Post Easter tidings

First day back after Easter and time to start thinking about work again. I have thought of nothing but chocolate and more latterly sunburn for the last week or so but today had a very interesting chat with Hamza about the project.

I've been thinking about the project and how to sum up the outputs and write down what we've learned along the way. Hamza is looking at the Community of Practice and has been going round asking people what the think of the site, if they've used it and generally their thoughts on the project as a whole.

In retrospect I think that we have been thinking of Validation as a driver whereas it is really the end point of the design process. To think about the design process from a much more holistic point of view with validation being a component of it would be more helpful. With this in mind I have been thinking along the lines of the creation a central area that all the team who are designing the award create and store all course design materials (a wiki perhaps?)that could be used to automatically create the documentation for validation. Validation documents are created as a culmination of work around the course design. In practice, (certainly in my experience)the final documents are produced by somebody sitting down and gathering lots of bits of information together and cutting and pasting a lot. For example the rationale for the course is often put together based around a central idea that the rest of the team feed their opinions via email into? At some point the modules and their delivery timetable is organised in a diagram somewhere. The learning outcomes are written down and then cut and pasted into tables etc.

So one central area, organised so it can be searched – each award team gets an instance created for them and they work on a central document perhaps. This would also include administrative staff who could then feed information into it (feeding into time tabling systems?) and from this document the relevant validation documents could be created.

This is an idea in very early stages but worth looking into a bit more deeply, certainly worth having a discussion with our colleagues in QIS.