In early 2016, ISD (Information Services Division) carried out the first Staff and Student IT Survey using TechQual+. Over 1,000 of you completed the survey, and over the past 16 months we have been working hard to improve our services in response to your comments.

Below are just a few examples of changes that have been made as a result of the feedback received from the TechQual+ survey run in 2016:

Wi-Fi                        

A substantial investment in replacing and upgrading our Wi-Fi technology infrastructure

Service Desk

We’ve invested in staffing, tools and training to speed up response times and improve quality.

We’ve partnered with an external organisation and altered shift patterns to provide additional out of hours’ support.

Printing                 

We’ve rolled out 170+ additional printers over the past 18 months, targeting the busiest areas. This takes the current total to 660 printers. In areas of high usage, we’ve introduced new high capacity printers.

Infrastructure

We have invested in storage and now all staff and students can store 100GB for free.

Computers

We are continuing to invest in additional cluster PCs, and loan laptops where there isn’t space for desktops. We added a further 550 desktops and 60 laptops by September 2017.
We operate one of the largest laptop loan services across UK universities – 266 laptops across 12 locations – and this year a further 60 laptops were added.

Training

We delivered 221 courses last academic year, that’s nearly 1000 hours of training with about 3000 people attending.  We are working hard to publicise the courses we offer.

Audio Visual

In 2016 ISD invested £2.5m into improving the technology in teaching facilities. Approximately 70 centrally bookable spaces had their facilities updated; this included bringing 43 spaces in 20 Bedford Way up to the standard spec including installation of Lecturecast in approx. 30 spaces.  Lecturecast was also installed at 22 Gordon Street and Canary Wharf (3 spaces each).  We also refreshed the Lecturecast hardware in 12 rooms.

Based on the findings of focus groups at participating institutions, the TechQual+ project has articulated a set of generalised IT service outcomes that are expected of IT organizations by faculty, students, and staff within higher education. The TechQual+ core survey contains 13 items designed to measure the performance of the following three core commitments: 1) Connectivity and Access, 2)Technology and Collaboration Services, and 3) Support and Training.

The TechQual+ survey will be run again at UCL in December 2017 and we’ll be asking for your help to advertise it to your students, encouraging them (and you!) to complete it. All respondents will be entered into a prize draw with a chance to win some great prizes!

We’ll be providing more information and communications about the survey closer to the opening date.

ALTC (Association for Learning Technology Conference) is a valuable and strange conference – an event for anyone active in learning technology to come together and share experiences, views and personalities. With 500 people attending this year, ‘there’s always so much to see’ is a statement from everybody. And yet within this wide selection, we all curate a path through and try to get as much as we can.

My experience is likely similar to many others; I go with my profession in hand and choose topics based on my background and interests. I try to see sessions, and meet people, that align to these. I was happily surprised, however, to note that there was not much on distance learning, even less on ‘lifelong and continuing’ education and so therefore I was exploring outside my box – and seeing how I could fit it in.

Digital storytelling

Digital storytelling provides an approach and platform for people to share an experience to a group, via a digital medium. Storytelling predates writing and remains on many cave walls from millennia-past, sharing early experiences for others to see and learn about. Stories are integral to the development of civilization; creating and telling stories can be a highly authentic, personal and social experience, so one would hope they have value place in education. Except that the digitization of stories seems to remain a lesser-hero in higher education at the moment, although it is happening in some sectors – but I hope it’ll continue to grow in popularity. The value seems immense, even if the term ‘story’ is perhaps childish or too informal.

Sarah Copeland shared with the ALTC group about what digital storytelling (DST) and community digital storytelling (CDST) is and how she’s using it at Leeds Beckett University and in community groups in rural Yorkshire. Dr. Copeland shared the five principles of DST/CDST and it seemed that even one of these phases can be an important and enriching experience for a learner:

1. Preparation – collate and structure what’ll be in the story
2. Storytelling – bring everything together and shape it into a story
3. Story digitisation – digitise the story and build it in a platform or capture with a device
4. Digital story sense-making – reflection on the story, self-evaluate and review
5. Digital story sharing (tricky if containing highly personal info) – share with others, on platforms or in groups.

In each of these phases a learner must go through a series of actions, reflections and sometimes quite social experiences that pave a strong way forward for a rich learning experience. It was important to highlight that digital storytelling is not a technology-based pedagogy, although it relies on the digital for some of the phases, the core activity could is not dominated by a certain tool. Digital storytelling in itself is an artifact and a transformative process – the idea is to couple narrative with a digital platform/environment. Community Digital Story Telling (CDST) adds an extra layer as it is also a social element; asking people to share their context, using a digital platform to provide a focus and helping to remove awkwardness for people to share their stories/views.

While Dr. Copeland suggests CDST/DST has to be small scale and to retain the authentic capturing of people I felt perhaps it could be countered against the ongoing effort to scale up education. Within increasingly large cohorts an institution can slip into neglect for personalisation for each individual. DST could help to provide an approach, or platform, to return the locus of learning upon the person and perhaps this goes some way to leveling an expansive playing field.

Inclusivity

Laura Czerniewicz really highlighted how ALTC can have an impact by sharing her views on inequality as higher education goes online. While the world struggles to balance societal equality (and seemingly failing to achieve a positive trend), higher education remains firmly within this challenging balance. Everyone deserves to be educated and when they do, their lives, and peoples around them, tend to always improve. Society should make education increasingly available, to more people, as time goes on.

While countries like the USA and many in Europe are investing increasing amounts in the EduTech boom it comes with a western-oriented emphasis on technology in society. Luckily, different cultures do not all work the same but this diversity is at risk of becoming lost, or overshadowed within technology. It seemed to me that while Silicon Valley is producing a lot of great innovation, that localization and local developments in other countries remain paramount as to harness the transformative power of the information, and digital age.

