competition – e.g. more attractive for an Indian to attend university in Dubai, than in the US or UK – especially if that university is an outpost of a well respected US or UK institution.

Also starting to be true that local degrees have more respect locally than UK degrees.

Key barriers include the standards of english (I’d suggest this is true of those coming to the UK as well); teaching practices – very different ways of teaching in other cultures; infrastructure supply – if you can’t get electricity, you can’t deliver e-learning; current business models – are we doing distance learning, bringing students to the UK, branch campuses, partnering with local institutions…

Seems to be a trend towards presence in other countries and away from bringing foreign students into the UK. Distance learning is not growing. Challenge for UK insitutions – need to get local presence in other countries, rather than rely on students coming onto the UK campus.

DF challenges Universities to regard themselves more as businesses, without comprimising academic standards. They also need to look at how much programmes cost, understanding whether they are profitable or not.

DF outlining issues with Distance Learning – most students want f2f tutoring, and DL works better at Masters level and above – which is a small slice of the market.

Local partners are becoming more sophisticated and discerning – they won’t just partner with anyone now.

What is your differentor?

Challenges – Global competition
Insitutional motivation and structures
Models of delivery
Systainability, profitability
Local partner sophistication
What is your differentiator?
What is your value proposition?

DF refers to a British Council report relating to some of these issues, which sounds interesting.

Challenges – Customer sophistication
My lifestyle
My culture
My needs
I want to be in charge
Undergraduate vs Postgraduate – Undergraduate market saturated in quite a few areas (e.g. IT in India) – so more opportunity for niche market models, usually means postgraduate.

Challenges – Customer Mobility
I want to go to your country to study (edutourism)
I have to stay at home
I want to go to a great destination
Rise of TNE (trans-national education – selling UK degrees through local partners)

Challenges – Knowledge Transfer
Are we empowering competition – how do you stay ahead?
Figure out value chain
What can we learn? Looking at agreeing qualifications

Challenges – Enabling Technologies
Pervasive technologies
Good quality content – content management systems; outsourcing content creation?
Who puts in the electricity?
Games and team-based – company called tpld, games or scenario based learning
Partnering

Educational enablers
Faculty English and capability – huge issue in China
Applicant English
Massive investment needed
Student centered learning
Partnering

The UCISA Conference is in Glasgow this year, and just having an introduction from Magnus Magnusson (of Mastermind fame), and also Chancellor of Glasgow Caledonian University.

The theme of the conference is 21st Century, and in the first section, talking about 21st century e-learning.

One of the themes MM is drawing out is the exponential growth in ‘knowledge’ (which he regards as consildated body of information). This seems to strike at the heart of ‘education’. Not only is there now an incredible amount of knowledge to sift through, but the growth of the internet means a lot of this knowledge is available to us reasonably instantaneously.

So – for University educators there seem to be two ways to go. We can concentrate of guided reading/education, and invest in systems that allow the tutors to deliver this, OR invest in skills which allow students to find information and assess it critically.

Of course, there is always a balance, and by suggesting it is a choice between one and the other, I’m being simplistic. However, there do seem to be some questions about where best to invest our effort.

MM just referred to education as ‘a way of integrating learning and living’ – quite like this idea.

MM just said that education depends on the quality of the teacher – reflecting that education is about ‘leading out’ what is already in the student, not putting something in (references to “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” and the latin derivation of ‘education’)

Quite a good introduction to the conference. One thing of interest is to reflect whether we could have got the same experience in an online environment. My guess is not – it would be very difficult to get the same feeling of a personal address online. However, I can see some possibility for online debate around the ideas presented – its a shame the conference hasn’t provided this facility.

Also worth noting that I wrote this as I listened to the talk, but had to wait to blog it, as getting the wireless network to work was a pain (I needed to get a special piece of paper with an ‘access code’, and also had problems as it only works via a proxy server. By the time I got the wireless access working, I was almost out of battery power – no power points in the main hall either.