What can we do that would really help?

It's been a frustrating few weeks with people unable to get to meetings and too many scheduled meetings at odd times of the day! One interesting meeting Sam and I had was with the Corporate information team in charge of THESIS. The good news was that the information we want is stored in Thesis and it's relatively easy to get out. The bad news is that the information isn't put into the system until after it's been through validation.

I can see why administrative staff don't want to enter information into the system if it's going to need to be edited later and would rather wait until it's signed off. But you can change the information in Thesis (well most of it) and I wondered if it would actually save them time in the long run if it means updated documents can be easily run-off? I think the only way to find out is to have a go.

I have a meeting with some people from the AMD faculty in a couple of weeks and wonder if it may be worth asking them to work with us on this? It may mean quite a lot of work for us as we would have to run the system alongside their normal processes and we couldn't expect them to do it on their own. If this works it will be brilliant and with a shift in working practices around the university could make life so much easier for the people who have to actually collate all the validation materials.

The other courses we have targeted haven't replied yet so I may send them a gentle reminder this afternoon and see if we can get them on board.

Next week we have a DIVAS team meeting and Christa, our new team member will be joining us properly for the first time. Christa will be looking at building models based around good practice for the project.

The interim report for the project for JISC is due and I've made a start on it. As it's due in by Dec I may have to get a move on!

November project meetings

It's been ages since my last blog, time seems to have taken one of those leaps recently. Since the last blog we've had the Nov DIVAS meeting much of which was spent discussing the project plan, the idea of the 'fast track' and ended up with us discussing what could be produced by the team as a tangible benefit. We were going to talk about describing objects but we did this in a separate meeting later on in the week.

The project seems to be running to plan and the idea that the 'fast track process would mean producing smoother administration and production of validation materials with guidance should work. Running the pilot of the fast track process along with the project now seems to be too ambitious. As a substitute what we have done is target a group of awards, all due to run in Sept 09 and we will track them and their progress through validation, hopefully ending up with a very real 'rich picture' of validation at Staffs University.

The tangibles we thought about involve using the information stored in Thesis (the university main system) to populate template validation documents. This went down well with the steering group who I met later on in the week. Apparently QIS have tried to introduce template documents before but with no great take-up, perhaps this could be the added benefit that would induce the faculties to use them?

Not much to report from the steering group meeting, they seem happy with the project and its direction. They're also happy with the idea of the 'fast track' process and hopefully our new eLearning Models coordinator will be in a position to start work on this next month. The group reminded us about the Xcri project (run by Manchester Met) and thought it might be useful to look at the Academic Planning Project being run by Paul Baron and Steve Wyn Williams at the university.

At the end of the week we had another meeting to discuss object descriptions, I won't go into detail here as Ben will have blogged in the technical blog. Suffice to say we came up with a list of the things we though people might search on:

• Subject (use JACS?)
• Level eg BA (Hons)
• Validation date
• Face-to-face or distance Learning
• Site of delivery
• Form of assessment perhaps?
• F/T, P/T etc
• Faculty/School
• Award title
• Prof body associated

The outcome of this is that I have arranged to meet up with the Thesis people, our disability service (they have an interest in assessment) and our student record people, who types what in where!

Fast-Tracks

Didn't blog last Friday as I was in meetings for most of the day. In the morning I went to an Enable project meeting. I gave them a short presentation about the DIVAS project and arranged to go out see them at Newcastle College in Nov.

Chris sent me the list of contacts for the awards we decided to target, as soon as I have an award from Health I'll contact them. One we looked at and rejected was a collaboration between the Oasis Christian Group and AMD, this week I was contacted by Jeremy Thompson from Oasis who I'm hoping to speak to next week, I think it may add an interesting aspect to the project.

I also had a meeting with the project director Jenny Yorke about what she envisaged the "fast-track" process to be. I've made some notes and I really need to go away and think about it properly before I ask the team to contribute and we decide the best way to tackle it. The scope is wider than I thought, though with the time scale of the project I think I may concentrate on certain aspects while hopefully building into the project room for expansion.

