SURF WBL-Way

Supporting Work Based Learning Workshop

2009-11-25T13:14:00.002Z

Here at Staffordshire I still have a role in highlighting work we have done in Supporting Work Based Learning, as part of this a presentation has been written to help staff think about WBL and technologies available and to facilitate conversations in a workshop environment around supporting WBL, how do we manage the issues in supporting WBL on the ground?

Launch your own SlideRocket presentation!

New Version and moving forward

2009-05-18T10:16:00.002+01:00

We now have the latest liferay software running behind the scenes of the Support Point. We are hoping that this will resolve the connection problem we were getting with users logging on with different usernames from the same computer causing liferay to break down. The new version does not look much different from the old thanks to the CSS style we have used but there does seem to be a number of interesting features that could be worth a deaper look. This includes the fact that you can now set friends, see latest activity and also see & chat to others online at the same time as you. These features seem to link to what is becoming more familiar to users from sites such as Facebook and Elgg. I wonder how we can use it in the Support Point and whether it will help or hinder take up within the university and its partner colleges. Perhaps some of these new features will allow us to think about how we handle the registration of employers and non associate lectures at the partner colleges that also support the WBL process. I have also demonstrated the site to Burton college, again, and it would be interesting to see if they pick it up as a tool that can help them with the WBL process.

Linking systems and information

2008-10-27T10:39:00.003Z

Just had an interesting session with the head of Information Services, to talk about how the university handles course information and its different purposes. This is linked to the fact that during August we lost links to the course information from the website from within the Support Point. It raised some interesting points about looking at the reason behind existing databases, how they are very focused to different business purposes and whether it is right to expand their purpose. A big thing is if their purpose is expanded to include new audiences how is this managed? Are we going to start putting too much pressure on Faculties to manage this data?

This is a good point as the www.staffs.ac.uk has a definate marketing focus on the traditional learner, therefore both the course search and results are targeted at that type of person. With the Support Point the target is either employers or employees looking for awards in a particular sector, and rather than looking at what entry requirements they need they are more interested in progression information and location of study. So how is this managed? Information overload!

Successful Launch

2008-10-02T08:06:00.003+01:00

Well I am now fully recovered from yesterdays launch, which went well. We did have a lot of positive comments about the usefulness of the support point, although there where concerns about the usability of the site and how those uncomfortable with technology would find it. This concern was mainly focused around the use of the Forums. A few bugs were found in the system, but this was mainly due to work the technical team were doing the day before to make the site look more polished. On the whole a positive experience which shows a real need by staff for this tool and for the functionality it gives.
Here is a couple of the presentations given during the morning:

Prof Mark Stiles Welcome and Background

Fleur Corfield gives a brief breakdown of the Support Point

Testing for Wednesday

2008-09-26T14:08:00.002+01:00

With the launch coming up the technical team are working hard with testing to ensure everything works smoothly next week. We have over 30 people registered for the event with a number from the partner colleges, which is great news. The technical team even booked the room we are using for testing today so we were all sat at laptops going through what we were expecting to do on the Wednesday. Fortunately on the whole everything went well. There were a few bugs found in the system and I now have a few to dos to do from comments from the LDI team. This includes putting some images against the demo accounts so people can see how the forums work and making sure all the links work. Sam is going through and proof reading things and changing the look of the site, and is hoping to have this done by end of play Tuesday, cutting things a bit fine but as it is a spit and a polish will not effect functionality. I have put some simple questions in the forums for people to answer after the activities so we should get some meaningful feedback from the event too.

ALT-C 2008

2008-09-15T09:21:00.003+01:00

I am back in the office after a good week at ALT-C, even though the event was over three days last week I was still thinking about it on Friday and sharing my experience with colleagues through pebblepad. Hopefully my notes make sense! It was an interesting experience with lots of discussion around social networking and using web 2.0 tools to support learners, although most of the focus was still around traditional learners there were some talks specific to WBL, including the one we did during the graveyard session (9am the day after the conference dinner) we had a turn out of over 40 and presented along with a paper on supporting prisoners as learners, the development of a Fd supported across Wales in eCommerce for Small Businesses and understanding the Net Generation in Eastern Australia. I know the technical team have been working on HIVE over the last few weeks, and this is important if we want it to work correctly with the Support Point but with the Launch coming up soon I will need to check that everything is running well and data is correct. I also need to check the status of setting up the hardware and make sure that we have people from each of the colleges in the consortium. So far we have attendance from Stafford University, Stafford College and Burton on Trent.

Date set and planning ahead

2008-09-01T08:56:00.003+01:00

The event is set for 1st October, at Staffordshire University and will be held over a morning, with lunch at the end. I have now posted information about the event in the WBL Google Calendar that we created for the project, the Support Point itself and I am also looking to publicise it through the WBL Moodle site and using email and posters at partner colleges. The date is slightly short notice but fingers crossed people (learners, employers, mentors, tutors etc!) will be interested in attending.

This week I will aslo be preparing my presentation for ALT-C and getting ready for the monthly team meeting on Thursday.

Looking forward

2008-08-18T10:21:00.004+01:00

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.

Employers are the way forward

2008-08-05T10:41:00.002+01:00

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!

Getting Lost

2008-07-21T11:00:00.006+01:00

As I mentioned last Monday I attended the JISC 08 Innovation Forum. I attended the three sessions around sustainability, these sessions held some interesting conversations. I was interested to see the different models around supporting project outputs after the project ended. The first session showed how one institution had recognised a number of failures in developing project outputs beyond the initial projects (these were websites created around data sets). However they were more hopeful of future projects and had developed a model of generating income from subscriptions outside of the UK.
During the breaks in sessions more useful conversations took place, from discovering a new version of some software which might be of use to the project (PebblePad now pulls in information from the institutions MIS systems, and is being developed to pull information out of PebblePad to sites such as Monster / UCAS - does this mean we can pull information into the Support Point - and deliver it to employers etc?) to talking to librarians about the restrictive use of VLE's and allowing learners and other parties promoted "guest" access to different courses. I also discovered a plugin could be available for HIVE that will create RSS feeds for new content added, which would be very useful for the project.
On the title - well on the way back from Keele we were supposed to be going to Stoke station, but the taxi driver tried to take us to Crewe! We only noticed 5 miles from Crewe that we were going in the wrong direction, fortunately we left in enough time to catch the right connections.
The technical manager is off for the next week while the technical team are working towards embedding a FAQ Wiki into the Support Point.

Visiting

2008-07-14T12:43:00.003+01:00

The last few weeks have been spent publicising the work done in the project. The first event was last week at Bradford, part of supporting the SpaCED-FD project, this was a two day conference involving tutors, learners and employers. Those who attended showed a high level of interest in both the resources created and the support point and how it could be used to develop a support community beyond one institution. Unfortunately the same could not be said for the second event attended today, this event was held at Stoke college and hopefully the experiences and issues raised from this event will be raised on their blog. The main problem at this event was the lack of involvement employers & mentors appeared to have with the awards beyond the work based learning project. Another was ensuring tutors had access to the right systems at the university, and in this case were aware of what they should be able to access as opposed to what they could access.
Later this week I will be attending a JISC Event in Keele, where I am planning to look at sustainability beyond the life of a project. This is already looking good for the support point, with discussions with college staff on how the support point can be embedded into the learners induction so that they can continue to drive the site, and encourage tutors and employers to develop stronger relationships.

From acorns

2008-06-26T15:50:00.003+01:00

From wish lists back in 2007 ...to the Support Point getting the features in 2008...the team have worked hard and are still doing great work in finding useful data in their systems.

