This talk by David Eastwood, Chief Executive of HEFCE…

He starts out by showing the increase in participation of older students in Higher Education – showing how the proportion of older students participating has increased over the last 40 years. There is a noticeably steep rise in the 1990’s. He is relating this to the overall growth in the sector.

He states that although this growth did not depend on IT, it was the use of IT systems that allowed it to happen (not quite sure what he is getting at here, but think he means that without enterprise systems for managing students etc. we wouldn’t have been able to cope with the growth?)

I have to say, that although he speaks well, the graphics he is using to illustrate the points are difficult to read on the screen, and are representing complex data, which isn’t very easy to assimilate as part of the talk. This is leaving me a little confused!

OK – a simpler chart here – you know where you are with a Pie Chart. Essentially showing that over 94% of HEFCE funding goes out on a formula basis – leaving special funding squeezed further and further.

This means that institutions need to slice the investment required for IT Infrastructure from their teaching and research funding (not sure this is very surprising, but perhaps because this has been true since I have been working in the sector?)

So – HEFCE priorities – delivering high quality mass higher education, RAE 2008 and beyond, growing importance of 3rd stream agenda.

Drivers for change are – increasingly diverse student body (non tradiational entrants, lifelong learning, new modes of study e.g. CPD); more demanding student body, students as fee paying customers; new research approaches and an expanding information base; the internet and TI enabled tools; cost and funding pressures.

What seems strange about all this, is that he could have given this list 3 or 4 years ago. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing (at least the drivers are consistent!), but overall it feels slightly like teaching us to suck eggs – don’t we know all this? The question is how we best use IT to react to these drivers.

Just an interesting comment, that got a murmur of approval – IT systems have modernised in Unversities, but often business processes have not. This has a ring of truth, but at RHUL, certainly there are some areas where we a trying hard to modernise the business process, but struggle to acheive this – and it would be good to understand why…

Some questions from David:

What is a university when there is universal access to ‘knowledge’ – we need to rethink the role of the university.
How do students learn in the information age? – what are the appropriate technologies and pedagogies to support them?

…
missed some stuff here as I was finishing my previous post, but quite a bit of the stuff he was talking about was about where we are at the moment – libraries now hybrid, coming under pressure for resource etc. etc.

RAE 2008 will go ahead as planned – is crucial to:
provide a baseline for new system
update quality assessments unchanged since 2001
and something else I missed!

The new framework has to produce robust indicators of research quality that are internationally meaningful (this seems ambitious, if not unrealistic)
To reduce the burden associated with the RAE
To relay on quantitative indicators
To accommodate disciplinary differences within a common framework

Meeting the Shared Services challenge:
Wondered when we were going to get on to Shared Services.
Interestingly he uses JISC as a model – but I think many people would see this as a flawed model. Although there are many good things about JISC, I can’t help think that it has been pulled in too many different directions over time, and perhaps some smaller, more focussed, shared services might have produced better results, certainly in some areas. However, this is not the fault of JISC I don’t think. I currently feel there are some real issues with the competetive nature of the HE Sector and how shared services work.
UCAS as another model

He is proposing that we need to look at the platforms we use – many people in the room remember the Mac initiative (http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/events/1999/conference/price_files/TextOnly/Slide1.html) – and he is deliberately invoking this, but arguing this is not a reason not to revisit some of these issues, and how we can more effectively share services. An interesting quote here from the presentation I’ve linked to “ethos of autonomy within universities remains an enormous obstacle to change” – from where I’m sitting, I’m not convinced this has changed – or at least, not enough to make a similar initiative successful at this point…

I’d argue here that stronger standards are more to the point than joint purchasing or using the same systems.

One question that has been raised is that VAT gets in the way of shared services – I’m not at all aware of what the issue is here, but all that David has said in response is that it is a difficult issue, and the sector needs to keep raising this to the Treasury…