• To build a body of knowledge based upon the positive outputs from validations and the outcomes of the models project. In the extraction of good practice from both to form new models perhaps?
• Map outcomes of validations to elearning models would be a bonus not the whole picture.
• Have to have named approaches
• Detail about good practice elements e.g. protocols for response times (these have been done by sciences)
• Far more detailed than the high level of the elearning models project.
• Look at Teaching & Learning strategies, student support, - especially module handbooks, decisions made about using new technologies would be interesting area to look at - e.g. if we are using emerging technologies who makes decisions about their suitability, support etc
• Learning Support are particularly interested in producing a generic module handbook
• If someone does want to use blogs for example who decides what at validation?
• Decide on which areas of validation to focus on.

Just a couple of things to think about! We have a steering group meeting on Nov 5th so it will be interesting to see what they think of the work we've done so far

LTEC, Plan 1s and 'Fast-Tracks'

On Monday I was invited to the University Learning & Teaching Enhancement Committee (LTEC) meeting where I gave them a 10 minute presentation about the DIVAS project. It seemed to go down well and I notice that several of them have joined the Validation Support Network (VSN) on NING. We've also now put a link to the VSN on the university Quality Services website as suggested by a member of LTEC.

We're still pluggging away at getting people to use the VSN, we've got over 60 members now and Hamza and Sue managed to persuade one of them to contribute a case study about her experiences of doing Market Research. Hamza and Sue are holding several face-to-face sessions next week to try and get people to contribute towards the community so hopefully people will drop-in!

Chris and I met and went through a couple of the Plan 1s that came in to QIS. We've identified 3 new awards that we will target next week. 1 is a Foundation degree, another is an award that will be delivered by distance learning and the other is a traditional on-site undergraduate award. All of the awards are aiming to run in Sept 2009 so we hoped that by targetting these they would have time to go through a faculty validation before the end of the project. While we were looking at the Plan 1s, I took the opportunity to email all the listed members of staff to remind them about the VSN as they are about to start their validation processes.

So far the project is running to plan and we about to enter the next phase of it where we start looking into the "fast-track" aspects of the project and how we can build upon the eLearning models project that was started 18months ago.

October meeting

We had our monthly DIVAS meeting this week. Ben is moving along with the xml schema, he has had a meeting with Sam to discuss Hive, collections in Hive and retrieval and searchability issues. The details are in his blog so I won't repeat them here.

Chris hasn't been able to get the list of plan 1's yet but we should have them next week when Chris and I can decide which to target then approach them and see if they'll work with us.

The main topic discussed in the meeting was the Community of Practice and ideas to liven it up, to start off the process Helen Walmsley spent some time with Sue and Hamza to give them the benefit of her experience.

We started a private group in NING so we can discuss how to make this community more active. Discussions went from a topical theme eg. having a Halloween "Nightmare validations" to a structured programme following a logical course over a period of a few months. For example, we could focus of Market research for awards one month, focus on foundation degrees the next, focus on administration the month before people start gathering documents for the glut of validations in spring., etc. Lots of ideas were non-starters for various reasons but hopefully we should be able to pick out the ones that will work.

We all agreed that members should only be sent 1 email a week from the Validation Support Network (VSN) with details of what was happening this week, Fri lunch time sounded like a good idea, so Sue sent out the following this lunchtime:

Welcome to the first of the Validation Support Network’s weekly bulletins. We regularly update the contents so make sure you logon as often as you can.

Coming next week................

Get involved with Market Research!

Our featured theme for the coming week concerns the very beginning of the process of producing a new module or award - Market Research. On Monday morning we will be opening a new forum for those involved with, or interested in, exploring demand for and validity of proposed new courses. Please join in with the forum discussion and share your experiences, concerns and queries on this subject.

Introduction to the project, NING and how to make friends...

If you would like to know more about the project that our NING online community is part of and discuss why we are building an online community, how it might benefit us and what we hope to achieve from its use then please come along to a one hour face-to-face session.