In the meantime take a quick peak at what a manager can see:

Keeping Fit

2008-06-16T13:11:00.002+01:00

Well the techie team has been working hard and its looking like they have the liferay performance issues licked. This was causing some problems with liferay only plodding on rather than running at full speed - giving problems for the pilot so hopefully they are now all sorted and people will no longer be experiencing a time lag in its use.
The project team meeting went well and I am pleased with the way the team is looking at different methods of keeping the employers & mentors engaged with the site, this has included two of the partners investigating sharing their attendance data with the Support Point.
I did a workshop last week at the Technology Supported Learning Conference at Staffordshire University around the Support Point. There was some interesting discussions around supporting stakeholders in WBL, and not many institutions seem to be involved in delivering the support given through the Support Point, and tutors seemed very interested in using it (or promoting the idea of it in their own institution). Hopefully the conference feedback will come back to me soon so I can use it in the ALT-C presentation.

Busy May

2008-06-03T08:41:00.004+01:00

I have had a busy May with lots of travelling to promote the SURF WBL-Way project and a week off to enjoy the first bit of sunshine for this year. We have received some good news today - we will be presenting a short paper at the ALT-C 2009 Conference in Leeds later this year.
Work has been progressing well with the Support Point, with enhancements added from comments at the last project meeting. I am looking at seeing if we can embed extra RSS feeds from Inute as a resource for both learners and tutors - this again would be linked to subjects that they are linked to. On a plus side JORUM resources will become easier to access with the launch of JORUM Open which will be happening in the future. We will have to consider which license we want to put resources into JORUM now - should anyone be able to access it or should it be limited to tutors etc as it is now? The biggest concern with our resources is that it includes Tutor guidelines. However HIVE should help with this allowing two IMS packages - 1 for the tutor and 1 for the learner, which can both be sent to JORUM as URLs.
The project is coming to an end in October so we want a system that can be built on and managed by the normal IS team. Even so it is hard to stop thinking about where we would like it to go next and how we can use it further within SURF. Still we need to get this first stage completed before moving forward.
We got some positive feedback from our project update which was nice, and I am planning to catch up with the other project summary that was sent out by the Programme Manager, David, as soon as I can.

Together we will find a way

2008-05-08T13:30:00.002+01:00

Well it has been an interesting week with a meeting with Corporate Information and the team working on the university MyPortal project. As Sam and I were talking to the team it was obvious that there was some overlap in the work being done and that, theoretically at least, portlets could sit within both the MyPortal and Support Point. However there were some very obvious, and already acknowledged issues.
MyPortal can not deal with non university linked stakeholders (i.e. college support staff, employers, mentors etc) this is partly due to the fact that it is heavily designed to support Staffordshire University learners and tutors and partly due to the licensing agreement for the backend system. Another main influencing factor is the lack of technology to support Personalised Fedorated Access - along with the need for each institution involved to understand their existing Identity Management. The Support Point has been able to work around this, as it is opensource and we have given users the ability to self register if they sit outside Staffordshire University. There are also combined resource limitations between the two teams.
It was interesting to see the University view and how feedback was handled between the university and the MyPortal team, and to see what portlets they have developed / are developing. We have offered to pass on any portlets they might find useful - including the ones designed around the repository. They have already been able to link users to groups by faculty/award/ module for targeted announcements (something we are looking at) but the biggest step forward is the agreement on both sides to see if we can link together so if a user has signed on to one system and they go to the other, they do not have to sign on again. It seems small steps forward is the answer.

Embedding, Reuse and Life

2008-04-30T10:02:00.004+01:00

It has been an interesting two weeks, with a number of meetings with different people and writing a new bid for a project linked to this one. So where to start?

Had a meeting with the FCET elearning coordinator as a follow up from the last FCET meeting and had a wide range of discussions around elearning, supporting WBL and the use of emerging technologies within the university for all. This linked very nicely into the SURF WBL project and the WBL-Way project as they have asked for a "hands off" approach, where employers are told about the service, I have created the guide and passed it on to them. Will have to see if this approach gets any more people involved. At the same time I reminded those already engaged with the project that things were moving forward and not to forget to use the Support Point - and sent them a copy of the same guide.

I also managed to use the JISC Conference in Birmingham to talk to a number of people about the project, and leave leaflets about it and the WBL project on the JORUM stand! This was an interesting day, especially those talks focusing on identity management which is where I see the next big thing for the university as we become more engaged with supporting WBL.

Other meetings I have attended have been around supporting WBL within the University and on Foundation Degrees such as Business Start Up, the department involved in delivering this award has shown an interest in using the Support Point as a central contact point for mentors to talk to learners on a group basis and the use of materials from the repository in the Learning Through Work Site. They also have a copy of the registeration guide!

Oh and Sam and I have managed to complete the Project Update document!

Reusing in action

2008-04-10T17:18:00.003+01:00

I know that this blog focuses on the SURF WBL-Way project but as I was promoting this project to our Computing, Engineering and Technology faculty I was pleased to hear that they had successfully used outputs from the SURF WBL project and that they had been able to use content from the Mentor Handbook in a presentation to help mentors involved in Work Based Learning understand their roles more. I am hoping to get a copy of the presentation and the revised Mentor Handbooks from validation to add to the repostitory and then share with everyone registered in the Support Point. At this meeting I was asked to work on creating a support document for Employers so that they could see why they would use the Support Point and how they can register so that they can tell their employers without the face to face sessions used by the pilot. They were happy with the fact that this was a pilot and problems would be expected but felt the value of the Support Point outwayed any teething problems they might have.

I also managed to find out that there are still problems with faculties access templated documents for SURF colleges rather than for Staffordshire University, traditional, learners. I need to chase this one up so that they can also be accessed through the Support Point.

The project meeting was this morning and feedback has been possitive about initial pilot experiences. Two of the colleges are actively promoting the support point with employers, learners, tutors and mentors, with the final college promoting it in the next two weeks. We had a short discussion based around how the Support Point was developing and how it matched the initial project plan. We are very pleased with how it is going but recognise that some problems will not be resolved in the project as hoped these include:- authentication of support staff at colleges, service access to information at colleges to get information, and information not consistant across partner colleges.

It was felt that users at partner colleges needed a clear message sent out that the Support Point is an information access point rather than a tool where they input information about their learners.

Mark mentioned that with HarvestRoad becoming part of JiuntiLabs, it looks like we will be able to get a built in SCORM player for HIVE that will work with our IMS packages, and Mark is looking at seeing if we can be involved in being Beta testers for this software. This would take a great deal of effort out of inputting all the WBL objects in the repository.

Plymouth, mentors, work based learning and Blogging

2008-04-07T08:57:00.002+01:00

What a title but I think I should have covered it all! Mark and I went down to the Plymouth e-Learning conference, where Mark was the Key Note speaker. This had a lot of interesting things going on around work based learning, control and innovation (based on Marks talk), and "Web 2.0". Plymouth have a JISC project called Uspace, where they are looking at using iGoogle as a portal for their learners, and it will be interesting to see how they link that to university systems and authentication, at the moment most tools they are using appear to be those linked to Google, although they also link to their internal elgg installation. Another interesting point will be whether employers let learners access it at work (barriers on control/ what is learning and what is social). They have taken the approach that each partner college has their own tab within iGoogle - this is something that we will be looking at during the next meeting.

Other interesting issues linked to: Will learners really use devices they have for entertainment/social networking for learning? Previous studies have shown this to be unlikely so will we be able to encourage technology relating to learning as well as their other devices - or can we piggie back on devices they use for work? Are they happier using work/ personal devices as opposed to learning/ personal devices? No easy answers were there but still need to be considered and investigated.

