A recap: Talis Insight Europe 2016 – Day One!

Today we kicked off Talis Insight Europe 2016 with some great keynotes, some useful sessions and lot of tweets! Here’s a recap of what happened on Day One.

Paul Feldman, CEO and Phil Richards, CIO of JISC started the day with their opening keynote. Paul began by explaining the role that JISC plays within the education sector and discussed the digital transformation we have experienced. Phil asked “What would a UK National Digital Library look like?” and outlined the JISC strategy for a cloud based data warehouse for learning analytics.

Next we were joined by Nick Bevan, Pro Vice-Chancellor & Director of Library and Student Support from Middlesex University, who gave us a clever baking analogy to explain how reading lists benefit students, rather than ‘doing the work for them’. “Hunting for a book is not learning, in the same way hunting a supermarket for ingredients is not cooking.”

Nick’s presentation was followed by a discussion panel on eTextbooks, who also offered us an interesting analogy. They compared the way we now buy songs from iTunes instead of an entire album to wanting just sections of a textbook, rather than the whole thing, which is something both publishers and academics in the session agreed they were seeing more of.

Throughout the day we had breakout sessions, hearing from Talis staff on UX, product and LTI and also from members of the Talis Aspire community on their experiences with engaging academics, students and using the products. We also heard from the wider Higher Education community on learning design and challenges for Libraries in Higher Education.

Arunn introduced the final keynote of the day, which came from Talis CEO David Errington. Talis was described as the ship and of course, Dave is our ‘captain’! David went on to explain where Talis Aspire is, what we have achieved and what we continue to work on. He used references such as Netflix, TripAdvisor and Bet365 to demonstrate how digital our lives are becoming, using the keywords “disruption”, “digitisation” and “disintermediation” to explain how the education sector is moving forwards too.

The hashtag was very active today, with a few keen tweeters battling it out for the top spot on our leaderboard. Check out the current leaderboard here. You can follow all of the tweets from the day by searching #TalisInsight.

We hope to see you tomorrow for day 2!