The sessions will include practical advice and help on using the Validation Support Network, contributing to discussions, jazzing up your profile, creating blog entries and making friends etc.

We also agreed that even if we just changed the welcome photo every week it would help, and we all thought we should make more of an effort going in ourselves and posting.

I am slightly worried that the workload is getting a bit heavy in some areas of the project but I suspect that this will ease as the project changes direction. We start looking at models in more depth soon and how we may map them to validations.

It's been a "SURF" week!

I've had a busy week, though not all to do with the project. There was a SURF WBL-Way morning on Wed where I got the opportunity to talk to people from the SURF colleges about the project. It wasn't really the time or place to say too much but quite a few people showed an interest.

Thursday morning I did a short presentation about the DIVAS project to the SURF Curriculum board, this seemed to go down well and I was pleased that, without prompting from me, the subject of validations and particularly support for university validations came up. I invited all the people there to join the NING community and hopefully they'll all join. I do feel the NING community needs a bit of a boost at the moment, I have suggested we start pointing out some of the features of NING, "Hey look, did you know you could blog here!" type of thing.

Fleur Corfield was also at the meeting and talked about how the DIVAS project fitted in with the Enable project, (I've agreed to talk to the Enable group about the project at the end of October,) this also seemed to go down well, so all in all a good meeting.

Thursday afternoon I went to see Penny McCracken from FDF, she's about to finish there so I lucky to catch her. We had a very interesting chat, she comes at things from a national quality standards viewpoint so it certainly gave me a new perspective. She was generally very positive about the project though did express some concerns about perhaps disseminating bad practice and did wonder about sustainability issues.

Hamza has done some great work on joining the repository to NING I'm sure the technical details will appear in his blog but suffice to say I think he has a solution to the question of linking the validation documents to the NING in a way that people should find easy to use, I am very happy about this and he should be telling us in more detail next week at the October meeting.

More Community of Practice

The Community of Practice "Validation Support Network" has gone from strength to strength. We now have over 50 members from a variety of faculties, schools and services. We held an online event yesterday where one of the project members, Chris, (who works in the Quality Improvement Service at the university,) was online between 2pm and 4pm to answer any questions about validation processes that staff had. We had an interesting discussion on contact hour for online courses and another about the sort of support the community could give each other. The event was slow but steady and we could see that we had more people online than contributed. I think we should repeat this session as more people get involved in the community.

I have been speaking to everyone who stands still long enough about the project. Yesterday I had a meeting with the dean of Law and mentioned the project, she sounded interested and I noticed she's joined the community.

Next week I am going to the SURF curriculum meeting on Thursday morning to give a 5 minute presentation on the project and in the afternoon I'm going to Lichfield to have a chat with Penny McCracken, who works for Foundation Degree Forward and has written the guidelines for their endorsement scheme for foundation degrees.

Hopefully I should have lots to blog about!

Launching the Community of Practice

The Community of practice was launched this week, we got 29 members the first day so a big sigh of relief all round, what if nobody came to the party! People are introducing themselves and already a few interesting discussions have started. Hopefully we can get people who are involved in all aspects of validation in the community.

I didn't blog last week as I was at the alt-c conference in Leeds. I went to a couple of sessions on social networking, they were interesting but I could have done with something a bit more focused on sustainability without throwing more technology into the mix. I'm sure there were sessions that would have been really useful but there are only so many hours in the day!

September

I've not blogged recently as I've been away, this doesn't mean work on the project has stopped though, and yesterday we had our monthly meeting.

Everyone has been working away, compiling a list of award leaders - not as easy as it sounds! planning the launch of the community in NING and discussing the schema we want to use to describe the outputs of validation events.

Chris, Sam and Ben met to discuss the validation documents and how to:

• Automate as much as possible of the process of inputting the documents into the repository
• Use a schema that won't create more work for Chris and his colleagues.
• Perhaps using IMS, creating a "validation item" that could have workflows etc attached.

There was some discussion as to whether to go with IMS, Dublin Core or to write our own schema. We decided that though all had their merits we would never get a perfect fit and so we'd go with IMS.

