New Warden at Keble College

The new Warden of Keble College, Oxford, who will succeed Professor Dame Averil Cameron in Michaelmas Term 2010 is Sir Jonathan Phillips KCB, currently Permanent Secretary to the Northern Ireland Executive.

Future of Higher Education debate

This blog entry is a response to the Future of Higher Education Debate. I have developed the following document with Stephen Coller from Microsoft. Background to the government debate is available.


Response to Ron Cook Report
The Debate on the future of Higher Education

i. Introduction

This is a joint submission to the debate on the future of higher education from a member of the University of Oxford and a member of staff from the Microsoft Corporation. Sir Ron Cooke was asked to provide the Government with advice and recommendations on how the country can be one of the leading – if not the leading – centres of higher education learning in the world. The focus of this response is chapter 3 of the report, “On-line Innovation in Higher Education’.

ii. Response

Approach

• Sir Ron Cooke was asked to provide a contribution on becoming a world leader in e-learning. In order to respond to this request, he defined a broad context [1.3] that encompassed: research and innovation, national e-Infrastructure, management and administration, integrated information strategies, and issues of scale. In our opinion it was essential to consider the higher education landscape [2.2] in the way he did; research and education are inextricably linked, e-Infrastructure [2.4] underpins research and education, and management of information is a unifying theme.

• We support his approach, endorse his recommendations, but believe that it is possible to be more specific in defining a way ahead for the next fifteen years. Our response, therefore, is to build on the foundation laid down in Sir Ron Cooke’s contribution and elaborate plans further.

Personalized learning

• Every student must be given access [3.4] to a world of relevant, personalized learning and strengthened educational opportunity. Today’s students come to education from diverse backgrounds, at different levels of preparation and with different learning styles. Diversity will increase over the next fifteen years.

• Within traditional teaching settings such as Oxford and Cambridge, there is increasing emphasis on preparing students before they arrive at University. This will enable all students to arrive with the necessary skills, but also build relationships in advance of their arrival.

• Complementing this there is a need to provide individualized learning experiences at low cost, wherever and whenever needed.

• Teachers will need to be adequately skilled to deliver [3.6], and adequately resourced [3.7].

• Through a potent combination of shrinking hardware costs, broadband connectivity, and a growing repository of digital education resources, it will be possible to prepare students before they arrive and to provide individualized learning. Through social networking and collaboration tools, as well as rich-media authoring software, students can create and pursue engaged, relevant learning that brings their lifestyle and classroom “learning style” together.

• Providing the infrastructure required for world-class teaching over the coming years will require private public partnerships.

New Tools and Methods

• Over the next fifteen years, inspirational traditional teaching will remain and define some of the world’s leading higher education institutes and the learning experienced by their students. In other segments of post secondary education facing pressure to improve retention while accommodating material increases in student attendance it will be necessary to adopt a different approach by tapping into ICT-enhanced teaching approaches that support educators in the design of inquiry-based learning experiences which are scalable, intuitive and replicable [3.19]. There will not be a one-size fits all pedagogy, and therefore the underpinning technology must support different approaches [3.20].

• Students, therefore, will have a choice of the type of teaching and learning experience they wish to receive, but all students will have different experiences and different expectations from previous generations [3.21, 3.22].

• Teachers must recognise the new requirements that students have, and will have, and have the tools and expertise to provide an environment which is suitable for students in the 21st century including teacher-student and student-student collaboration. At the same time it is important that we recognize the unreasonableness of such an expectation absent from the provision of deep professional development support and resources.

• Teachers should be able to change their approach to assessment to take better advantage of modern data systems in order to achieve an effective balance between traditional testing and real-time insight into progress in the classroom.

• One of the traditional features of education which is in danger of being lost is the concept of learning within a community of scholars. Students benefit when they have opportunities to participate in each other’s learning. Tutorials and liberal arts courses are based on this principle, and emergent technologies have the potential to make the opportunities more widely accessible.

Systems to Manage the Student Lifecycle

• Current and future students will move from one stage of education to another, will experience different educational experiences, will need preparation before embarking on some courses, and may well leave education and return later.

• Students, their teachers, and employers need access to a digital record of educational resources, and a means of storing educational outputs and recording and accessing the student’s attainments,

• Using much of the same software that businesses use to be more efficient and productive, there is a unique opportunity to provide scalable support for enhanced learning environments, with longitudinal data stores. These will have the benefit of offering greater insight to administrators, educators, students, guardians and policymakers.

