Career ready, Graduates, Data visualisation, Information is beautiful, Education trends, Conferences, Primer, Google, Edinburgh, Awards, Tatler, BBC 3

Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday to me-eeeeeee, Happy Birthday to me.

The mailer is a year old.  Please send any cards or presents to 5 Forrest Hill.

Well, actually, a more correct statement would be that I have only just realised that I have been sending these things for more than 364 days, but that isn’t quite so catchy…  Sidebar: this mailer has been in preparation for a good three months, so please mentally append ‘ish’ to anything that says recent.

Anywho – ‘ere be the news:

————————————————

Research news

THE published an article (ish – see above) recently about UK students having inflated satisfaction levels of career applicable skills training.  Maybe we should stop trying to talk to employers about making our students career ready, and talk to our recent grads about what would have been helpful to them when entering the workplace…

Do you, or a friendly academic you know, have a stack of data that you want to make accessible for others?  Well, this company visualise data.  I’m sure others do too, but, to be frank, I can’t be bothered to look for anyone else.

I found them by chancing upon information is beautiful awards.  If you like data and are interested in that sort of thing, it is worth 20 minutes of your time, if only to look at the judging panel and see what they do.

————————————————

Student news

Search trends for education around the world

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34638279

A couple of interesting things I stumbled across on our website (I heard recently we manage 50,000 pages by the way) is a list of companies that our grads have gone to by programme.  It is from 2013, but still pretty good information.

————————————————

Training news

Got £400, into digital, UX or design and fancy a couple of days out of the office next year? Design It Build It is a conference you may find interesting.  Plus it is in Edinburgh.

Google are now teaching bite sized marketing bits and pieces through their Google Learn arm.  It is called Primer and is available from all good proprietary and trackable app stores.

There is an FE and HE Marketing Conference in London at the end of April if anyone is interested (put on by inside government).

————————————————

Edinburgh news

Edinburgh has received more accolades for being great.  And some more.  This is getting embarrassing.  Imagine how many people would live here if it was 5 degrees warmer…

————————————————

Awesome news

Tatler have a yacht guide, a beauty and cosmetic surgery guide, and now a university guide, and it’s a belter.  Are you in charge of the ‘doss subject’?  It isn’t exactly a complete guide though – as far as I can see, they have only written something for Oxford, Cambridge and us.  Not sure what that says, but I’m taking it as a compliment.

BBC3 rebranded.  Their marketing director tried to distance herself from W1A whilst explaining their thinking behind the refresh and ended up sounding like an excerpt from the programme.  The Guardian commented on it, obvs.

Laters haters.

Data, Analytics, The Big 4, Email, CEO, TEF, Rankings, Advertising, Evaluation, Google, Panda, SEO, Edinburgh, Estate, Spinouts

Yes, like Nick Cotton, I am back from the [presumed] dead.  Rejoice.

The problem with being away for so long is that some of the news I scraped together is, like, totally out of date.  Luckily for me, the rest of it was a little leftfield so never really had a read by date anyway.  All that means you have a load of out-of-date irrelevant links.  Don’t tell me I’m not good to you.

Anyway, enough of this intro malarkey, to the news Tonto!

——————

Using data

Ours

Some institutions are trying to use analytics to stop students from dropping out.  The Guardian then had a bit of a chat about it.  The question is, who owns our data, and where is the line – I wonder whether this will get bigger…

Theirs

Ernst and Young and PriceWaterhouseCooper are increasingly turning to their own tests to gauge the quality of applicants rather than degree or A level results.  A sign of things to come?  A construct of our concentration on graduate attributes – it isn’t what you learn but how you apply it that really matters….

Mine?

I chanced upon a website the other day and was curious.  It has a load of CEO email addresses for worldwide (but mainly UK) companies.  After my initial amusement I thought it might actually be relatively useful for some of you, perhaps if you are looking at launching a new programme and would like some advice or quotes, or even for guest speakers.  I leave it to you to judge the ethics of it; personally, I am presuming it all came from public websites. The Principal is there, just in case you were wondering.

——————

Measuring teaching quality

More and more people seem to be talking about a TEF.  Joy!

I am presuming you all saw the Good University Guide on Sunday by the way

——————

Digital

Ads

Billboards that learn what makes people smile, and therefore tells us the best images to use to build engagement.  I think this is actually interesting, and feels likes a small stepping stone to what we may think of as run of the mill in 5 years.  It’s not improving the world, but getting more people to smile can’t ever be a bad thing, right?  Obviously, there is the slightly cynical side of me questioning whether we really need to research what makes people smile though: Youtube can tell you already

Efficacy

Understanding Keyword Planner stats

Search

Google have recently updated their Panda algorithm (effectively the criteria they use to return organic searches).   It shouldn’t really have an effect if your website is within the .ed.ac.uk, but you may want to check it if you are standalone.  NB – I don’t really know what I am talking about when it comes to SEO, a website I was skimming said it was important, so I have included it here.  If anyone knows what they are talking about can you let me know whether this is newsworthy or not.  Thanks!

