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.