Investment

• At a policy level, some key investments would accelerate progress:

o Ensure that every school, educator and student have access to the devices, tools and connectivity they need.

o Provide teachers the support they need to adopt ICT-based teaching methods.

o Provide students with digital resources that can enrich their learning experiences and improve their workforce readiness.

o Equip education systems with the same data, technology and communications infrastructure that businesses enjoy today.

o Adopt an integrated approach to achieving education reform and a “21st-century learning environment”.

• Investment should be made through private public partnership. The sheer scale of the challenges faced by higher education to improve access and quality in conjunction, with the competing claims being made on the financial resources of the Exchequer by other segments of the economy, mean local solutions in some institutes will be limited in terms of their scope, scale and sustainability. Working together with both the for-profit and the non-profit sectors we can provide the data, resources and capabilities that will empower our educators and learners to realize their fullest potential in an ever more connected and competitive world.

Private Public Partnership

The Private Public Partnership (PPP) approach offers opportunities which can transform the use of technology to assist learning. In some higher education institutes this will have a profound effect by facilitating personalized learning . PPP will offer new tools, methods and capacity which are not available to individual universities including access to data-centre scale computational resources and collaboration platforms. One respect where PPP has the potential to make a profound affect across the board, however, will be in the provision of systems to manage the student lifecycle:-

• Provision of digital record and ePortfolio – students will be able to store their information in a secure but portable manner – using commercial networks but subject to permissions being set by the user. These records will be owned by the students and persist as they move from one place of learning to another.

• Provision of longitudinal datastore and repository – the commercial sector can host and manage learning objects and related data on progression of student learning for a fraction of the cost of it being done locally. Microsoft and Oxford are exploring the possibility of delivering learning objects and data for maternal health developed by the University to medics in the third world. Microsoft would hold the data in a secure infrastructure managed by Oxford, delivered through the Internet and mobile devices in a way that would not be possible for the University to offer alone.

Stephen Coller and Paul Jeffreys

IBM CIO Leadership Exchange, Shanghai, Feb 09

This is a report from a IBM Conference titled, "CIO Leadership Exchange". It is the third in a series and is in Shanghai (first time held in the East).

CIOs asked IBM to run the series of Exchanges.
The title this year is: Building a Smarter Planet: The Next Leadership Agenda

--> Main theme of the meeting is to consider the CIO role in creating a 'smarter planet' - which means primarily smarter use of information, and the consequences of the current financial crisis.

... Overall - there were some interesting and challenging presentations, others were superficial.

(I) Smarter Planet - A mandate for CIO Leadership: Interesting session with relevance to HE

Sam Palmsano: Chairman, President and CEO for IBM

Leadership Exchange originated by academic institutions three years ago (Harvard), supported by IBM. Much has changed over the three years.

The central theme is that the world is smaller, flatter and smarter. Every day systems and processes are connected, instrumented, with embedded intelligence. This has profound effects for innovation. There are 2b people on the Internet, by 2010 there will be a billion transistors for every person.

The digital and physical infrastructures of the world are converging.

Challenges:

• 40-70% of electrical energy is lost due to inefficiencies in the grid
• Healthcare systems are not systems
• Financial markets spread risk but cannot track it
• Consumer products and retail industries lose about $40b annually due to inefficient supply chains
• A world where 820m are undernourished

A review last August by IBM found activities in many areas which are addressing the challenges. Since then $3trillion will be applied to stimulate growth and jobs. IBM advised the Obama team last autumn: broadband, healthcare, and better electrical grids.

CIOs have new challenges; need to balance cutting costs while preparing and connecting for the future. Avoid just battening down. Means bridging between technology and future business direction.

The financial crisis will last beyond 2009; CIOs have opportunities as the world is ready for change. Change in the business model, change in role in the company, change of use of embedded intelligence. The key is to come out of the crisis stronger than you went into it.


Mark Hennessy (VP and CIO): CIOs - Catalysts of Change: Leaders for a Smarter Planet

As CIO, walk tightrope. Manage legacy system <> develop new capabilities. Long term thinking <> short term execution. Have three teams:-

- Run team: smart datacentres; social networking. Datacentre: sensors manage energy consumption, virtualisation, automation simplifies provisioning. Use cloud (Tivoli)

- Transform team: business process simplification (don't automate chaos). Agile development methods. SOA flexibility and savings.

- Innovate team: IBM changing from multi-national corp. to globally integrated organisation. Global talent management: outcome-based model; high-performance culture.

Richard Williams (CIO, AstraZeneca) - The CIO as a Catalyst for Change

It can take 8-12 years to develop a new drug to market (cost $800m).

