At the recent Higher Education Policy Institute and JISC seminar, Nicola Dandridge Chief Executive of Universities UK and Nicholas Barr, Professor of Public Economics, London School of Economics gave their views on the topic of the financing of higher education as a starting point to generate discussion and debate with an invited audience.

JISC’s Rebecca O’Brien spoke with both Nicholas and Nicola about how higher education is currently funded, how the current system could be changed in response to the increasing pressure on universities to reduce costs and the value that universities contribute to the UK economy.

Access the podcast here:
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2010/03/podcast100hepi.aspx

26 e-course texts across four subject areas (Medicine, Business, Engineering and Media Studies) were made available to 127 UK universities who took part in a National e-books observatory project funded by JISC and carried out by JISC Collections.

The largest study of its kind, it has seen the behaviours of over 50,000 participants and observed to see how they use a selection of academic electronic textbooks.

Caren Milloy, the project’s manager at JISC Collections, and her co-author of the National e-books Observatory Project report, Ian Rowlands from CIBER who carried out the study, speak with Rebecca O’Brien about this project in this JISC podcast.

The national e-books observatory project is about exploring impacts, observing behaviours and developing new models to stimulate the e-books market, and to do all this in a managed environment.

National e-books observatory project Podcast

Transcript

At the launch event of the Edgeless University publication, David Lammy Minister for Higher Education and IPR announced a new £20m open learning innovation fund for UK universities.

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/Home/news/stories/2009/06/podcast83davidlammy.aspx

Supporting the student’s learning experience is key to helping students find their full potential and enhance the quality of their learning.

Working with partners, JISC is looking to guide future developments in this area and from October 2008 will be running a series of national workshops. These workshops will discuss the issues around supporting the student learning experience to help institutions and services devise their own strategic responses to supporting learners.

In London this workshop will be taking place on the 20th January 2009 – More Details

In this podcast Rebecca O’Brien talk to Helen Beetham, a consultant supporting the learning experience work at JISC.

Podcast – Student Learning Experience.