The institution and IT managers were at the heart of the discussions at JISC CETIS's 5th annual conference two weeks ago in Birmingham. This report outlines the keynote presentations by Andrew Feenberg and Stuart Lee and collects the many lively tweets, blog posts, flickr photos and videos from the event.

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The second two days of the JISC online conference, Innovating e-Learning 2008: Learning in a digital age - Are we prepared? focused on Theme 2: Going boldly into the dark. Topics covered included; the impact of mobile technologies, achieving transformational change and using multi-user virtual environments.

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The first two days of the JISC online conference, Innovating e-Learning 2008: Learning in a digital age - Are we prepared? has been attended by 400 delegates. Theme 1 looked at embracing the future today, with stimulating discussion sessions about web 2.0, e-portfolios, supporting staff, listening to learners and learning space design. The conference continues today with Theme 2: Going boldly into the dark.

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e-Assessment promises lecturers and tutors the opportunity to both streamline the assessment process and to allow for greater variety and creativity in testing students. We asked Helen Ashton, an active member of the JISC CETIS Assessment Special Interest Group and a lecturer specialising in the design and development of e-assessment systems, to explore e-assessment from a practitioner's perspective. In this article she looks at each stage of the e-assessment life cycle from what to assess to how to measure student performance.

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Last month the HEA and JISC published their report on the three year Benchmarking and Pathfinder Programmes. Using resources released from the UKeU, and guided by the 2005 HEFCE Strategy for e-Learning, the Programmes helped teams in 77 institutions to adopt methodologies to assess their e-learning maturity (benchmark) and teams in 36 of those institutions to strategically plan future e-learning developments (pathfinder).

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That seemed to be one message emerging from the panel discussion on service oriented architectures (SOA) at the recent IMS Global Learning Consortium Summit on Interoperability. The session provided an opportunity to reflect collectively on whether service oriented architectures/approaches offer benefits to HE and FE institutions, and if so how institutions might start adopting SOA.

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Widgets and gadgets are small applications that run on your desktop or in your web browser which enable you to keep track of things like the weather forecast or share prices. But widgets and gadgets can also be used to add additional functionality to existing applications to create flexible and personalised learning environments. We spoke to Scott Wilson from JISC CETIS and the Institute for Educational Cybernetics at the University of Bolton about the potential for using widgets in educational technologies.

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Hearing Sir Tim Berners Lee on the Today Programme last week, talking about the Semantic Web as the next big phase of development of the WWW, made me realise that this was now becoming part of a more mainstream discussion and not just the world of computer scientists, technical developers and futurologists.

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It’s that time of year again – bid writing time. Given the number of JISC calls for proposals that are out at the moment I thought I’d update an article I published last year with some links to resources on how to write a good bid.

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A number of the Distributed e-Learning Regional Pilot projects explored the potential of web service technologies to provide flexible tools and systems to support regional learners. This article focuses on those projects that piloted service oriented approaches and will be of interest to those using web services in their institution.

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It is five years since IMS released its Learning Design Specification and this week JISC CETIS held a meeting in Manchester this week to reflect on the last five years and to look at the tools currently under development which could bring the concept of learning design to a wider audience.

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Over 700 delegates from all over the UK and further afield, attended the annual JISC Conference in Birmingham on 15th April.

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We spoke to Mark Barrett-Baxendale from Liverpool Hope University about the JISC DesignShare Toolkit Demonstrator project, which focussed on the use and storage of Units of Learning defined by IMS Learning Design. Mark concludes that the project “demonstrated the utility of the service oriented approach” by linking the Open Document.Net repository to the Reload IMS Learning Design editor.

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Jonathan Fine introduces the MathTran toolkit project. Correct rendering of mathematical notation and equations on the web has always been tricky. MathTran has developed a web service that translates mathematical content from TeX encoding to a variety of graphical formats in order to simplify the teaching of maths online.

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Steve Bennett describes the MCQFM (Multiple Choice Questions Five Methods) toolkit project which has produced a simple notation for multiple choice questions (QTEXT) to facilitate conversion into a QTI format. The project has also produced a web service with five functions which can be integrated into any application. Steve begins by discussing the difficulties of translating questions between different objective test formats.

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