The conference showed a move towards blogging in everyday learning, with learners now starting to complain that they have to reflect on too much. Where blogging has not joined the mainstream feedback shows the reason they like to do it is because it is new and different. I found it interesting one study appeared to have written their own blogging tool with a template for feedback in a certain way, the learners using this complained about the limited functionality and they had not been asked that if they had been given the template to go into their own blogging tool would they have been happier?

As we look at the Support Point and consider how the learner is being encouraged to blog their experiences will we have to think about linking learner blogs to different modules? And will the learner have to start thinking about different blogs for those modules? How will they be able to manage this experience?

Anyway enough of the questions!

Moving on up

2008-03-27T09:06:00.003Z

Have had a busy few weeks, and a few more ahead with the pilot taking off, features being rated with the technical team, and attending a few conferences. Last week was particularly interesting as I met one of the employers involved in the pilot based in Shrewsbury, plus one of the tutors involved. I am not going to say much here, just read Shrewsburys blog which should be out today or tomorrow.

This week I have been looking again at tools on the web that could be used to assist in learning and could also be embedded into the Support Point as tools for the learner etc. This included investing Diigo (nice) Shelfari (OK) and Squidoo (very good, similar to Pageflakes, and have set up a WBL page - which is referenced now in Diigo and Facebook) It is nice to see how some of these tools now fit together, and it will be interesting to see how they work for dissemination of project work.

Thanks to the project team rating features for the project on the roles of Learner and Educational Support Staff/ Tutor we have been able to put a plan together for developing the features and releasing them into the support point. Some of the features overlap with Mentor and Managers so progress should be fairly quick once we get started. We can't rate employer type features until a few more get involved in the project and see what is available.

On the plus side it looks like calendars in the University and the linking to online tools and software within the University is now being investigated beyond the project which should help with getting the information into the Support Point in a usuable format.

Meetings and Issues

2008-03-13T13:59:00.004Z

Had an interesting week that has involved a get together at Birmingham for those involved in JISC projects (see http://cetisllg.ning.com/) and a project meeting within two days of each other. Found that some of the same issues in our project are reflected in the community around work based learning including:

Although Fds follow fdf models during validation by delivery they have changed, including the loss of the mentor role due to the nature of the learner and/or employer
Learners can get conflicting information due to being part of a FE and a HE institution
Learners & Tutors are confused about resources and support tools available to them from the validating institution
Employers don't like other employers to know they are engaged with WBL
Employers only want limited involvement in WBL
Applications supporting learner administration are often not linked and involve duplication of work
Good practice can only be replicated where all the conditions are the same, and therefore often needs modifying to fit the new purpose (audience, delivery method etc)
Learners don't have access to similar technologies in the work place
Course descriptors are often modified immediate need
Course support documentation created to support validation and not the stakeholders involved in the award.
Access and Authentication a big problem, not just across consortium's but with mentors, employers etc needing to access materials/ data

So its a list, a long one and most need some serious thought to being addressed. In most cases there needs to be a change in Business processes, and a change in policy (and to quote from Mark Stiles, there needs to be a change in perspective from restricting to enabling).

On a lighter note it is good to see the ning group grow and some of the inputs have been very interesting.

Calendars

2008-03-10T11:06:00.002Z

I am thinking about ways of making life more easy and centralising information about university calendars and then how they will fit within the Support Point, the University website and its own portal. I am really pleased with the calendar spreadsheet I have started and shared with the Student Information team, who seem happy with it. I will have to look at a way of sharing it with the community.

Start Spreading the Word

2008-02-28T13:15:00.003Z

As the project moves forward there is more need to spread the word, one opportunity made available to us was through the SURF Curriculum & Qualifications Group Meeting. This meeting had its focus on helping inform colleagues in SURF about efforts around employer engagement, with a great talk by the fdf; Clare Stoney. This was a very interesting meeting about how both the colleges and the university need to look at strategies on engaging employers. We were able to get everyone there to take a leaflet about the project, and it looks like Clare has given us extra points to think about - and given us some backing on items we have already raised (like customer relationship management across SURF for employers).

Our next main opportunity will be in June, where we will be involved in a University event "Technology Supported Learning in the 21st Century: Issues and Paradigms in Transformative Tertiary Education" (for more information follow the link). We are hoping to run a workshop demonstrating employer engagement with SURF through the use of the support point.

Student Information

2008-02-21T08:58:00.004Z

Had an interesting meeting with Student Information yesterday, initially about how the University delivers it's calendars and how the calendars are used for funding etc. It seems that the calendar is not just one thing that is agreed at the beginning of an academic year but a constantly growing, changing entity, and if this is the case how can it be used easily across systems? Obviously the easiest approach is to use the repository to centrally store a ICS file and then that file is called by different systems. There is a problem with this in that most systems using ICS files require an import of that file, so then we have to think about ways to create an automatic import once the file version has changed (when necessary) which may not be easy thinking about all the different systems at the University... This needs much more thought than originally perceived.

After some discussion around calendars we got on to the University's portal for full time students, MyPortal, which is something that has been running for 2 years at the University now. This was interesting as some of the features from the Support Point are already used in MyPortal, with differing success. The interesting ones included showing results to learners after they have been confirmed, and displaying learner history in a user friendly way. This can obviously be replicated across the different WBL stakeholders. They are also talking about taking MyPortal to learners outside of the University and to those studying at colleges and work place in September. This has an impact on the projects sustainability; we don’t want learners to have to go to two different points to get very similar information. We now need to think of ways in which the MyPortal and the Support Point can complement each other..

Ratings

2008-02-15T15:12:00.003Z

The team have worked this week on setting the ratings for features through the project WIKI rating them from very important to not important at all. The team went through and rated them on their own and then I went in to view them and whether they all match. It seems that the project team agree on must of the features ratings, however there were some interesting points raised by one team who had experience as a learner at Staffordshire University. The three most important Learner area functions are: Information on Modules they are studying now, Information on progression routes, and linking to support documents in HIVE.

I am wondering if the next stage - looking at the tutor/support staff section should involve tutors etc in the pilot should be rating the features or whether the project team should just review the interviews that took place at the start of the project. Has anyone else thought about this?

All Quiet

2008-02-13T07:45:00.004Z

Work has been slowly moving on without blog updates, sorry folks. We have had to make some decisions on the HIVE software and how we get our learning objects out of it. We were hoping to access IMS packages from HIVE but there are a few problems with that. Mainly the IMS/Scorm viewer in HIVE is not displaying objects in the way expected, and now it also looks like without a big upgrade to Blackboard they will not be able to be used in there either! I am trying to think about work arounds that won't involve putting all the HTML files in - and darn it the only thought I can come up with is using frames....there has to be a better option out there.
Our portal has now got some users on it and we have had some useful feedback - especially on the use of forums in the community, and the fact that the permissions did not work as we expected. Thankfully the LifeRay community have come to the rescue with some work arounds - thanks guys. Calling on experts when needed means that the development team don't have spend lots of time investigating the back end of the software.
We had a project meeting last week, where the technical team have confirmed that they now have their own blog, and I will certainly be putting the link up here as soon as I get it. The project team are working together to prioritise the different features requested for learners over this week and by Friday they should have chosen the features most important to the success of the portal. They are using the project WIKI and will be blogging their experiences too.

Deja Vu

2008-01-18T10:38:00.000Z

The project team are now working towards inducting employers, mentors, learners and tutors into the support point. Rather interesting this has highlighted some standard issues (some of which were raised in our eXchange for Learning projects (X4L & SURF WBL), including IT fatigue, unclear roles in support foundation degrees (see Burtons Blog), and lack of learner knowledge of available tools available via the University. One thing can certainly be said of this project, we have found that these problems just keep coming up and have to be faced and dealt with. Thankfully that is the main role of the support point, delivering information where it is needed and helping those involved in WBL understand how they fit in. Ideally it will be used to reduce the technologies the stakeholders will be aware of (they will, of course, still be in the background) - one point of access to the tools and information available. For example the repository will be a tool they will use but wont need to know anything about, it will be delivering content to them as they request it using the support point as a front end. The same could be said from any MIS such as Dolphin, Frame-Up etc.