Hamza has been looking at Gadgets in NING and using them to link to HIVE, he has joined a NING developers group so things look interesting on that front.

We are going to launch the NING community in the 3rd week of Sept and there are planned events for the run up to Christmas. For more news and details of this they have a blog.

In the next few weeks: I am going to talk to the University Learning and Teaching Enhancement Committee in Oct to introduce the project to them and to invite them to join the NING. I have also arranged to see the administrator in the faculty of computing and engineering who deals with all their validations to get her view of things. If I can I'd like to see some of the other administrators as each faculty has their own processes and this is something that the Foundation Degree people find a problem.

The August Project Meeting

We had our August meeting this week. Most of the actions from the last meeting have been done. Hamza has checked the copyright issues with NING and everything seems to be OK and we have decided to pay NING to remove the adverts from the pages. We had quite a discussion on ways of getting people involved in the Community of Practice and when to really push it. We still think Sept would be a good time though it may be a good idea to hold some sort of face-to-face event in October to advertise the project within the University. Again the issue arose of sharing pre-validated documents. Whether to allow full access for people to compare before and after documents against how introducing an element of "This is what not to do", was ethically sound and what would it do to the positive feel of a community!

We finished the meeting will us all tasked to think about the requirements of people searching through the validations and to think of some use cases. Ben Sam & Chris are meeting up later in the week to look into descriptions with the validation documents that Chris and his colleagues currently store in a database.

I had been pondering over the question of how to attract the more experienced staff members to join the community. So at the end of last week I went to see the head of our Quality Improvement service, (essentially the powers that be when it comes to validation). She is part of the project steering group and is happy to for us to let the community know that they will have an influence on policy and process.

This week I also had meeting with a senior member of the SURF group and from our faculty of Computing & Engineering. A common theme is emerging from these meetings around support for panels and consistencies between faculties. It would seem that for the project to succeed then in order to develop more intelligent systems for validations we may need to put the emphasis on support. I am hoping to talk to some of the faculty administrative staff see how their approach differs cross-faculty.

Other things have arisen from the meetings. It was interesting how the wider University agenda affects the validations over time for example the new legislation on disabilities in 2005 meant questions about accessiblity became very prevalent. If (as I suggested may happen) panels were recommended to make more commendations would advice or guidance be available? Something I hadn't realised that the SURF Foundation degrees that involve Work-Based-Learning, often invite employers to validation events.

So lots to think about and lots to do so I'm off to the Maldives to lie on a beach and think about it. I wish!

A quiet week

No blog last week as I was away. Things are slowly moving along. Chris has sent Ben some validation documents to play with, and Ben has also had a meeting to discuss metadata with people from the library and information support team that he has described in his blog

I was sent a couple of very interesting links this week from Laura James from Cambridge, particularly relevant to us was the University of Wales, Newport site about their experience of using NING, hopefully Hamza and Sue will be able to pick up some useful pointers.

I am keeping an eye on the project plan and what is scheduled to start in August. I have several meetings around the university next week, I'm hoping to involve the SURF colleges and our Faculty of computing and engineering, so fingers crossed.

JISC Conference

Bit late this week with the blogging as it was the JISC Conference on Tues and Wed at Keele. The sessions I went to were probably a little too techy for me but I did get some useful pointers and they did make me think about how to apply the lessons learnt by the technical developers to the project in general. For example, some of the principles from the Engage project about identifying the community and understanding their values seemed very pertinent. And the sentiment "better not perfect" though being applied to software development summed up a lot about how I think we need to respond to get things done. So rather than go into detail about sessions (you should be able to read about them on their website ) I thought I'd blog about meeting the other projects who come under the same bid.

We had a short meeting, us, Ravensbourne, Manchester Met, Cambridge & Kingston a team from Netskills and Rob Bristow. It was good to meet everyone and hear a quick 30 sec resume of each project. Essentially Manchester are looking at mobile technology and SMS texting, Cambridge, linking up administrative systems using social networking tools, Kingston timetabling and Ravensbourne are looking at quality issues. For fuller descriptions there is a JISC website you can go to. I'm hoping we'll be able to work quite closely with the Ravensbourne project as the projects have common ground. It's being led by Cathryn Smith who is their head of quality so it should be interesting working with her.

