ALT is delighted to be supporting dev.ac.uk, a two day event for software developers working in further and higher education. As part of this Martin Hamilton, Futurologist at Jisc, highlights why the dev.ac.uk event is important and how to get involved:
Across our universities and colleges there are lots of software developers – working in areas as diverse as technology enhanced learning, research software engineering and core institutional systems and services. Quite simply, developers make stuff happen.
Those of you with long memories may recall a couple of Jisc initiatives supporting developers at institutions – Dev8D (“Developer Happiness Days”) and DevCSI (“Developer Community Supporting Innovation”). We’re returning to this territory in collaboration with UCISA for a one-of-a-kind event in Birmingham in February called dev.ac.uk.
dev.ac.uk will both celebrate the institutional developer, and give developers from universities and colleges the opportunity to learn from each other. We are looking to run a series of 1-2 hour sessions, with a practical focus on things you can do, picking up new skills and learning about new technologies.
What sorts of things will we be covering? Well, that’s up to you – we are asking institutional developers to tell us their hot topics and burning issues. I’ll throw a few examples in here of potential session ideas that might be of interest to developers in the ALT community:
- Getting up to speed on developing Augmented Reality apps for teaching and learning with Unity and ARKit
- Writing an Alexa skill for your university or college
- Creating an AI chatbot (teaching assistant?) using Microsoft’s Bot Framework
- Integrating your activity data sources with Jisc’s Learning Analytics service
- Automating Google Sheets, Docs etc using Apps Script
- Care and feeding of abandoned Moodle plugins
- BigBlueButton as an open source solution to lecture capture
- Understanding where and how to use LTI and SCORM
- Alternatives to that pesky Flash app that will stop working when you roll out the next Windows patch set
- Exploring blockchain for accreditation and academic credentialling
- Practical steps to hack your institution and install a maker culture
- Porting existing e-Learning apps from physical servers and virtual machines to containers and serverless computing
We also recognise that there will be ideas that emerge spontaneously when people gather together, so we also have a dedicated unconference strand to the event. This is a part of the event where you can self-organise around topics that interest you. Just claim a slot in the timetable and collaborate with other like-minded individuals.
Whilst dev.ac.uk isn’t a hackathon as such, don’t let that stop you – it would be great to see new ideas prototyped, existing code improved, or bugs fixed. What we won’t be doing is picking winners and handing out trophies. However, we do reserve the right to hand out prizes for delegates who go out of their way to be friendly, help each other out and generally be awesome to each other.
If this sounds interesting, we’d love to hear from you – what would you like to see covered, and would you be interested in contributing a session? The event itself is free to attend, and in addition we’re providing overnight accommodation to delegates. Don’t delay - fill out our call for participation survey form today!
Image credit: CC-BY-NC-ND Andrew Hewson https://flic.kr/p/7JnZ2j