Happy New Year

2008-01-10T08:10:00.000Z

We are now fully into the new year and its starting off with some interesting posts from other JISC projects, mainly SPLASH who are looking at different social networking technologies for their project and have come across some interesting software. Their links are well worth a peek.
The project team meeting has been cancelled for this month but the team are still working hard, Stoke have been making progress on finding out about initial thoughts from end users on the support point, fingers crossed that will be blogged soon. Also, from looking at statistics the PageFlakes page is bringing more traffic to our blog and raising awareness of the project. Still not getting much feedback from the community but I am forever hopeful! The Wiki is taking a while to get going, but as meetings take place at the colleges this should become more active. We will have to see.
I am talking with different departments about institutional calendars and seeing if they are progressing beyond the traditional word/pdf files so that they can be shared through the support point as well as other methods (website, email etc). Plus it would bring all information into one place (open days, term dates, exam timetables, award events etc) rather than in different places.
Other than that I am down to London next week for the Engage Conference and presenting at the JISC conference the week after, which is keeping me busy.

Handing over control

2007-12-17T10:20:00.000Z

As the project moves forward I am handing over the blogging to the techies for the next few weeks as they let you know what they are up to - although you still might hear a little from me.

I have set up a couple of new tools for the project, there is a public page in pageflakes (http://www.pageflakes.com/surfwblway/) that lets you see all the blogs, project calendars and websites from one page. I have also set up a private WetPaint WIKI for discussing the support point features. This is after our unsuccessful attempt to use it for the last project. I really want to see a more positive outcome to using it this time - so fingers crossed. If all goes well with the pages this could also go public as part of the project dissemination.

Development Work

2007-12-06T15:25:00.001Z

As the development work takes place for SURF WBL-Way the blog has been really quiet. Sorry folks! There is not much to report, the technical team are still working at tidying the code and the database and I am working at trying to get content into the universities repository (HIVE) in a way that will be usable.

I have got a number of learning activities in - over 35, but with another 50 to go the task seems never ending. Plus there are some problems with how Blackboard reads IMS packages, for some reason putting the Base attribute after the HREF attribute rather than before it. Hopefully this will be a quick fix otherwise it really impacts on the work I have been doing. The other main issue is how HIVE previews SCORM packages, with the embedding of Reload with its Explorer programme I was hoping for SCORM to be using the Reload previewer. Unfortunately not which means that at the moment the SCORM packages only show their top level navigation. I have demonstrated to the technical team here how Reload Previewer works and how Jorum displays IMS packages but it looks like we will have to purchase a commercial product to cover this gap in the software.

Pilot has taken off

2007-11-15T11:12:00.000Z

Well the pilot is now up and running, anyone interested in registering as an employer, learner, tutor or support staff can do so. While this has been going on I have tried to put a list of all the features together of everything we have discussed in meetings. This has been put in GoogleDocs (as it is a document that others in the project will need to contribute on). This list will form the project plan for implementation of features that will occur while the pilot is running. I am now looking forward to feedback on the document and the launch of the pilot.

On an aside I have avoided using GoogleDocs since the start of the project as its functionality seemed limited and there was no way to add folders, since then they seem to have spent some time on it and now there is a way to add content to folders etc so it might be worth thinking about again as a store for documents with the project as GoogleGroups now has over 60 documents in it and is getting difficult to manage.

Next week I am off to the CETIS conference which should be interesting. I get to take my business cards, which have finally arrived too, helping with getting the projects name out there.

Helping friends

2007-11-13T08:35:00.000Z

Went out and about yesterday with Mark to talk to Bradford college about their HE in FE project that is using some of our content. It was an interesting day that reinforced some of the points raised at last weeks Project Management training when it comes to writing work packages and using GANTT charts. I know I need to spend a bit more time now on the next stage of the project and the features that need to be added to the support point once it has launched (still waiting on that one!). It also reminded me to send the work packages for the project to the Programme Manager.

It is always interesting to see how the same problems occur for different projects, often these revolve around senior management support, lack of internal communication, and unforseen technical issues. These problems always impact on the success of a project, especially on its timings. We have been lucky with communication with the project, by choosing and using tools to communicate (thanks Google!) from the start the team have always had ways of keeping in touch, along with the use of monthly meetings. We are also fully supported through senior management thanks to ensuring the project fits with strategy within the university and the partner colleges. We seem to have been hit by the technical issues bug though and I am not sure that there is any way that this could be managed any better, but I will certainly be working at it!

Pilot in bar

2007-11-09T11:03:00.001Z

Yep, the pilot is still on the runway! Technical problems seem to be the order of the day and they keep on coming at us. The pilot is now looking at launching next Monday which is 3 weeks late, but as they say better late than never! Still I have been working at developing my project management/ managing skills (including planning and risk analysis - oh the irony!) with a day and a half of training (thanks JISC for a good day). The days were very interesting and talk about shared experience about the project management was useful.

Now that the project update is out of the way I have been investigating PDP within the university on behalf of the fdf. This has involved my trying out PebblePAD with some colleagues, and I am having fun with that at the moment. It seems to be very useful for collaborative work and this is the bit we are testing in the department.

Other than that I am reviewing the Staffs Uni handbooks for awards, I am finding this useful for the project and the repository work I am involved in. The main problem appears to be that there is no standard format for these documents in SURF although the university has some guidelines for full time, undergraduate courses based at the university these guidelines do not work well for courses offsite.

Plane holts on runway

2007-10-30T10:25:00.000Z

The launch of the pilot turned out to be a bit disappointing with a few technical problems that could not be resolved as quickly as we hoped. Fortunately the pilot launch coincided with half term and it turned out difficult to contact employers due to them taking time off, or staff needed to initiate contact had time off. This week I am hoping for a more successful story as the technical team work at fixing the last few bugs, and employers start to see the system. Release features are going to be limited but with the technical team still working hard the features will soon be growing. To begin with tools such as forums and calendars will be up and running along with linking to learner information from the university systems and courses run through SURF and Staffordshire University. At this point there is no link to college systems.

The one thing that is bugging me the most at this point is that Staffordshire University give access to tutors teaching Staffordshire awards at partner colleges access to University systems such as email & MyPortal, as they are funded by the university. Unfortunately support staff at the colleges don't not get the same level of access and as such are limited in their access to the support point at this stage, even at a most basic level this raises the question - how can support staff at partner colleges fully support learners on Staffordshire awards at those colleges when they can't use the systems themselves? From a technical perspective is it possible to get lifeRay to look at different LDAP systems to validate support staff rather than use just the university LDAP?

In the meantime I am working with Sam putting the final touches to our Project Update document for JISC - although time is running out on us to get it in before the deadline as Mark will need to take a look before it goes. We also have the monthly project meeting this week so any feedback and comments on the site can be collated there.

Communication

2007-10-18T13:02:00.000+01:00

As we move towards the pilot phase of the project I have been talking about the experiences we have had to date with the Information Services team. Staffordshire Uni has these events where we showcase what we have been up to for the last year. It was very interesting, not only to hear peoples own views on how communication has been "managed" within work based learning and how useful the support point would be (always good to know!) but also to help clarify and summarise the experiences of the project to date. Namely:

Communication between institutions and employers is limited
Employers often feel that the institution is being paid to do a job - so why are they being asked to get involved?
Often we assume tutors know which employer a learner is associated with, and this is not always the case
Mentors are often forgotten after the start of a course
Setting up a foundation degree can be a long and complicated experience

Everything appears to be flying towards a positive start to the pilot with the techies working hard at resolving a number of issues around lifeRay including the difference between private / public in a community and also how to link to different communities.

