Looking forward

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

Employers are the way forward

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

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

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

Getting Lost

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

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

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: