Learners lead the way

We received the final report back from AimHigher WM today, it made for interesting reading and demonstrates where the demo is going right / wrong. It seems learners like information dripped to them and also like more colourful sites (although they also say this is confusing to use...). The project will have to think about how this impacts on the demo site or whether the changes are simply reflected in the next stage of the project - the pilot.

At the start of the week I had a meeting with Sian and Jodie from the competitive workforce department. They are also working on employer engagement with the university and are interested in the project, they have their own employer database. I mentioned that the project is looking at ways to centralise this information, saving employers being contacted by different people keeping their own databases up to date. So far the project has found over 5 different employer databases within the university, they are used for different reasons but hold the same information.

As mentioned last week changes have been made to the demo site based around the pilot document I am writing. The project team are kept up to date with the changes through GoogleGroups. Some new pages have been created including registration pages and others have been changed. I hope they will get some good responses.

Thanks to feedback from the project team the project leaflet is going well and has had a total overhaul. It now includes a number of screenshots from the demo site which I wasn't going to do but it got some positive responses so as long as we are clear they are demonstration pages then we should be ok. I am hoping to get the leaflet confirmed as ok at the next team meeting so we can start using it for promotional purposes.

The SURF WBL-Way project is working with the HIVE repository project at Staffordshire university, as part of this work I have had to consider a number of case studies on how the project will be accessing information from the repository into lifeRay. There is a meeting on this at the start of next week. This also meant changes to the demo screens to clear things in my head. The case study document is now with the project manager so just waiting on feedback.

As I am not here the first week of August I am putting together a list of actions for the next team meeting and things that need to be discussed.

Summer?

It's the summer season at the university and colleges so a lot of staff are on holiday, and yes in two weeks time I too will be enjoying a short break. Which will be nice, especially after the rain we have had recently. The project team is data mining at the moment at each college identifying what information they hold and where it is held. I am working on what to do if the data doesn't exist (or exists in an unusable format). Also having to think about the pilot phase which involves checking out all the partner surveys and working out exactly what we want to know. It is looking like a bigger job than initially thought, need to work out how to keep questions short and interesting to the stakeholders. It is making me think more about the functionality and management of the lifeRay site too. I am planning on working on the support point a bit more over the next week.

Attended the fdf conference on Tuesday which made for interesting thinking, they have a number of resources that we could use in the support point, (employer case studies being the best) plus we could give them some of the materials we are creating (i.e. guidelines on validation). Saw a few members of Staffs Uni and SURF at the meeting and managed to do a bit of that project management nagging I seem to be getting a name for!