Companies such as Amazon have proved that careful use of data about users’ actions and attention can improve services to end users and provide advantages in managing and targeting the service. Many systems in institutions store data about the actions of students, teachers and researchers. The purpose of this funding is to experiment with this data with the aim of improving the user experience or the administration of services.
Projects funded under this strand will identify tools and techniques that prove beneficial to university services. Once identified, JISC will fund further development to enable as many Higher Education institutions as possible to benefit from them.
● Business intelligence the use of data to provide historical, current and predictive views of business operation and the use of those views to support better decision making.
● User activity data a record of a user’s actions on a website or software system or other relevant institutional service.
● Attention data the record of what a user has viewed on a website or software system or other relevant institutional service.
This call is focused on experimentation with user activity data and attention data. We are using the umbrella term activity data to refer to both of these data types. Projects funded under this call should seek to use activity data to improve institutional services or
There is a separate JISC call related to business intelligence data: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/fundingopportunities/funding_calls/2010/09/grant1210.aspx. It is seeking projects that use internal and external sources of data to address strategic institutional concerns and help improve decision making. Implementation of specific business intelligence software systems is also a major part of the call. We advise all bidders to read both calls carefully to assess which fits their project most closely. JISC will reject bids if the same or very similar bid is submitted to both calls.
We are asking all bidders to state an institutional problem or hypothesis in their bids and make this central to the project. All problems or hypotheses should be practical and testable. In July 2011 we will be looking for successful projects to build on, and the problem or hypothesis and the data to support or deny it will be a key part of the evaluation of successful projects. Therefore, bidders should carefully plan the way in which the hypothesis or problem is evaluated and include these plans in their bids.
As stated in the call, bids should have a strong focus on the improvement of an institutional service. Service is a word that can have subtle variations of meaning. In this case the word is used to cover both of the following variations:
We are looking for projects that can provide improvements in both of these types of services. Possible improvements can be from a user perspective or from an administrative perspective. This service improvement can form part of the hypothesis and, like the hypothesis, this improvement must be practical and measurable and projects will be judged on it in July 2011. Evaluators will be looking for a well scoped service improvement with realistic plans for measurement of the improvement.
Funding is available for projects focusing on institutional improvements and also for projects seeking to provide a national, regional or consortial shared service. Shared services offer opportunities to provide efficiency savings or greater effectiveness for the institutions involved or should provide a better service to end users than an institutional service could offer. Projects will need to address these issues during the lifecycle of the project and should collect and disseminate knowledge gained via the project blog. Projects will also be encouraged to focus on the business cases for shared services that would persuade institutions to engage with the proposed service.
This section of the call is broad in scope and is seeking bids that involve any institutional service or software system. Services or systems that could be interesting to investigate include:
This list is not intended to be exhaustive and bidders are free to include systems and services that are not included on the list.
● The JISC Mosaic project investigated the possibilities of collecting and reusing library circulation data. The project final report is relevant to all bidders seeking to work with library data http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/466/. The project also organised a developer competition that may be a source of potential ideas http://devcsi.ukoln.ac.uk/demonstrator/2009/10/22/jisc-mosiac-project-competition-winners/.
● Infonet have produced an infokit on business intelligence that may have relevant information for bidders to this call as well as the business intelligence call http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/bi.
● Mark Stubbs and team at Manchester have been experimenting with the data stored by Virtual Learning Environments to explore the issue of student progression[1].
● The Knowledge Exchange has a group that is thinking about usage statistics in the retrieval of scholarly information. This group has produced a number of useful outputs including a briefing paper. All outputs can be found on their website: http://www.knowledge-exchange.info/Default.aspx?ID=365
● JISC is funding a project that is developing a usage statistics portal for libraries to manage statistics about electronic journal usage. More information can be found on the project website: http://www.jusp.mimas.ac.uk/
● JISC is funding a project called PIRUS which is investigation the extension of Counter statistics to cover article level usage of electronic journals: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/pals3/pirus.aspx
● The JISC RAPTOR project is investigating ways to explore usage of e-resources: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/aim/raptor.aspx. This project is part of the AIM programme and bidders interested in activity data from identity management systems are advised to browse this programme: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/aim.aspx
● The Strategic Content Alliance has produced an audience analysis toolkit that bidders may find useful: http://sca.jiscinvolve.org/wp/audience-publications/
● The Technology Strategy Board are releasing a competition exploring the possibilities of extracting value from large and diverse sources of data http://www.innovateuk.org/content/competition/harnessing-large-and-diverse-sources-of-data.ashx. There may be overlaps from the TSB competition with the work funded by this JISC call.
● Edina released a study that, among other things, considered the possibility of using data from openurl link servers: http://edina.ac.uk/projects/Shared_OpenURL_Data_Infrastructure_Investigation_summary.html. JISC and Edina are investigating the possibility of more work in this area and it is possible that this work will run concurrently with projects funded under this call.
● JISC held an event that explored the issue of activity data in July of this year: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2010/07/businessintelligence.aspx. The report from this event is available and bidders are strongly recommended to read it: http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/486/. Bidders may also be interested in the reflections on the event from Balviar Notay: http://infteam.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2010/09/29/event-report-gaining-business-intelligence-from-user-activity-july-2010/
This list highlights some relevant work. It is not intended to be an exhaustive account of all work in this area.
[1] Hardman, Julie; Paucar-Caceres, Alberto; Urquhart, Cathy; and Fielding, Alan, Predicting Students Progression Using Existing University Datasets: A Random Forest Application (2010). AMCIS 2010 Proceedings. Paper 272. http://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2010/272