DIVAS Project

Post Easter tidings

2009-04-20T06:59:00.000-07:00

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.

The Jisc Conference

2009-03-26T05:29:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week we went to Edinburgh to the JISC conference. We did a demo about the project which was a bit disappointing with only a couple of people at it, but it was the first session and people were still registering. Also, it can be a bit difficult selling a project on Validation, it isn’t the most glamorous subject at the conference though perhaps one that will help the unsung heroes of academia. After all where would our star lecturers perform if there were not awards to shine in!

There were the usual luminaries there, a keynote by Prof. Goodman, bafta award winning, globe-trotting, dancing guru at Smart lab, I have a vague idea of the content but I must admit I drifted off half way through with thoughts of “Raoul, my dance teacher”, and drifted back to some pretty amazing stuff done with technologies to support disabled people. I met lots of interesting people, including most of the other projects in the programme, lots of inspiring people who are doing some really clever stuff. I went to a couple of great sessions, one on identity which gave me something to think about. I certainly have a better idea of some of the issues of Identity Management that Sam and Co have been looking at, and another on Geo-Spatials, not something I’ve had much to do with in the past but certainly gave me a few ideas about using technologies in different ways.

The Conference timing was good, it’s kicked me off into thinking about the questions I need to ask about getting the project back on course, not that it’s drifted much but all projects seem to suffer a bit from time to time, thinking about what we’ve achieved has actually reassured me that we getting there. I’m not sure how anybody else achieves anything between twitters, the whole conference seemed to be filled with people posting one-liners, before during and after (I was going to type sessions but perhaps I should leave it there!)

It’s April next week and I’m looking forward to getting stuck in again so watch this space for more postings, off to do some twittering now, I feel drawn to find out what it’s all about!

March

2009-03-13T08:22:00.000-07:00

Just realised I haven't posted about the meeting in March! We are just going through a bit of a tricky stage with the project, things are moving but because they are technical moves they don't seem very fast to those of us not directly involved. Sean has done wonders with the repository and now that things have slowed for me on the teaching front I will be able to dedicate a lot more time to the project and catch up with the plan.

I'm feeling quite optimistic about the project and looking forward to going to Edinburgh in a week or so. It must be the weather, in like a lamb and out like a lion or some such :)

February Meeting

2009-02-11T06:35:00.000-08:00

We had the Feb meeting this week. A couple of people couldn't make it but sent updates. The biggest problem recently is that our HIVE guru has been on holiday for 3 weeks and so work has practically stopped, albeit temporarily. Things are back to normal now and so things should start moving on getting documents into Hive. This has got to a point now where we need to start playing with real data and working out if our descriptions actually work.

We have been concentrating more on the "models" and "fast-track" side of the project recently. Christa has come up with a set of starting points or categories for her approaches or models based around the follwing:
• Structure
• Delivery
• Content
• Interactivity
• Assessment
• Resourcing
• Support
We think it'll be a good idea (given the time left on the project) to concentrate on delivery, interactivity and support for now. We can see how the interactivity planned on a course will influence the support needed. If we can marry this to templates then we may be able to see a "real" way in which it may work and we could present it to our QIS and ask if we can pilot it. The idea being that we target a validation of an award being led by an experienced team that have previously validated a similar award. I need to think this through more as it is still formulating as an idea, it may take some time!

I also sent a short description of the project to Rob at Netskills so we can demo it at the JISC meeting in March in Edinburgh. We should have something to actually demo by then, the Community of practice is up and running and it shouldn't take much to put in the links.

We also have started to look at evaluation and I had a quick look at the final report templates. I ran away.

Snail's pace but still moving!

2009-01-20T07:20:00.000-08:00

Last week I showed the DIVAS presentation to people from Ashton and Burton Colleges as part of an Enable project meeting. They seemed interested so I've sent them invitations to the Validation Support Network (VSN)in NING. Interestingly this week we found out that not all the colleges can see the VSN site properly, at one of the SURF colleges no pictures were displayed.

Things are still moving, albeit slowly, I wish I could spend more time on the project but I suspect all people involved in projects wish that! I'm going to a Computing & Engineering faculty meeting to talk about the project next week. I have already sounded some of them out about the idea of auto-populated validation documents and they were very keen so it'll be interesting to speak to them. I'm changing the presentation to reflect the change of direction so I'll see how well it goes.

I also have a meeting next week with Fleur to talk about how exactly she wants the colleges to use the VSN to support the Enable project. It may mean somebody needs to do some training, it may mean talking to the colleges about how they let their staff use social networking software, it may mean trouble at' mill!

Happy New Year!

2009-01-08T06:35:00.000-08:00

Bit belated I know, but meant nonetheless.