AstraZenica strategy is:

• Renew, but not abandon, our strategy; industrialize service in federated environment; power of one
  
• Resolve to drive business value; sense of purpose; connect the network
  
• Release through strategic partners; Service effect contracts (I am going to measure partner on basis of business outcome, not SLA - you have as much accountability as I do)
  

Very clear business objective: "new medicines for patient health"; what is our equivalent objective(s)?

Discussion (moderated by Peter Williamson - Univ of Cambridge)

Need to get CEOs involved with CIOs work on regular basis. Visibility of where CIO spending time and investment is important. How does investment translate into efficiency of organisation change, quality of product.

Social networking is growing in importance. Half of IBM uses wikis. Blogs and IM are important. These cannot be measured in terms of ROIs, but are seen as strategically important and will improve the collaboration.

AstraZenica does not have an IS strategy, it has a business strategy of which IS is a part. Then there are regular reviews to see if business value is achieved.

(II) Applying New Intelligence and Knowledge - A Systems Approach: Very company specific and not especially relevant to HE...

Gini Rometty (Senior VP, Global Sales and Distr. IBM)

Faster
Right
Predictive: remove risk in a decision

Dan Deasy (CIO, BP):

IT innovation is dramatically changing the way BP works: Instrumentation, interconnected, business intelligence.

BI is crucially important to enable them to predict customer need.

Use 185Tflops of compute power to improve seismic accuracy to predict well positions.

Agnes Mauffey (CIO, Michelin)

Collaboration tools are essential for the company. Intelligence used to give competitive advantage.

Discussion (moderator Dr Marianne Broadbent):

Clear that IBM is helping both companies is many aspects of their operation. Much of their IT is outsourced.


(III) Smarter Planet - IT for the 21st Century - interesting session

Mike Daniels (Senior VP, GTO, IBM)

The average utilisation of Intel processors is 6%.

A smarter planet needs a smarter infrastructure. There is: 54% increase in storage each year.

Eric Clementi (VP, Strategy, IBM)

Need dynamic infrastructure: virtualisation + automate + standardised.

30b embedded RFID tags by 2010
1/3 of world's population on the web by 2011
4b mobile subscribers globally at end of 2008

Cloud computing is emerging in the enterprise from the consumer Internet. It is a consumption and delivery service.

For the enterprise it will be a hybrid delivery model: private cloud and public cloud. This is followed up in the subsequent Cloud break-out session.

Frank Gens (Senior VP and Chief Analyst, IBM) - Convener of Discussion

Successful industrial clouds have well defined rules, regulations, management; and often a third party providing the service to enable separate users to have independence.

A key issue within this is Identity Management.

(IV) Breakout Session - Cloud Computing: Dr Willy Chiu, Dr Jim Comfort, Robert Rosier, Paul Lu - interesting session - led to new thoughts for Oxford

Cloud computing - a disruptive new paradigm. See Economist article. There is an interesting IBM perspective on cloud computing.

IBM has 9 Cloud centres around the world.

Grid computing (1990s), Utility computing, Software as a service, Cloud computing: so evolutionary.

• Software as a service (eg Googlemail)
  
• Platform as a service (SOA)
  
• Infrastructure as a service (Green, virtualised and scalable - optimised for security, data integrity)

Develop in the cloud; Deploy in the cloud; Deliver services from the cloud; Overflow to another cloud

China has an cloud computing centre built by IBM, 11 more being created. Promotes s/w start-up company growth.

Moving towards: Private Cloud - Public Cloud - with single management view (can 'pull' applications from one to the other). IBM uses - C loud management tools.

Google/Amazon are not full Public Clouds as do not have security or full service quality guarantees.

iTricity Cloud Computing Centre (Netherlands) - IT as electricity. Infrastructure as a service, which is compliant (to Basel-II, SO, Healthcare). Will provide cloud computing on customer premises! if excess, then trade back resources.

(V) Breakout Session - Using New Intelligence - Real Decisions in Real Time: Mark Chapman, Jeff Jonas, Brenda Dietrich, Nina Schwenk (Mayo clinic) - really interesting and thought provoking session

How do you drive intelligence from all the data?

The Smart Planet is all about intelligent decisions. Data is both structured and unstructured. Analytics can be: descriptive, predictive, prescriptive. An example IBM has worked on is Traffic Prediction in Singapore.

Healthcare is messy; data are not clean. In the 21st century - more evidence based treatment is expected, more pressures to provide regulatory data, expectation that personalised treatment. Genomics is foundation for what healthcare can be in the future, but technologies for gathering, analysing, storing not in place. Knowledge gradient is important.

