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.