Not as much to catch up on as time suggests what with the xmas break and all, but still we have progress. Things on the HIVE front are looking good. Sam and Sean have worked really hard and Hive has initial version of xcri installed , (it can't cope with attributes only elements so if we need to export as xcri we will need to work on this, this is the royal "we" of course!) They think it'll only be a matter of weeks until they can release a version to Chris and his colleagues in Quality to have a look at.

The meeting with the AMD academics didn't go ahead, in fact the response to my email asking for meetings with academics who are planning validations was very disappointing. I will try once more and if it still doesn't work I'll put plan B into action.

Plan C on the other hand has had a very good reception. Everybody I've spoken to about populating pre-formatted validation documents from Thesis thinks it is a brilliant idea. I suspect its because it isn't 1 persons' idea but an idea formulated over time by everyone. I've asked Ian Watts (he knows Thesis better than the rest of us)if he'll give us a hand and he has agreed so I think this is the way to go.

Christa is now in a position to start thinking about the models side of the project so things should start moving on this soon.

At the Jan meeting people seemed quite happy with what they need to be getting on with and I'm planning on meeting with individuals this month to make sure everyone has everything they need to get on with things.

New years resolution is to get back to writing the blog regularily so don't forget to come back!!!!

What can we do that would really help?

2008-11-28T04:03:00.000-08:00

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!

November project meetings

2008-11-18T01:59:00.000-08:00

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!

Fast-Tracks

2008-10-28T03:20:00.000-07:00

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'

2008-10-17T03:25:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-10T06:42:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-10-03T05:36:00.000-07:00

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.

More Community of Practice

2008-09-26T06:04:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-17T06:41:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-03T05:48:00.000-07:00

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.

The August Project Meeting

2008-08-08T03:01:00.000-07:00

We had our August meeting this week. Most of the actions from the last meeting have been done. Hamza has checked the copyright issues with NING and everything seems to be OK and we have decided to pay NING to remove the adverts from the pages. We had quite a discussion on ways of getting people involved in the Community of Practice and when to really push it. We still think Sept would be a good time though it may be a good idea to hold some sort of face-to-face event in October to advertise the project within the University. Again the issue arose of sharing pre-validated documents. Whether to allow full access for people to compare before and after documents against how introducing an element of "This is what not to do", was ethically sound and what would it do to the positive feel of a community!

We finished the meeting will us all tasked to think about the requirements of people searching through the validations and to think of some use cases. Ben Sam & Chris are meeting up later in the week to look into descriptions with the validation documents that Chris and his colleagues currently store in a database.

I had been pondering over the question of how to attract the more experienced staff members to join the community. So at the end of last week I went to see the head of our Quality Improvement service, (essentially the powers that be when it comes to validation). She is part of the project steering group and is happy to for us to let the community know that they will have an influence on policy and process.

This week I also had meeting with a senior member of the SURF group and from our faculty of Computing & Engineering. A common theme is emerging from these meetings around support for panels and consistencies between faculties. It would seem that for the project to succeed then in order to develop more intelligent systems for validations we may need to put the emphasis on support. I am hoping to talk to some of the faculty administrative staff see how their approach differs cross-faculty.

Other things have arisen from the meetings. It was interesting how the wider University agenda affects the validations over time for example the new legislation on disabilities in 2005 meant questions about accessiblity became very prevalent. If (as I suggested may happen) panels were recommended to make more commendations would advice or guidance be available? Something I hadn't realised that the SURF Foundation degrees that involve Work-Based-Learning, often invite employers to validation events.

So lots to think about and lots to do so I'm off to the Maldives to lie on a beach and think about it. I wish!

A quiet week

2008-07-29T03:42:00.000-07:00

No blog last week as I was away. Things are slowly moving along. Chris has sent Ben some validation documents to play with, and Ben has also had a meeting to discuss metadata with people from the library and information support team that he has described in his blog

I was sent a couple of very interesting links this week from Laura James from Cambridge, particularly relevant to us was the University of Wales, Newport site about their experience of using NING, hopefully Hamza and Sue will be able to pick up some useful pointers.

I am keeping an eye on the project plan and what is scheduled to start in August. I have several meetings around the university next week, I'm hoping to involve the SURF colleges and our Faculty of computing and engineering, so fingers crossed.

JISC Conference

2008-07-17T04:08:00.000-07:00

Bit late this week with the blogging as it was the JISC Conference on Tues and Wed at Keele. The sessions I went to were probably a little too techy for me but I did get some useful pointers and they did make me think about how to apply the lessons learnt by the technical developers to the project in general. For example, some of the principles from the Engage project about identifying the community and understanding their values seemed very pertinent. And the sentiment "better not perfect" though being applied to software development summed up a lot about how I think we need to respond to get things done. So rather than go into detail about sessions (you should be able to read about them on their website ) I thought I'd blog about meeting the other projects who come under the same bid.

