Getting back on track …

The HEDA community has been severely impacted by the global changes in the last two years, not unlike the entire Higher Education sector. While ‘the show must go on’ and it has during this time, many changes have occurred and many visions have been entertained. This event has the objective of getting ‘back on track’ with the sharing of information, requirements, developments, solutions and aspirations of the HEDA community in terms of what is being done and what would be next to engage with.

The User Group event will highlight the changes in thinking, design and functionality of the HEDA product suite and the team behind the service to clients. The event will showcase the various moves to produce ‘solutions’ as opposed to ‘software’ and the adoption of innovative techniques to address client requests with the move to more comprehensive development and deployment.

Some of the key areas are:

1. A focus on complex and comprehensive back-end solutions reducing the need for complex and expensive front-end development;
2. A move to further automate data and information dissemination – data push as opposed to data pull;
3. Enhancing techniques and technologies to address the ‘packaging’ of BI solutions to be more ‘interesting’ – the use of infographics for example;
4. Integrating the above to create more comprehensive and user-targeted solutions;

Integration in Higher Education: What does this mean for the HEDA community?

In the Higher Education context, integration can be many things to many people. From a demographic or profile perspective, integration aims to address issues of equity, participation and even internationalisation. On a more academic front, integration could have the objective of inter- or multi-disciplinary curricula, providing more nuanced learner experiences. From a governance perspective integration could aim at using a framework of integration in all matters of decision‐making, while from a technology perspective integration could be the intersection of disparate data sources or data dissemination practices. It could also mean the innovative use of different technologies and the provision of different services towards a more informed position.

The HEDA community is impacted upon by all of the above and ‘integration’ is used freely in our conversation around the provisioning of information for decision making.