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!
Friday, 28 November 2008
Tuesday, 18 November 2008
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:
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
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