New Version and moving forward

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.

Testing for Wednesday

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.

Reusing in action

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.

Moving on up

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.

Ratings

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

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.

Plane holts on runway

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.

Forums

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.

e-learning at the cusp

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

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.