——————

The City!

Outreach to the City or Renting our own land.

Edinburgh City are looking at renting pedestrianised areas out for events.  They believe some areas such as Hunters Square and the bit outside the Usher Hall are under used, mainly to do with a lack of awareness they are available.  Can we use them for things? Or can we take a leaf out of their book and rent George Square more or Bristo, or the bit out the back of the Informatics forum, the old Medical Quad, or Old College quad, the bit in the middle of Divinity (or the barbeque area), how about the rooftop bit of Informatics, or the top of Appleton Tower (for the fireworks, say, or a pop-up bar, maybe even a thank you to the SouthsIde residents…).  What about the lecture theatre in the bottom of Adam House.  Anyway, I am sure you get the gist.

A ‘new’ video to sell Auld Reekie

In 1982 Edinburgh City Council commissioned a 30 minute film about Edinburgh.  Fronted by the one and only Sean ‘I can do any accent you like’ Connery.  It is helpfully housed on the British Film Institute website for all our watching pleasure.

——————

Branding

Old College Capital is back in action, giving some much needed funding to some interesting UoE related projects.  I think they’re great, thing is though, we all know that OCC is inextricably linked to The University of Edinburgh, but you’d never know it from this successfully funded venture because they have used the launch.ed logo as one of their partners rather than the UoE one.  <INSERT DISCUSSION ABOUT MERITS OF SUB BRANDS IN UNIVERSITIES HERE>

Ta ta.

Media, Online Learning, NSS…

Well, this is the second email of UoE Insights.  2 weeks and an hour later than the last one, if that is important to any of you.

I have a section on Media, one on online learning and some (absolutely unrepresentative) sector views on NSS and the changing requirements of tertiary education.  Enjoy.

=========================

Some ** MEDIA ** stuff: I have two bits of news from 2012, which I have only just stumbled upon (there is a lot of catching up to do…), a teeny fact on SEO, some app news and the promise of India:

Which? University Which? Have a website comparing UK universities http://university.which.co.uk/

Pay per gaze

Google has patented ‘pay per gaze’, whereby advertisers could be charged a fee based on whether a person looks directly at a real-world ad. http://mashable.com/2013/08/23/google-pay-per-gaze-advertising/

The importance of SEO

First position in organic google search results gets 33% of total traffic http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2276184/No.-1-Position-in-Google-Gets-33-of-Search-Traffic-Study
Losing their APPeal?

WARC are wondering whether we have met saturation point with apps: 90% of smartphone users claim to never spend money on any content for their phone, 31% of smartphone users now ‘never download apps’, with the average monthly download of apps has fallen from 2.32 to 1.82 this year. http://www.warc.com/LatestNews/News/UK_at_app_saturation.news?ID=33445

Connected India

Rajan Anandan, managing director, Google India, has said;  “By the end of this year, India will become larger than the US in terms of number of internet users. By 2018, India will have twice the number of internet users as the US does.”  Wow.

====================

Thoughts on ** ONLINE LEARNING **

Is the future of HE online?

Shai Reshef (Founder of University of the People): “UNESCO stated that in 2025 100 million students will be deprived of Higher Education simply because there will not be enough seats to accommodate them” see his TED Talk here http://www.ted.com/talks/shai_reshef_a_tuition_free_college_degree

Staying with online learning, Deloitte try and predict the future every year – along with the predictable wearables prediction (ha!), they predict MOOCS to reach 10% of all courses taken in tertiary education by 2020 (it currently stands at 0.2%) http://www.deloitte.co.uk/tmtpredictions/

====================

Next, Some (slightly jaded) views on the NSS which had its public embargo lifted this week:

http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2014/aug/12/do-we-still-need-national-student-survey-university?CMP=new_1194

This, finally, links nicely to the primary and secondary education systems’ impact on tertiary education:

The Learning Curve – a review of primary and secondary education systems across the globe says the UK is doing ok, but skilling our students is the real challenge;  “Even in the richest countries, fewer than half of school students are career or college ready, with the result that higher education institutions and employers often find themselves re-skilling school leavers before they embark on the next phase of their lives.”

http://thelearningcurve.pearson.com/
THE END.