JISC Summer of Student Innovation

Are you a student with ideas on how technology can be used in novel ways to enhance their experiences at university? If so, you might be interested in entering the annual JISC Summer of Student Innovation. Says JISC:

“At Jisc, we strongly believe that students should have a prime role in developing novel uses of technology to improve their experience at college or university.

That’s why we are running our popular summer of student innovation competition for the third straight year, with a new approach to ensure we engage a broader range of students with funding of up to £20,000 available, so get involved!

Entrants are invited to submit an idea that uses technology to improve education, research or student life, and those who are successful receive grant funding and support from Jisc to develop their project as part of a co-design approach to innovation within UK education.

Last year 20 projects were successfully funded and supported and today we continue to work with six projects to help develop them and explore the possibility of offering them as a shared service for the whole sector.

The summer of student innovation 2015 is bigger and better than before, and has a variety of competitions available:

1. Student ideas competition Ideas using technology that could help improve research, learning or student life across further and higher education
2. Supporting technology startup projects Support for existing educational technology products that addresses needs of learners and researchers in further and higher education
3. Learner ideas in FE competition Ideas from learners based in UK colleges, or apprentices and trainees who have a technology idea that could improve the learning experience
   4. Apprentice-led ideas challenge A pilot project to support apprentices or trainees and learning providers who have an idea for technology that could help work based learners.

Students have until 18 May to submit their entries and, with our help, attract votes from around the sector.

How you can engage with the summer of student innovation:

• We’d be grateful if you could promote this year’s competition to your students. Contact us to request a campaign promotion pack including a poster, web banner and brochure you can use
• Find out more about this work and how it might inform your organisation through our guide What Students Really Want
• Join us for a briefing, Q&A and ideas generation session on the learner ideas in FE competition – find out more.

The summer of student innovation is part of our R&D work which identifies emerging technologies and develops them around your particular needs. By exploring and developing ideas, then scaling them up to benefit the whole Jisc community, the R&D service we offer aims to keep our customers competitive long into the future.

For more information please visit our website. You can also follow #studentideas on Twitter for the latest about the competition.”

Tags: Research