The Association of Colleges (AoC) Beacon Awards took place on 17 November, celebrating best practice in further education (FE). Jisc sponsored the award for Effective use of technology in FE. It was won this year by South Eastern Regional College for its BLADES programme, which uses peer mentoring to support the digital capabilities of staff and students.

In this podcast, we speak to Paula Philpott, ILT pedagogy mentor at the college, to find out about the programme and what it means to win. 

Visit the Jisc website to find out more.

On the final day of the Association of Colleges (AoC) annual conference, Paul McKean, head of FE and skills for Jisc, talks about his highlights over the past three days, the main themes that have emerged, and how Jisc can help support colleges going forward.

For more information visit the Jisc website. 

Day two of the Association of Colleges (AoC) annual conference saw Phil Richards, Jisc's chief innovation officer, join City of Liverpool College Group to host a session on 'Delivering accelerated transformation', which focused on the power of shared services for creating efficiencies and transforming further education. Here, Phil speaks with Val Keay, marketing manager, about the college's shared services vehicle - SharEd - and how Jisc is supporting work in this area.

Visit the Jisc website for more information.

We're at the Association of Colleges (AoC) annual conference this week. Day one was the Beacon Awards, which celebrates best practice in further education. John Potter, head of Jisc south and east, was one of the award judges. He speaks with Val Keay, marketing manager, about the judging process and tells us about the winning college - South Eastern Regional College.

Visit the Jisc website for more information.

In this podcast we hear from Jisc subject specialist for accessibility and inclusion, Margaret McKay about the issues that learners with sight loss face when accessing information. She also relays advice from learners with visual impairments and sight loss about the technologies and tools they find useful.

Visit the Jisc blog for more information.

In this podcast Julia Taylor, Jisc subject specialist - accessibility and inclusion, discusses how dyslexia can affect learning, and offers her top tips for using technology to support independent study.

Visit the Jisc website for more information.

We’re delighted to support the team behind Call for Participants who are currently showcasing their project at this year’s prestigious Web Summit conference in Dublin. Call for Participants grew from Jisc’s 2013 Summer of Student Innovation co-design project. In this podcast, recorded at Web Summit, Matthew Terrell tells us how important Jisc’s support has been to the team and gives his top tips for succeeding as a digital innovator. 

To find out more visit www.jisc.ac.uk

Over the past few months we've been conducting interviews with projects in research data spring, to find out more about their work, progress to date, and how they've found the process so far.

We also want to find out about the people behind the ideas and get to know them and their aspirations.

In this podcast we speak to Joy Davidson from the Digital Curation Centre about a project to improve how institutions support research data management.

Visit the Jisc website to find out more.

Richard French, international coordinator at Jisc is attending the Educause annual conference in the US. Educause is the association for higher education IT professionals in the US and their conference is one of the largest EdTech events in the world. Following research undertaken last year which found that IT manager were not always involved in leadership decisions, where their skills and knowledge could benefit their institution. Richard talks to attendees to find out how much progress has been made in getting IT professional a seat at the management table.

Open science has been highlighted as one of the priorities of the Dutch presidency of the European Union in 2016. Matthew Dovey, head of research technology at Jisc, discusses the motivations behind the open science movement and why initiatives to support it are more important than ever. Read his original blog here.