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?
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.
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!
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
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.
This blog can be added to Flock, as an RSS / Atom feed, and to Google Desktop using the link below.
