Gillian Keegan has been appointed as education secretary by the new prime minister, Rishi Sunak. “I’m deeply honoured,” she tweeted as news of the appointment broke. “Education transforms lives – I know that talent is spread equally around the country and I will work tirelessly to ensure opportunity is also.” The MP for Chichester is the fifth person to act as education secretary in four months, following, in short order, Kit Malthouse, James Cleverly, Michelle Donelan and Nadhim Zahawi. The frequency of turnover was condemned as “farcical” by Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association ..read more

Post-pandemic, many educators are worried about attendance, since university class and lecture attendance have fallen dramatically post-lockdown. Students could be missing out on vital interactions and social learning opportunities by choosing remote learning over in-person. However, encouraging students to come to campus is becoming harder, even though students themselves champion in-person learning; over half want to learn ‘mostly in-person’, while two-thirds prefer blended in-person and online teaching. While technology-enabled a greater shift to remote and on-demand learning during lockdow ..read more

While cyber attacks on major companies and government organisations tend to grab the news headlines, around 80 percent of attacks are currently targeted at educational institutions including schools, colleges and universities. This somewhat surprising figure is based on Microsoft’s Global Threat Activity report that tracks reported enterprise malware encounters in the last 30 days. And according to a new report by Check Point Research, education and research have suffered a 114% increase over the past two years, making it the most attacked industry sector. While cyber attacks on education ..read more

With record numbers of new nursing students attending university, and an increased focus on a digital learning landscape due to the pandemic, we are seeing pressure that could potentially impact nursing course retention.According to a Health Education England survey, during the first Covid-19 wave, nursing students felt overwhelmed with their academic studies and stressed by the situation they found themselves in. Many were doubting their clinical ability and were particularly concerned about catching up with their clinical skills. In the survey, 69% of students stated that online delivery ena ..read more

A new report from the Made By Dyslexia charity finds that only one in 10 teachers have a good understanding of dyslexic issues. The results of The School Report are drawn from a survey of more than 12,000 teachers and parents in a range of educational settings across 102 countries. It finds that dyslexic challenges are not understood in more than half of schools across the globe. Indeed, 80% of dyslexics leave UK schools undiagnosed, according to a 2019 report from the all-party parliamentary group on the issue. Other statistics underlining the seriousness of the issue in the UK include: More ..read more

Jisc could not have recruited a more ecologically-committed analyst for their digital carbon footprint report. Upon arriving to our Zoom call, the first point Scott Stonham makes is to apologise for being a few minutes late as he’s currently installing his own solar panels at home as part of a project to build his own micro-grid and make his home office fully self-reliant. He informs me this makes our web call a wholly green conversation. Scott, who is an independent sustainable technology analyst at Well, That’s Interesting Tech!, was commissioned by Jisc and asked to work on sustainability a ..read more

Micro:bit Educational Foundation is an education non-profit that creates pocket-size entry-level coding devices designed to make learning about coding and computer science enjoyable for kids. The foundation launched micro:bit in 2016 by giving free devices to every year seven student in the UK as part of BBC’s Make it Digital, a year-long campaign to support digital skills. In 2022, over six million of the devices are already in use by children aged 5–14 across the world. All primary schools in Scotland own micro:bits, and all Scottish secondary schools will receive them this autumn, after the ..read more

The publishing arm of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is now part of Jisc’s OpenAthens federation. Founded in 1962, MIT Press is now part of a cloud-based service allowing single sign-on to library web resources and applications from any country or sector. As well as integrating with institutions still reliant on IP authentication, OpenAthens offers flexible control for managing access rights to groups of users, as well as comprehensive usage statistics showing how often content is accessed and by whom. “We’ve seen an increase in customer demand for federated single sign-on access to ..read more

New study helps to understand the role that cloud computing can play in reaching the UK’s digital ambitions to enable the UK to compete on the global stage. Commissioned by Amazon Web Services (AWS), the Public First report shows that digital technology could grow the economy by over £413 billion by 2030. That is the equivalent of around 19% of the entire UK economy – or bigger than the entire regional economy of the south-east of England, and more than twice the annual output of the UK’s manufacturing sector (£183 billion). ‘… citizens and businesses see digital technology as one of the bigg ..read more

EDUCATION WEBINAR Save money with sustainable IT Wednesday, November 16 2 PM (GMT) REGISTER NOW > Days Hours Minutes Seconds By registering for this webinar you agree we will also share your information with the webinar partner Workspace IT. For full terms read our privacy policy. Overview Workspace IT are a Professional Services Consultancy, specialising in End User Computing. We support customers ranging from a few hundred to tens of thousands across all sectors – Government, Finance, Manufacturing, Education and Retail. We understand the challenges organisations are ..read more