Link to the original article on Jisc.ac.uk
The 20 winners of this year’s Summer of Student Innovation competition have been announced today.
The Summer of Student Innovation is managed by Jisc and is a co-design project with Research Libraries UK (RLUK), Russell Universities’ Group of IT Directors (RUGIT), the Society of College, National and University Libraries (SCONUL), Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA) and the Association for Learning Technology (ALT).
Winning teams will develop digital technologies to improve every aspect of students’ experience, from work-planning and making sure they eat well to improving exam performance and boosting employability.
The winning students will each receive an award of £5,000 from Jisc to develop their ideas into tools that can be used by fellow students, colleges and universities. They’ll also attend a series of summer schools to help them develop their project management and entrepreneurial skills and give them an opportunity to learn from experts in digital technology.
Dr John Shemilt, director of ICT, Imperial and Summer of Student Innovation steering group member said:
“It is fantastic to see such great ideas put forward this year, building on the success of last year’s competition. It gives a real insight into what the students see as important. I’m looking forward to the autumn showcase event, it will be rewarding to see how these ideas have grown and been developed by the students.”
The competition attracted dozens of entries from further education, undergraduate and postgraduate students and 8,400 votes from 160 institutions as their peers voted on theJisc Elevator website.
The winning ideas will be developed over the summer and presented to universities and colleges later in the year. This will give the students a chance to pitch their ideas and offer individual universities and colleges an early opportunity to adopt these new technologies.
This is the second time the Summer of Student Innovation competition has been run. A number of the 2013 winners have successfully developed their concepts and have seen them start to take off both in the UK and overseas: several of these have been selected by Jisc to receive further development support. Call for Participants’ Matt Terrell comments:
“We are just adding the finishing touches to the new website being launched late this summer, while fast approaching another milestone – registered users from 200 different institutions. The grant enabled us to speed up our development process, and working with Jisc has provided us with many useful connections.
I am very excited about this year’s competition winners as there are some interesting ideas and innovations, many of which I can see being adopted by students and institution staff as early as next year, if not before.”
For more information visit the Summer of Student Innovation web pages. To join the conversation on Twitter, use #studentideas
Top image courtesy of Queen Mary, University of London Library