Things to do: Holidays are coming up for a lot of the team so I'm hoping that things can keep moving. There are no major tasks in the plan to start until Sept but we need to make sure we're ready. I will probably spend a lot of time over the next week sending email reminders!

A busy week

Last week was a busy week for the project. On Thurs Rob Bristow the programme manager from JISC and Will Allen from Netskills came to Stafford to meet us. The project is one of a set of 6 that were funded by this call with one at Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication in Kent being very similar. Rob and Will were both keen on all the projects working together so watch this space.

On Wed Chris and I met up with Glyn Skerrett from our sciences faculty. Glyn has lots of experience of validations and is happy to share his thoughts and experience with us. He also is willing to join in with the NING Community of Practice, hopefully we'll be able to persuade him to join us as an "expert". Yesterday Chris and I met another senior member of our academic staff from AMD who also gave us his view of the validation processes and we have started thinking about what a COP can offer experienced staff. I have a few more staff to meet to find out what potential users of the COP want but it is difficult at this time of year.

I contacted the SURF team and they are very interested in the project, I have been invited to their Curriculum Group meeting in Oct so I can meet the college representatives and get their views - it should be interesting!

July already!

We had the first team meeting of the DIVAS project this morning, unfortunately Chris couldn't be there but I sent him the meeting notes. We went through the project plan and hopefully we've all got a good idea of where we are going. We spoke about how we see the project and agreed upon a vision. Users come to the system, put in their requirements eg, I want to see all the validations over the last 2 years that are in Humanities, at masters level and delivered online - a set of reports come back and then the user can see if there are any common features, for example, all validation panels have asked about staff training. Or if there aren't any, perhaps the user can go to the community of practice in NING and ask if anybody can help.

A number of actions came out of the meeting, I need to arrange several meeting and I need to email somebody involved in SURF to see if the colleges want to join in. Sue KB is looking at getting a list of the award leaders and she and Hamza are thinking about how to get the NING off to a flying start in Sept. It was thought that it was better to leave until Sept as so many people are out of the university at this time of year.

The next push is to get some real data into the HIVE repository for Ben and Chris to look at so hopefully over summer we can identify some useful validation reports. Interestingly Jenny wondered how we could perhaps capture the issues raised at validations that are not necessarily recorded in the validation reports - food for thought.

Sue

Week 1

I've spent all week chatting to people about the project and generally getting my head around what we're doing and why we're doing it. I spoke to Hamza and Sue about setting up a NING community. Due to time constraints I decided to use NING, rather than consider alternatives, whether this was a good decision or not, only time will tell. Hamza has now set one up and I've put a link to it on the blog. I'm still not totally sure how this will fit together and what will be the driver behind the community of practice but I think things will become clearer as the site develops.

A few people have told me that they'll be at the focus group which is good news but I'm hoping to get more by the time we run it.

I still need to finalise the plan but the day job keeps getting in the way, and I also need to think about how to fit in the work on the models side of it with the team. Hopefully things should start coming together with our first team meeting next week and our meeting with Rob from JISC!

Starting again!

Well, after a change of personnel the DIVAS project is starting again. So far I've spent a lot of time talking to people and finding out what we really want to do.

So, today I've set up this blog and I've fed in a more technical blog that Ben has been posting to. I've sent an email to the Teaching and Learning Directors of the faculties asking them to a focus group - so far not a huge response but I have asked them to pass on the invite. Also I've invited all the project team and the project director to meetings once a month so we can all keep each other up to date.

Later on this week, hopefully the community of practice should be set up and then it'll be a push behind that. We have a meeting with Rob Bristow from Jisc on 3rd July and we should have a complete updated project plan by the end of the week.

It's been a bit of a slow start but hopefully things will speed up soon!