Pilot at airport but not ready to fly!

2007-10-05T08:38:00.001+01:00

Over the next few weeks I will be trying all the cliche's for pilot and flying that I can! This is because the project has reached that important stage of running the pilot. Yesterdays meeting made something clear, employers interested in doing the pilot under two main conditions:

They did not want to meet other employers! this was due to a fear that employers would loose their 'edge' if others knew what they were doing
They did not want to have to go to partner colleges for any events

This has made planning the pilot rather interesting, and time consuming for the project partners. As the development team work hard to meet the project deadlines for the pilot the rest of the project team are writing a short pilot plan, including a script for the "welcome" meeting so there is a consistant feel to it.

I have started writing the project update for JISC with the help of Sam (technical) and Mark (budget). It is good to see that the project is still running within the planned timescales, however this relies heavily now on the technical teams achievements. Some items that we would like to have released for the first stage of the pilot will be added as the support point develops due to the small size of our development team.

You will be the first to know when the pilot goes live, and the features available.

Personalisation and Social tools

2007-09-14T11:35:00.000+01:00

This is more of a general blog about what I have been up to this week rather than a total focus on the project. I have been to several meetings, including one covering the "dynamic prospectus" with our marketing department. Unfortunately the quotes are needed as this seems to be an idea at the moment rather than something that feels tangible. Further meetings with corporate information confirmed this impression, with their investigation into XCRi.
Another thing that has been keeping me busy is pushing the marketing of the project, including setting up the portal with the right information to be shown on leaflet screen grabs and creating Flash Demos from Wink of both the site and of HIVE and how it fits in to the site and local VLE's
On a side note to all this is the impact of ALT-C, and how people use social software. Since attending the conference I have had some friend requests for facebook, and as a result I have set up a second facebook account for my work persona. There are a number of groups I have got involved in which have got me attached to a few more blogs. In particular Helen Keegans EduSpaces Blog and Steve Wheelers e-learning blogspot have been interesting to read (and added to my Google Reader list) as well as adding myself to the Hood 2.0 facebook group. Another tool I have had my interest revived in is PebblePad - which seems like a handy tool.

ALT-C 2007

2007-09-07T07:46:00.000+01:00

As you can see this week I have been attending the ALT-C conference in Nottingham with some colleagues. This has been an interesting event covering some useful subjects for the project including methods of evaluation, although some ideas seemed very restrictive (i.e. just using positive interviewing to gather feedback). It was good to see some very controlled evaluation projects out there, which is difficult for our project but still made for interesting listening. The sessions seemed to be more around the experience for the learner rather than the technology itself which is good as this links into what we are trying to achieve with this project, the other interesting one was how frameworks fit with simply good learning and not with the technology that was being demonstrated. This was particularly clear with the sessions on wikis and I am still to be convinced that they are a useful tool for learning. The main problem seems to be a learners reluctance to change someones work (and who can blame them?). Podcasting is another one where someone mentioned something I have experienced myself - by uploading learning material (in my case learning Italian) onto my MP3 player it would appear during my random playing of music which was annoying and not something I like to experience, this was reflected in their study of learners. I am more likely to use my phone for this content as I don't use it as an MP3 player even though it has the fuctionality, but this requires learners to be using different technologies for different purposes (i.e. MP3 player for entertainment, phone for learning - and how likely is this?).

flickr photo by Fleur Corfield

Anyway back to the project!
We have now got a new version of lifeRay running on the test server, we are working on getting the look and feel right as the CSS is different in the new version. The Business school have expressed an interest in using the portal for the work placement learners, allowing all of them to access the information in the school relating to that module. Hopefully we will be able to cover this for them reasonably close to the start of the evaluation period - the more the better! We also have a meeting with CI to find out about linking through to course information and learner study history.
For enrolment it looks like we are OK about linking to the university login information, however we are having to think about how we validated who an employer is - it might have to be something the learner does - i.e. notification to learner that the employer has registered and wants to see their information.

Forums

2007-08-28T14:25:00.000+01:00

Had a meeting this morning to discuss access and management of the forums within lifeRay. The main solution to managing the forums is to focus the information much like we already do in Blackboard. Thus tutors will be managing something they already take control of in the VLE. This way link tutors manage the overall generic work based learning forums and the subject specific forums are managed by tutors involved on the course. In order to ensure that the correct tutors get the right permissions we need to ensure that the right information is collected at registration (and kept up to date by the user). We need to ensure we cover main job roles in each of the institutions and the faculties/departments each institution has.
One bonus would be if we can show the different forums under different areas so that they could be under the generic WBL Support page and then the Learner sub category (and those categories under it) are also displayed under Learners Public area as the main category. This is being investigated by the technical team.
The technical team have managed to investigate further into the use of LDAP within lifeRay and copying data across (very like the tool in HIVE) into a local database and it is looking good. It could be an easier issue than previously thought (thanks to the new version of lifeRay - this should be up on our severs by the end of the week). We are planning a meeting with the Corp. Info people for two weeks time so that we can start looking at linking with their data too.

Timescales and planning

2007-08-22T12:32:00.000+01:00

Had a few meetings recently, and will be having a few more, about the functionality of the support point and what will be possible for the end of September. The main one is LDAP authentication of users to access data from the university. We will need learners and tutors to go through this process to prove they are who they say they are. We need some way of verifying the employers now :)
Other than authentication we are looking at different ways of giving access to the forums and prioritising the different functions of the support point. To get everything together at once might be difficult but once the pilot is out functionality can be added as we go along. We do need to think about evaluation after the Christmas holidays to look at what everyone thinks, how often they have used it and also if they have any extra requirements that have not been considered.
Rather depressingly I have had no response from those sector skills councils I contacted about RSS feeds so it is looking like another load of emails.

Moving Closer

2007-08-13T10:25:00.000+01:00

After a well rested week off I was busy last week catching up on everything the team had been up to as I missed a team meeting. I have also worked at updating the Google Group with all the registration screen shots and what information will be used for each login.

The project will be using its own database for the pilot phase of the project due to the time/ staff restrictions in place and also due to data protection issues. This is mainly because learners don't have to give employers access to their study information even if they have paid for it. This also allows the database to be used for other purposes in the future (i.e. Careers/ Competitive Workforce/ Marketing etc). It is important that we make it clear to all stakeholders involved in the pilot that the information in the site will be viewable by other users (mentors, learners, employers, tutors etc).

Everyone has given the thumbs up to the project leaflet so copies are now being printed and will be going out to project partners and to university staff.

The HIVE meeting went well, I was able to use it easily to upload some learning objects from the last project, however it was less obvious if IMS packages were used how they would be viewable through VLE's etc. The case studies really helped and also gave other departments ideas on how they would be using the repository.

There was also a meeting with AimHigher as we discussed their involvement in the project pilot phase. It was agreed that their role would be more as advisors with regards to setting up the pilots but they will be in charge of any focus groups.

I have contacted a number sector skill councils, based on their websites, about the possibility of them setting up RSS feeds to both their news and events items.

Learners lead the way

2007-07-19T09:05:00.000+01:00

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?

2007-07-12T07:41:00.000+01:00

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!

