Monday 18 August 2008

Looking forward

After a short team meeting (due to it being Summer break) I went to see Shrewsbury on site last week to discuss what the project was planning as they missed the project meeting. It was a good thing I went as they reminded me it was not long to the ALT-C conference and that I needed to sort out the presentation for it. Time is just flying at the moment. We also discussed the idea of a launch party - this has been agreed to, it is just a matter of picking a date that the team can attend, and that gives us the conference facilities at Stafford. Once a date has been picked I am planning to speak to the Employer Engagement dept again about getting employers to attend.
As we move towards the end of the project we are still doing a lot of work on the Support Point - this includes more work on the portlet that links to the MIS data (TheSiS) and checking links to the Staffordshire website as the site has been updated and most of the URL's used by the Support Point have changed. We are also hoping to get some new portlets in place by the end of the project that link to HIVE, and I need to give some thought and investigation time into what information is used with the content that goes in (IMS 1.3 etc). As already mentioned as this is now core business work will continue beyond the project and work done in other projects will impact on what we can do in the Support Point.

Tuesday 5 August 2008

Employers are the way forward

Had an interesting meeting today with the Director of Sales and Student Recruitment. She is running an Employer Engagement Project that fits nicely with the work already taken within SURF WBL-Way. This project is on a larger scale than this project, however our experiences will be informing on the work, and it looks like the Support Point will be used to support Employer engagement beyond the projects initial scope once we have finished in October. It is good to see that the Support Point has a real value within the university beyond strategies and policies and the partner colleges involved in the project. Some of the changes being implemented by the Employer Engagement Project will have a direct impact on the Support Point, including extra fields in our Corporate Information Systems that will allow direct linking to learners and employers where the award is for a specific employer and a standard language that should be used when talking to employers.

We have a team meeting this week where we will be looking at promoting the site within Induction at the partner colleges, and also thinking about workshops that involve all the stakeholders. Perhaps we need to look at a "launch party"?

Oh, and I have confirmation that the new PebblePad will be installed at Staffordshire late August!