Prof. Czerniewicz highlighted that universities and academics in Africa do not have the resources to work on ‘good things’ (like Moocs) they must focus on solving real problems. I suspect that projects such as Wikipedia Zero (free mobile access to Wikipedia on certain mobile networks and countries) sets a better direction than any MOOC platform has so far. Moocs use high-bandwidth media and inflated social interactions, well bandwidth is expensive and slower in many other countries, so only the privileged few can access them.

Map of 3G & 2G coverage of Africa – speeds can reach approx. 1.5Mbps

Map of 4G coverage of Africa – speeds can reach approx. 10Mbps – much faster, but no one’s has it!

Map of 3G and 4G across Europe – speeds can reach 10Mbps – 20Mbps

(all maps taken 11 Sept 2015 from Opensignal.com)

The number of number of mobile subscriptions is rapid and far more numerous than that of broadband. Mobile connectivity is the future of globalised internet access. Yet in developing countries the State of Connectivity 2014 Report notes that only 20% of the population can afford a 500MB monthly data plan for their mobile device; 90% can afford 20MB monthly; which doesn’t equate to any other bulk download of media other than text. So that’s not fair and it must be resolved, but are we reliant on the mobile networks to resolve this inequality? Sure we could give people more money, but I know when I am roaming I switch off data due to the cost; the problem is systemic; you’re offline. My view is if we fix this technology problem, we might solve a societal issue. What power!

Digital storytelling and inclusivity

Linking data to stories – I can’t shake the idea that networking everyone and sharing stories would be a good thing. For too long digital networks have been centralised rather than personalised. Digital stories could be highly inclusive; by design their output is an opportunity for an individual to express and share. Mobile devices are an extension of our need, and desire, to be social. Let’s combine them.

Imagine, as a closing thought, we introduced cheap data and storytelling into the global migrant crisis. Each person sharing their story, accessing the information they need, reporting back home and learning the new language so they can make home in new lands. In addition, as they travel, that they curate their story, their reason for leaving, the ongoing change, struggles and hopes for the future. It might not seem educational – perhaps it’s more basic & functional – but for everyone else it could be a chance to learn from perspectives of people who could soon become their neighbour.

Further info / reading

Sarah Copeland, DST and CDST – ALTC talk 

Laura Czerniewicz, Inequality as higher education goes online (slides from ALTC keynote – video of ATLC keynote)

In June 2012 UCL Moodle is being upgraded. One new feature will be mobile device support. This preview will give a five minute demonstration of what’s coming to a mobile near you:

(more…)

UCL Moodle sees in excess of 30,000 visitors per day at the moment and with this number of people coming along it produces some interesting statistics to look over and try to see any patterns which can be addressed. One of which was that Safari is now the most popular web browser accessing the site. With this in mind we published some advice about using the browser, as Safari and Moodle don’t necessarily play well together.

For those who are interested, here are some statistics:

One thing you may notice is the rather rapid descent of Internet Explorer, going from a 55% share and 24 months later coming second in top from Safari – an unlikely outsider. Strangely the adoption of Firefox – a free and open source browser seems to initially correlate with that of IE, each notice in May/June 2009 where IE slumps, Firefox seems to take a reflective ascent. The same happens again in April 2010.

There is also an interesting growth in Apple’s Safari. Perhaps new students arriving with laptops for study (August 2010) and another, perhaps less mysterious increase in December 2011 is Christmas?

One thing to note is that Google’s Chrome is a steady grower in the browser area. Opera (a very powerful browser) isn’t used much at all and other/mobile devices barely try to access Moodle at all. Just to note; we are looking to a iOS and Android mobile Moodle very soon! We will keep you updated.

The annual Horizon Report, published by the ‘New Media Consortium’ tries to predict which technologies are going to be important for higher education over the next 5 years. It’s actually a very good read.  The 2011 edition is just out now at: http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2011-Horizon-Report.pdf. Here’s a potted version:

Key trends, as in 2010, are:

• Abundance of resources and relationships made accessible via the internet is challenging the roles of educators and institutions.
• People expect to work wherever and whenever they want.
• Increasingly collaborative world of work is prompting reflection on the nature of students’ projects.
• Increasing use of cloud-based technologies and decentralised IT support.

Critical challenges:

• Digital media literacy is a key skill for all, but not well-defined nor universally taught. Pace of change of technology exacerbates problem.
• Difficulty of finding metrics for evaluating new forms of scholarly publishing.
• Economic pressures and new educational models are challenging traditional models of the university.
• Staff and students are struggling to keep up with pace of technological change , and with information overload.

The report describes the top six ‘technologies to watch’. Open content and visual data analysis have disappeared, and  new in this year are game-based learning and ‘Learning Analytics’ (which looks intriguing).  They have three ‘horizons’ and the report describes the technologies in detail – and points to case studies.

Technologies to watch in the near term (12 months)

• E-books, e-readers with note-taking facilities, some augmentation of functions to allow immersive experiences and social interaction.
• Mobiles – increasingly users’ first choice for internet access.

Technologies to watch in 2-3 years

• Augmented reality – layering info on top of representation of the real world: access to place-based information.
• Game-based learning, from simple individual/small group games to massively multiplayer online games – ability to foster collaboration, problem solving, procedural thinking.

Technologies to watch in 4-5 years

• Gesture-based computing
• Learning analytics, along with data gathering and analysis tools to study student engagement, performance and practice in order to inform curriculum & teaching design and enhance the student experience.