Innovating e-learning Event

2007-06-20T13:27:00.000+01:00

Last week was a busy one, wasn't very well for a lot of it and had Friday off to see mum in hospital (she is out now). I aslo participated with Mark Stiles and Richard Benefer in a JISC online conference, "Innovating e-learning", we were presenting under the Supporting LifeLong Learning Theme with the presentation based on how we promote work based learning (WBL) and how our project is looking to support wbl stakeholders. We had some interesting comments/ thoughts/ outputs including:

Being able to point people to JORUM and SURF WBL outputs
Communication is vital for WBL
Institution tools (i.e. VLE's) are not suitable vehicles for sharing information with employers
Understanding and Supporting the mentor role is still difficult for some institutions
Ownership of Learner data - Employer or Learner owned?
Getting the Employer to understand:
- The role of the FE college outside of the more traditional context (16 -19)
- Understanding the roles of HND against Foundation Degrees
SME and bigger companies have different needs for training
Difficult to access Work Based Learners access to computers
Accessibility of tools being used is important
Sharing good practice across HE and FE is vital

Engage

2007-06-08T07:52:00.000+01:00

Thanks to our presentation at the Welsh conference we have become involved in a working group (WBL/Programme Delivery Group) for employer engagement, engage (a Higher Education Authority funded employer engagement project), I presented at the meeting held this week at Loughborough University and spoke about some of the experiences of the original WBL project, on the AimHigher report the WBL-Way project had commissioned and also on the experiences of project partners when talking about supporting work based learning at HE level in FE. Some interesting things were discussed at the meeting:

Employer definitions of WBL are varied and confused

Employers want students fit for purpose, interested in courses with accreditation at modular level

Need to look at Change Management approach to learning, considering company strategies in developing courses for individuals

Employers not interested in point in time qualifications but in capability and confidence in their employees (qualification output but not goal of training).
Case studies are important to help employers, learners and mentors understand their roles in WBL
Often large companies have outsourced Human Resources, IT etc so it is important for the WBL-Way project to develop a Staff Development Area rather than a personnel or HR area (this links back to the last WBL-Way project meeting)
Templates and guidelines would be considered useful, this included the UfI's learning contract, there was an interest expressed about how Staffordshire University looked at mentoring (I need to sort out the last projects documents on mentoring and send them to the group).

The engage project has already created a number of useful outputs, including developing a WBL-Journey for the Employee mindmap which I have passed on to the WBL-Way project partners.

The WBL-Way project had a team meeting this week, still keeping to the first Thursday in each month, and we managed to get one partner senior manager to attend it - a real achievement! It is looking like this will lead to further meetings about how we can fit our project into their own strategies. Will keep you posted!

e-learning at the cusp

2007-05-31T07:54:00.000+01:00

Went to an event held at Stoke campus yesterday, once again it raised the issue of the use of Web 2.0 in an educational context, and the idea of the student being in control of their learning - to the point one institution calls their learners "researchers". Another interesting presentation was Mark Stiles' 'Living with the Uncontrollable' his framework made me think about what tools should the institution recognise, embed in the learning and take control of.

This project has been looking at providing one point of access to a number of stakeholders of not only institutional information but information personal to that stakeholder (i.e. blogs / rss feeds/ favourites (del.icio.us)), this information would not be controlled by the institution but just displayed by lifeRay. This is the best solution to encourage stakeholders to use the access point as a single reference for those either unfamiliar with information available to them or for those who need one area for all of their information.

As stakeholders gain familiarity with the information we can provide to them the more I wonder whether we need to take this a step further and look beyond the project.....allowing the institutional information to be accessed through authenticated rss feeds? Or using standard widgets which would allow them to be plugged into those tools we are using for project management (Google homepage, yahoo!, Flock, MS Live)? I will have to revisit this thought once we have managed to have a (successful!) pilot of the support access point.

Useful Links
Google Gadgets (Personalised Homepage) : http://code.google.com/apis/gadgets/
Yahoo! Widgets: http://widgets.yahoo.com/workshop/
MS Live Gadgets: http://microsoftgadgets.com/

Information Information Information

2007-05-14T08:42:00.000+01:00

Well the course descriptions are looking like, that to begin with at least, the information will be at university level, with links to the college websites. In most cases it does not look like the colleges have a database of course information, or a single point of contact for employers trying to find information on local HE courses. This again can be a problem for the project.

Managed to attend a SURF meeting last week and disseminated information about the project, we have been asked to run an event for tutors on the ground in the near future. It is looking like we might be able to squeeze into an existing training day as it links to the QAA looking at FE's support for HE. Have found a hidden bonus database held at the university outside of the main corporate information which includes information on validation and foundation degrees and lets people know the status of the awards.

The project has been worried about the terms used in both HE and FE and are trying to build a glossary. Due to the university having a Portal we have started this off by saying as a project we are creating a "Work Based Learning Support Point" rather than calling it a portal. We have also made the decision that we will be going ahead with the use of lifeRay as the software to support the project.

Course Information

2007-05-04T11:58:00.000+01:00

One of the things raised as a task is to look at Course descriptors and how they are handled at the different colleges and the university. This is interesting as a quick evaluation of websites shows the same foundation degree has two different course descriptors - depending which college is delivering it. When we look at putting this information into a link in a portal showing foundation degrees run by the consortium do we link to the course information held by the colleges or the information held by the university? From a good will point of view we could look at both - but that could get confusing. How do we handle this information? Perhaps a main link to the unversity generic descriptor then links to the local colleges information (but that would have to assume that the college information is held in a database with matching codes). Perhaps the colleges information (and the unversities) should be pushed to the repository before going to the portal?

Settings and Permissions

2007-04-23T07:48:00.000+01:00

I have been working on trying to set up a HR Managers area in the test portal (LifeRay), a Managers area and a Learners area. Before completing this hit a couple of fundermental issues for different groups seeing simular information and also sharing information across users. I think it is based on my understanding of roles and communities within the portal so even with permissions across groups the different users could not see the same information, and the end user could do too much across the portal, as we are hoping to make it mostly a push site. Hopefully Sam will be able to sort it out. We have managed to give the portal the same colour scheme as the project website which is nice :) I have set up a HR Managers area with loads of information in it that seems to make sense. I have passed the information on to the team to check out and also now waiting to see what they think of the portal.

Presentations and Use Cases

2007-04-16T14:11:00.000+01:00

I have (fingers crossed) now finished the final report for the SURF WBL project so now I can put that project to bed, oh no how could I forget dissemination?! Have a number of events coming up relating to both the SURF WBL project and the SURF WBL-Way project. Off to Bradford this week to help contribute to a project that is planning to use the learning objects from the SURF WBL project within a personal learning space for students on Foundation Degrees. Next week involves a trip to Taunton and the week after I am spending some time in Wales. I have a number of presentations, workshops and papers to put together which is going to keep me busy. We are also planning to publicise the projects using the in house newsletter IS Connections.

SURF WBL-Way need not feel neglected - I am working hard with the LDI team to try and get a working demonstration in place for the portal. This includes getting the layout to look good and the tools to look useful. A main start was the logo selection at the last project meeting and sitting down with Sam to think about Use Cases based on the partner interviews and also on the report by AimHigher. Meanwhile the project partners are working at identifying gaps in our supporting materials to go on the portal.

Spring time

2007-04-05T13:40:00.000+01:00

Spring is in the air, portals are up and running, things are looking sunny in the project world of SURF WBL-Way.

For the last few weeks Sam and I have been looking at the employer database, now that we have spoken to the Corporate and Student information teams we have a better idea of how things fit together and can now push something to Mark and back to the Corporate information team.

The marketing team have managed to come up with a logo we are all happy with (bar the colour) so will be able to get that up on our site in the next two weeks (the marketing contact has the next week on holiday) and it can also go onto our demonstration portal. The team meeting went well, with ideas being spoken about how to get marketing involved from the different colleges, and at what stage that should happen. We spoke about getting the demo a bit more polished before showing it externally so I have two days planned with Ray to get it looking good with demo content.

