Getting ready for Digital Apprentice

We are soon going to be starting to recruit institutions to be part of the pilot group for Digital Apprenticeships, so it seems timely to describe what will be needed to enable an institution to join in.

Digital Apprenticeships will be using the same key infrastructure as Jisc’s existing Learning Analytics service, which uses provider data build dashboards for the use of teachers and others to monitor and get predictions of students’ progress and likely attainment.

In the same was a Learning Analytics,  Digital Apprenticeships works by bringing institutional data into Jisc’s Learning Data Hub, one of the first steps for an institution is to be in a position to sign Jisc’s data sharing agreement. This legal agreement has recently been updated to be fully GDPR compliant and adapted to be explicitly about data sharing about Apprentices.

Essentially the agreement (in amongst the legal stuff) sets out that Jisc and the provider will share the provider data (as defined) for the purposes of delivering the service. The agreement makes it clear that the provider will retain ownership of the data, but grants a licence to Jisc to use the data for the defined purposes. The provider remains the Data Controller, while Jisc is the Data Processor.

Screenshot 2018-02-09 17.48.06

As the Data Processor Jisc is obligated to process the provider data only in connection with the agreed purpose, to be in accordance with applicable law, to do this in a secure manner and to let the provider know of any data breaches. There is also a clause prohibiting disclosure to a third party (except appointed sub-contractors), and to allow the provider to audit compliance of these requirements.

Signing the data processing agreement is the crucial first step to taking part in the project, as Jisc cannot touch your data without it.

Once these legal formalities are out of the way the process of coming on board the project is:

  1. Extraction of data from institutional systems. This involves setting up an SFTP link, devising “recipes” to extract data from student record systems, the VLE, attendance data, etc.
  2. Data validation and quality check before that data then enters the data warehouse (Jisc’s Learning Data Hub).

From there the next steps will be to pull the data through to the Digital Apprenticeships dashboard, and work with the institution to fine tune that to be ready for the employers.

The whole on-boarding process is well covered on the Learning Analytics Blog:

https://analytics.jiscinvolve.org/wp/on-boarding/

To find out more about Jisc’s Digital Apprenticeships activity, come to the Community Event on the 28th February at Jisc’s central London offices.

https://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/digital-apprenticeships-community-event-28-feb-2018

To keep in touch with our Digital Apprenticeships work follow this blog and join our mailing list:

https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=DIGITALAPPRENTICESHIPS&A=1

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