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!