From the very begining..

2007-03-27T14:09:00.000+01:00

Due to the creation of materials for supporting foundation degrees in the SURF WBL project we were contacted by CWT the Coventry Chamber of Commerce Training firm. They were given our details from foundation degree forward, one of our project partners for both the WBL project and the WBL-Way project. It is good to know that our materials are being disseminated outside of our own dissemination days. They have been given access to our Moodle site and some learning objects have been emailed over to them based on their requests and discussions(Negotiated Learning, the Project, Mentoring handbook).

I organised a meeting looking at supporting them in creating a foundation degree in Leadership and Management based on REAL work based learning. This is very interesting for the SURF WBL-Way project as it has allowed me to see the very start of the process of what happens when someone expresses an interest in running a foundation degree. We had a very profitable meeting yesterday with the university (Rex), SURF (Richard), CWT, and foundation degree forward attending along with Mark and myself. It was interesting to see the very start as due to the project I have been working through student enrolement, validation and award setup but not this side. Hopefully some of the information we collected at this meeting can be used for guidance for other people wanting to set up foundation degrees, such as:

Collect a list of existing internal training - including learning outcomes
Collect a list of professional training employees have attended
Think about the setup for the award (including do you want to embed existing training / x days + assessment = 15 credits?)
What would be considered a critical success (for measuring against in the future) for the company
Expected numbers of students
Frequency of award being delivered
Starting date of award
Does the company want to deliver the courses or do they want the university to do it?

These are some of the basic points I have picked up on, and we are organising another meeting in May to carry on work in this area. It was surprising that they felt that they had to push their project back from being ASAP to being delivered next year as they perceived universities as being shut over the summer. We have been able to move their project forward much quicker than they hoped and may be something we need to consider on our portal is letting employers know that we are available to help them regardless of the time of year.

Meetings, Conferences and too many teas!

2007-03-23T07:55:00.000Z

After talking to corporate information it seems we were on the right line with the employer database and it looks like we can use existing database fields for the portal including allowing employers to search awards based on subject fields from JACs (although we will need to hide the term JAC’s!). Thanks to student registration we capture company name when the student fees are being paid for by the employer, and this links in nicely with the results of Stokes student survey. By linking the company to a learner we are linking them to awards, the question is how we handle histories, for example what happens if a learner switches employer during their studying? We also don’t hold (at the moment) much information at award level, rather just at module level at the moment.

The Shock of the Social was an interesting conference, Terry Anderson covered some interesting points as the key note speaker talking about the decline of the compliant learner and the fact that content on its own had no value and that it needs to be linked to pedagogy. He went on to say that there needs to be a change and the systems need to conform to the learner rather than the learner conforming to the system. This appeared to missed by some of the other speakers who focused on fitting social “web 2.0” tools into existing systems, i.e. Blackboard / Moodle. The main thing about moving forward is putting the learner in control and in the centre of the tools, not the institution. The SPIRE project shows that young learners do not accept institutional systems as well as older learners, this could be as they have found their own tools and would rather use them (http://tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk/index.php/2007/03/16/some-real-data-on-web-20-use/).

Paul Wall followed this up with looking at roles of traditional IT teams and using social internet tools within institutions. He looked at institutions needing to pick portable tools, able to use across systems and the presentation layer of using existing tools. This linked in well with the SURF WBL-Way project which is looking at a number of tools that will fit within a presentation layer created by the university, using information across selected tools. For example information from the repository could be delivered to a number of different tools including VLE’s, News Feeds, HTML pages etc. Blogs appeared to be the technology of the day with some different ways of supporting learners and delivery of assessment. Although the big problem still appears to be the learner can’t pick the tool, it is chosen for them. There are reasons for this including tutor management. One of the main drivers to getting learners to use these chosen tools is still linking it to assessment, there was little coverage on what learners do on their own time, with their own tools.

Coordination across projects

2007-03-20T11:11:00.000Z

Had a really good meeting with Sue Lee (LDI) about a project she has been working on with some colleagues with the Creative Arts team. They have requested a portal similar in requirements to what we are doing in the project, we have taken it in under our project umbrella but should give us an in into colleges not directly involved in the project. Also combines well with the project group being set up by the SURF office.

I have been asked to deliver a presentation at JORUM next week “from the outside looking in”. It could be interesting, especially as we have been collating comments from other institutions as we demonstrate the last project outputs.

Tried to use Yahoo in the same way I have been looking at Microsoft Live Homepage and Google Personalised Homepage, unfortunately at the moment it looks like Yahoo have some way to go before getting the functionality and usability to the same level as these more mature tools and wont be something I recommend to the team to use instead of the Google / Live options. It could just be me but these two tools seem much more mature and more flexible than the Yahoo! Personalised Homepage. It seems that all these companies are embedding more options within their email tool rather than making the options modular – which could be more of a way forward, i.e. Google calendar with your Yahoo! Email and your live blog. We will have to see. Got a busy two weeks ahead – will have to try and keep this blog updated as I go!

Validation and Employer Engagement

2007-03-15T14:14:00.000Z

Spoke to QIS (Quality Improvement Services) about validation documents and information given to tutors, employer etc involved in setting up foundation degrees. It is clear that the same information is given out regardless of the stakeholder. The QIS service has recognised that they need to review the information that goes out to either the colleges or employers as the documents have been written in academic terms. They are already going to be involved in the project through a mini project being run by the SURF office, especially looking at best practice and the possibility of creating templates for staff to download and complete. In discussing templates we got on to talking about XCRi and how the QIS could use parts of it for their programme specification. I have promised to send them some of the materials created from the WBL project for review and in turn I have got some QIS documents around validation to review.

On the case of more meetings about employer engagement Mark and I had a meeting with Rex Hollyman, this went really well. Especially as Rex came up with some more uses of a centralised employer database. Rex reflected on the same issues raised at the colleges of communication to/from the institution and the employer. Most of this would be the future as a CRM system but some could be implemented earlier. His department is also looking at converting ALL their materials into e-learning objects. Their focus will be on distance learners and in creating learning objects more "wizzy" than the first project as they are focusing totally on supporting the learner. I have spent some time with him to show him everything done by the first project. They are looking to get funding for this project so I have helped with the terms in the bid. Fingers crossed we should have a good working relationship with Rex and his team. I should be getting access to their materials for the project to see if anything can be used to support the portal. Anything their team does will be useable through the Harvest Road repository too.

Tomorrow it’s another meeting to discuss a smaller project being run by the LDI team and one of the faculties and whether it fits within the reaches of this project.

In between gaps in meetings I have been thinking about screens and information and have started putting fingers to keyboard over generic content but need to see what everyone thinks yet.

HE in FE and using uPortal

2007-03-12T11:05:00.000Z

Last Fridays meeting in London was very successful with some interesting talks on foundation degrees in FE. Foundation degree forward did a presentation that reflected on simular experiences to our own, and resulted in a conversation about getting feeds from them with regards to tenders from employers looking for universities to develop / validate foundation degrees. The presentation reflected what Richard Benefer was saying in last weeks meeting that it is clear that HE language a barrier, and that it is important to develop personal links between the employer and the institution for successful foundation degrees. The meeting also made me think more about our portal and some of the tools they might like. Which lead to this mornings research into uPortal.

In trying to understand more about uPortal and its possibilities I found the case studies site where you can see a number of implementations of uPortal within education. It was interesting to see how some places already use personalisation for students/ staff to link to external tools such as the BBC News, local weather channels etc. One interesting tour was: http://www.csuchico.edu/stcp/portal/portaltour/.

This all links back to getting information to employers, like feeds from fdf, sector skills councils etc. It might be an idea to allow employers to change colours etc to match the branding at work rather than using Staffordshire branding.