The data is the query -- More data is better and faster -- bad data is good for you (in some areas). The data must find the data ... and the relevance must find the user!

Need to extract and enhance information as data is collected.

(VI) Deepening Enterprise Capability - Intelligent, Interconnected Leadership - not very CIO focused

Harvey Koeppel

CIO Leadership: Developed competency model for CIOs. "The three top competencies for CIOs are: leadership, contribution to business strategy, and talent management. CIOs have to convert their teams as themselves so they all have new capabilities."

Dr Marianne Broadbent (Senior Partner, EWK International)

How do you invest in the downturn? Experience isn't what it used to be.

[Some case studies were considered of companies which have already refocused in view of the financial downturn.]

Some organisations have addressed the downturn, changed focus, accelerated succession, invested now for streamlined future - should the University do the same?

Joe Locanndro (Director, CLP Group)

Based on a five-year research project, Good to Great answers the question: “Can a good company become a great company, and, if so, how?” Jim Collins

Use human capital strategy balance scorecard; improvements evident.

Seek to understand, seek to be understood.


(VII) Building a Smarter Enterprise - Leading Change, Embracing Disruption - disappointing apart from summary from Sam Palmsano

Bruno Di Leo (General Manager, IBM)

IBM is committed to being number 1 IT partner.

Disruption speaks to 'driving change'.

Peter Williamson (Prof of Int. Man., Cambridge)

Best selling book: 'Dragons at your door'.

We need to move beyond 'cost cutting' to 'cost innovation'.

15% of today's market leaders used the recession to vault to the top.

CIO agenda in a value-for-money world:

• Business cases for IT investment based on Cost Innovation: reduce cost of variety and customisation, roll-out products to mass market quickly.
• Enabling Global Innovation: need to globalise innovation and globalise the supply change

Quality vs cost becomes value for money
High technology at high end becomes high technology to mass markets

Dr Jai Menon (Dir, Bharti Enterprises)

Bharti Artel are growing by 2.5m customers every month.

Time to evolve from 'best practices' to 'next practices'.

Conversation

Use the mobile as your PC.

The view expressed is that the CIO has to run more than a technology function and build a business function, so that no longer issue of IT being business aligned. Thus, IT staff through the department spend part of their careers working on business functions.

Sam Palmisano - Closing Remarks

CIO Leadership: began role definition, mentoring, ...
Do CIO survey every few years with benchmarking analysis.

So now need to set goal that CIOs do role beyond technology function.

Now is the time to change the Business model.

CISCO meeting: Future of the Internet

The future of the Internet: what's keeping the CISCO engineers awake at night.

I attended this CISCO presentation to the University of Oxford today.

The first presentation was from Fred Baker (CISCO fellow and ex-IETF chair).
Talk focused on growth of INternet and current limit of number of computer addresses. The goal is to, "Continue the growth of the Internet and its businesses"; for CISCO the goal is, "Continue the growth of the Internet with maximised application options and minimalised additional cost."

RFC521 - John Curran's Internet Transition Plan for ISPs: explains transition from IPv4 to IPv6. Fred explained how the two systems would have to co-exist.

CIDR put off the need to go to IPv6 to deal with the shortage of addresses.

A particular issue is the amount of information that is needed in the routing if you put an address on everything you want to track. IPv6 routing scales better than IPv4.

There are serious IPv6 trials in enterprise services. Total traffic is still less than 1% of total traffic.

The second presentation was from Klass Wierenga (consulting engineer in the office of the CTO) entitled the Mobile Internet

Billions of new users onto the Internet, most mobile access.Tens or hundreds of billion things connecting.

Radio access: RF is a major bottleneck - does not scale.

• Need to optimise airlink efficiency.
  
• Need to make networks a lot less expensive to build and operate on a cost per bit basis.
• Need to optimise routing; possibly not use tunnels, expose mobility to hgher layers and make it clear that host is moving...

Who decides who gets access to a network? Likely to require some kind of roaming agreement and technology for remote authorisation.

There are three identity spaces: SAML, OpenID and CardSpace. Trust is the foundation of any security model.

Network access: eduroam: authentication by home institution, authorisation by visited institution.

Application access: Shibboleth: UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research. Developed by Internet 2, uses SAML.

Conclusion: The issues of the Internet relate to scalability.

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As go through transition, Internet industry need a lot of help from academia. Internet is an open confederation and so everyone needs to contribute to evolution.

Is it true that the Internet has done as much good as it has done bad (a statement made at the meeting)?