We had a short meeting, us, Ravensbourne, Manchester Met, Cambridge & Kingston a team from Netskills and Rob Bristow. It was good to meet everyone and hear a quick 30 sec resume of each project. Essentially Manchester are looking at mobile technology and SMS texting, Cambridge, linking up administrative systems using social networking tools, Kingston timetabling and Ravensbourne are looking at quality issues. For fuller descriptions there is a JISC website you can go to. I'm hoping we'll be able to work quite closely with the Ravensbourne project as the projects have common ground. It's being led by Cathryn Smith who is their head of quality so it should be interesting working with her.

Things to do: Holidays are coming up for a lot of the team so I'm hoping that things can keep moving. There are no major tasks in the plan to start until Sept but we need to make sure we're ready. I will probably spend a lot of time over the next week sending email reminders!

A busy week

2008-07-08T02:36:00.000-07:00

Last week was a busy week for the project. On Thurs Rob Bristow the programme manager from JISC and Will Allen from Netskills came to Stafford to meet us. The project is one of a set of 6 that were funded by this call with one at Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication in Kent being very similar. Rob and Will were both keen on all the projects working together so watch this space.

On Wed Chris and I met up with Glyn Skerrett from our sciences faculty. Glyn has lots of experience of validations and is happy to share his thoughts and experience with us. He also is willing to join in with the NING Community of Practice, hopefully we'll be able to persuade him to join us as an "expert". Yesterday Chris and I met another senior member of our academic staff from AMD who also gave us his view of the validation processes and we have started thinking about what a COP can offer experienced staff. I have a few more staff to meet to find out what potential users of the COP want but it is difficult at this time of year.

I contacted the SURF team and they are very interested in the project, I have been invited to their Curriculum Group meeting in Oct so I can meet the college representatives and get their views - it should be interesting!

July already!

2008-07-01T07:37:00.000-07:00

We had the first team meeting of the DIVAS project this morning, unfortunately Chris couldn't be there but I sent him the meeting notes. We went through the project plan and hopefully we've all got a good idea of where we are going. We spoke about how we see the project and agreed upon a vision. Users come to the system, put in their requirements eg, I want to see all the validations over the last 2 years that are in Humanities, at masters level and delivered online - a set of reports come back and then the user can see if there are any common features, for example, all validation panels have asked about staff training. Or if there aren't any, perhaps the user can go to the community of practice in NING and ask if anybody can help.

A number of actions came out of the meeting, I need to arrange several meeting and I need to email somebody involved in SURF to see if the colleges want to join in. Sue KB is looking at getting a list of the award leaders and she and Hamza are thinking about how to get the NING off to a flying start in Sept. It was thought that it was better to leave until Sept as so many people are out of the university at this time of year.

The next push is to get some real data into the HIVE repository for Ben and Chris to look at so hopefully over summer we can identify some useful validation reports. Interestingly Jenny wondered how we could perhaps capture the issues raised at validations that are not necessarily recorded in the validation reports - food for thought.

Sue

Week 1

2008-06-24T06:55:00.000-07:00

I've spent all week chatting to people about the project and generally getting my head around what we're doing and why we're doing it. I spoke to Hamza and Sue about setting up a NING community. Due to time constraints I decided to use NING, rather than consider alternatives, whether this was a good decision or not, only time will tell. Hamza has now set one up and I've put a link to it on the blog. I'm still not totally sure how this will fit together and what will be the driver behind the community of practice but I think things will become clearer as the site develops.

A few people have told me that they'll be at the focus group which is good news but I'm hoping to get more by the time we run it.

I still need to finalise the plan but the day job keeps getting in the way, and I also need to think about how to fit in the work on the models side of it with the team. Hopefully things should start coming together with our first team meeting next week and our meeting with Rob from JISC!

Starting again!

2008-06-17T03:03:00.000-07:00

Well, after a change of personnel the DIVAS project is starting again. So far I've spent a lot of time talking to people and finding out what we really want to do.

So, today I've set up this blog and I've fed in a more technical blog that Ben has been posting to. I've sent an email to the Teaching and Learning Directors of the faculties asking them to a focus group - so far not a huge response but I have asked them to pass on the invite. Also I've invited all the project team and the project director to meetings once a month so we can all keep each other up to date.

Later on this week, hopefully the community of practice should be set up and then it'll be a push behind that. We have a meeting with Rob Bristow from Jisc on 3rd July and we should have a complete updated project plan by the end of the week.

It's been a bit of a slow start but hopefully things will speed up soon!