March Team Meeting

2007-03-08T13:39:00.000Z

Had a team meeting today and was able to get some real thoughts together around the scoping of the project, including scenarios and identifying stakeholders. See the screenshots below for information discussed. Some work still needs to be done by the colleges on scenarios and they need to blog their experiences with trying to engage employers with the project.

Validation

2007-03-06T14:07:00.000Z

Had an interesting couple of days, been looking at collaborative and social working (web 2.0 for a better term) still and the different tools available and how they could hang together. Microsoft have taken a step towards compatibility with allowing Google tools to be viewable through their Live homepage. I can now have Google calendars etc on this site. Wonder if Yahoo! are doing something similar?

Had a meeting this morning going though support needed to help with the development/ validation of foundation degrees, only to come back into my office to find someone requesting my help with a foundation degree they are trying to set up in Coventry. They had been given my name from the first project. After attending a dissemination event down in Bedfordshire it reinforces the fact that there doesn't appear to be anywhere to go for help on this subject. Hopefully we will be getting some input from those at that event too.

Got a group meeting this Thursday and fingers crossed some scoping should come out of it ready for Sam to run with.

Back Again

2007-03-01T08:17:00.000Z

I have been back for 4 days from the wedding and honeymoon and the partners have been working on the scoping of the project while I have been away, and have set up their own blog sites to record their experiences (see links on the right). The Google group I have set up has been busy; we are using the beta version so the partners have put up a couple of documents I have had to comment on.

Mark and I went to Bedfordshire University CETL yesterday to promote the resources from the first WBL project and the new project. We had a wonderful turn out of very friendly people, who are battling with the same issues as the SURF consortium with running foundation degrees, getting employer involvement, understanding the roles of mentors and using APEL. Feedback about existing materials from the SURF WBL project was extremely positive, and some people have offered to help with the WBL-Way project. A success all round.

Next week is going to be busy; we have a meeting with our SURF office to discuss supporting validation and looking at how to put together an employer database that would help the SURF office as well as faculties. We end the week with a presentation in London for the RSC.

Getting Married! :)

2007-02-06T12:53:00.000Z

I am off now for two weeks, getting married and very excited! I have passed on a number of tasks to the team, including starting their own blogs up, I will link to them when I get back.

The other tasks include focusing on the scope of the project, what is wanted by employers, tutors etc. After a meeting this morning had some good overlap between project goals and the university plans including setting up a CRM database for employers. This will link to work already being started by the Corporate Information team. We have to put a specification together around the requirements of the project to see how it can all fit together. I can definitely see that once the information is in a central place how it could be queried by different people for different things.

Harvest Road Training

2007-02-05T08:56:00.000Z

Last week was spent mostly in Harvest Road Hive training, looking at the issues of implementing a repository not only in the university but sharing it across SURF for the purpose of the project. There were a number of issues raised, including some of the same issues seen at all repository installations such as meta data, version control, permissions and managing copyright. Initial thoughts would be that access to the repository for SURF WBL-Way will be purely through web page interfaces. We have to think about the users accessing the portal, and therefore the repository, and what type of access we should give them, this could include the very restrictive option of being able to search the repository, see the summary of the materials, but not actually view the materials themselves. Other options for displaying information from Hive include being able to pull information out of the repository as rss feeds, or creating widgets.

Tools

2007-01-31T09:03:00.000Z

The last project meeting got quite a lot agreed in the end with regards to project tools to be used. The last project used a WIKI for communication but soon was unweildy and became difficult to find anything, I think the main problem was with the management as it really needed more time than any one person could spend on it. This time we have started looking at online tools that can be pulled together in an online environment such as Google Personalised Homepage (GPH), I have been using this successfully for some time for management of my own time as it means one place to go no matter where I am. We have hit some issues, such as colleges blocking some of the more useful tools, or stopping staff from installing new browsers available such as Flock. Although investigation showed that although Flock is a good community tool its remit was too wide for the project and did not work/ layout was messy with some of the tools we wanted to use.

I have been pleased with the take up of the use of GPH by the team as it means that we can personalise the tools we use and get them all together in one place. At the moment I am the only one with a blog but I am hoping the others will set up their own. The main problem now is how to share documents, as we don't need the collaborative aspect of Google Documents and we need to display folder structures so we can't use Google Groups Beta. A lot of the free tools out there seem to be limited or can't be added nicely to GPH, or other personalised environments. I would love a plugin to GPH for DriveHQ that works like the box.net gadget.

AimHigher

2007-01-22T07:38:00.000Z

Bit of an eventful week with the wind causing everyone to be evacuated from the Beaconside campus on Thursday afternoon. Fortunately I was in Wolverhampton on the Friday for an AimHigher event as the campus was closed until Monday. The AimHigher event had a keynote speech by Stephen Gardner (Director of Work based learning National LSC) and the questions asked by the group raised the same issues as we have been hearing within this project, problems with getting employer involvement, issues with funding for employers, businesses too small to afford to send employees to be trained, employers scared of losing highly trained staff, students have a lack of understanding progression from non traditional level 1, 2, and 3, students reluctant to raise training with employer for fear they should be seen to want to leave. Some of these issues are already being addressed with websites such as AimHigher's getupgo and the alps sites. I think it's going to be important to link to these external sites to help guide learners, and potential learners. Perhaps there should be a FAQ area in the portal for each type of person we are trying to help with links to other sites.

New Year

2007-01-15T10:41:00.000Z

Well the new year is now in full swing. I have been focusing on finalising the last SURF WBL project with only some of the time spent working on the new WBL-Way project. I seem to be spending my time organising meetings for it at the moment. I did have an interesting conversation with one of my colleagues with regards to requirements of employers and award leaders involved in foundation degrees. It seems the main point raised was the fact that it would be good to give employers access to the same materials that the learners see, another point raised was to give them an idea of employers already involved in foundation degrees (something prospective students are also interested in) within their area. Work has continued with disseminating the two projects and a great forum for this was the TENCompetence conference held in Manchester at the end of last week. I have also been contacted by the RSC London team to visit in March to present at their HE in FE forum. This week I am at an AimHigher West Midlands meeting in Wolverhampton.

TENCompetence raised a number of thoughts:

That the learner should be in control of their environment, and that universities should be the "middle man" in providing access to tools, and to manage the complexity of technologies out there, and learners themselves appreciated the fact that they could take skills learnt in using existing tools across subjects. Mark Johnson spoke about this at the conference in more detail.
Shared materials across institutions providing the same course showed a decrease in the drop out rate of over 40% to 10% with the use of a single source of materials shared across the institutions. Each lecturer used the source materials rather than their own materials. (John Casey)

Deadlines and Documents

2006-12-11T08:06:00.000Z

Well, we have worked hard at putting together a general project plan and consortium agreement for the project and they are finally done and dusted. Now we are focusing on getting information out to the colleges and finding out what is actually needed by the community. Had an interesting talk with one member of staff who came up with a lot of ideas that I had no idea about, including getting information on bidding and funding for training etc. This will rely on third parties giving us usable access to their systems (RSS or XML/ JAVA Services) so we will have to see how that one goes. Assuming all goes to plan the final project plan with work packages and full scoping will be available in Feb 07.

1st Project Management Meeting

2006-12-01T14:08:00.000Z

Well its been a busy week, had a meeting with the university marketing department about getting a project logo together. Have to work closely with them to ensure that the right branding is used, was going to use the Information Services Marketing department but they are busy at the moment with two of their staff off ill so handed over to the main marketing department. The first project management meeting was this morning and managed to get a lot done, the main things include a quick overview of the project plan and consortium agreement so with a few changes these should be out by the end of next week. There are a number of things that need actioning from the meeting by the whole team.