Enable

FLAG Flying

2012-01-30T14:02:00.002Z

The FLAG tool has now been launched in its pilot phase. A very exciting moment as months of mapping, tweaking and moving things around has now been put on hold as real staff get to use the tool to support their developments. Feedback has already been positive, with some very useful suggestions on improving the tool.

Initial demonstrations have highlighted the different needs of course design stakeholders. Each sees the tool as useful in different ways, from e-learning facilitators, business managers, and lecturers. It has been noted by a number of stakeholders that the amount of information collated during course development, and the use of the information for different audiences, would be useful to take on next. This is much more than was originally intended from FLAG and links to the work of the XCRI project and the embedding of a document management system at the University.

Demonstrations with partners has also highlighted a new focus for developments. Should we be looking at a separate process when partners are driving the development? Or do we need to look at a tool that allows different people to take ownership of different steps in the process? This aspect of the tool for supporting partnerships will become further unpicked as the work within the Partnership office continues.

One of the questions we were recently asked from JISC and I fully expect the same question from our senior management: 'So what are the time-scales for this?' The time-scale for this is very flexible by the nature of course design. In an ideal world we would give a two month period for pilot, however we would like those piloting the tool to go through if not all, at least most, of the work-flow. Therefore I envision a more fluid end to the pilot as the different awards are completed. We have got a questionnaire for each end of the pilot to capture how course design is considered, but one aspect I believe will be changed by FLAG is communication between the different stakeholders engaged in a particular award design, and I need to consider how this gets captured.

New Product Design

2011-09-28T11:04:00.000+01:00

As Enable moves towards its final phase we are making some great progress with the work we have been doing for the FLAG project and for supporting the work around developing unified course development theory!
We have created a number of business layer models of CDD for faculties capturing the here and now, we have noted a few interesting factors:

What is believed to happen by managers often isn't the case for those on the ground
Processes that are believed to be sequential are often running in tandem to ensure speed in development (can cause problems)
Responsibility of the process of new product development can sit with different individuals without any joining up.

Although the models have been useful for my own purposes, and for discussions with faculty it has been noted that they were hard to follow to create links between different stages and the support resources available to the university. The first attempt at creating a work-flow from idea to validation is shown below - all information in black is considered part of the core/ parent process, the text in red is information that sits within child processes (Completing documentation, Understanding Employer Engagement, Assessment etc).

This helped clarify my thoughts before moving on to using Word as a standard tool to create the flows, at first each point in the core work-flow became a new stage in the process, however we soon changed that to match the stages from modelling. Idea & Initial Approval -> Award Approval Documentation -> Preparing for Validation & finally Validation itself. An example work-flow at this point, including questions to ask at each preparation point:

These models have since been distributed to the project team to help create the child processes, as they are more familiar with that area. This was one of the reasons I chose to use Word to create the flows, so that they could copy the standardisations easily. Even so it has required a short demo document so that the flow fits the set up of Pineapple, including a two page document where on one side was the actual flow in Pineapple using screen shots and on the other was the actual flow created. As I am very close to this work it has been invaluable to hand it over to the project team for review and also over to faculties already interviewed. It has also been vital that I keep impartial to the work so that I can view all aspects of the suggestions made. I also believe it has helped that I am not a process owner in creating these flows. It has been demonstrated by some of the work already gone on that process owners have a very narrow view of curriculum design and development!

Models to flows to Information, Advice and Guidance

2011-08-16T09:05:00.002+01:00

As mentioned in 'Flying Forward' the Enable team, and others in the department, have been working on creating a ToolBox (known internally as the FLAG project) for supporting curriculum design and development for those roles involved in the process.The project team started with the original baseline models and then modified them based on the existing information available on the websites, once a 'trail' process was in place interviews took place with Teaching & Learning Directors, faculty quality staff, and the Director of Quality Improvement.

The first thing we learnt with moving from models to online work-flows, is that the models 'viewpoints' hadn't been fully considered, and were therefore either too detailed or included too many different roles. Therefore the team went back and created models from the viewpoint of the person who had come up with the new course idea. This then raised a number of issues with complexity of the work-flow, and how they delegate different steps, and what they need to consider as opposed to a module designer. The process was broken down to different views:

Approving the idea in Faculty,
Approving the idea in the institution,
Developing the Idea,
Preparing for Validation

To keep it simple we needed a 'parent' work-flow (including all the above views) which then allowed the stakeholder engaged in CDD to move to 'child' work-flows whenever needed. (For example Validation is in the parent work-flow, but filling out the different documents would be a child work-flow). This would allow those happy with the high level process of CDD to move to a specific child process they could be struggling with (what roles do I need to consider when picking my course team?).

This was great in theory however it was noted that there was no clear way to link process within Pineapple. Thankfully the Plymouth team were contacted before we started this project and have been very supportive in developing Pineapple to support processes beyond the original intention of APEL. After putting together a specification document for this change they are now working on making this possible.

Enable had already noted that the course development process was under review, and that faculties have their different ways of doing their side of the development process. The creation of the 'trail' process within Pineapple has helped us identify a baseline for faculties and the Quality Improvement Service to discuss and view issues/ holes already highlighted. It helped those engaged in the process see how the tool would be used, identify differences in their processes & best practice, and inform us of any useful information/advice/ guidance (IAG) that they provide to members of staff for the different steps.

Survey - Funding and Innovation

2011-05-27T12:34:00.001+01:00

Link to Survey - Perceptions of Funding, Governance and Innovation

We are hoping that staff at different institutions will help the Enable project in the search to understand how perception of institutional funding and governance can influence innovation in higher (and further) education. It only takes a few minutes and will be completely anonymous (unless you want to know more about the results or survey).

This survey has come from our thoughts and experiences from interviews with staff and discussions at different events over the last 2 and a half years. Now that we are all in a state of transition there is a hope with evidence from this survey that we can start addressing perceptions about institutional governance and how we look at innovation.

Seeing change with fresh eyes

2011-05-12T08:44:00.000+01:00

Yesterdays JISC programme meeting on Transformational Change & Demonstrating Impact was incredibly useful (See the Twitter Story for other peoples viewpoints)- first for the informal conversations that occurred during the sessions, and second for helping us as a project recognise what we have been able to achieve over the past 2 years. This is an important step for us as often it is easy to get stuck on what we haven't achieved rather than what we have. This made me feel very positive - we are indeed seeing a change in culture and attitudes in the university, if not changing behaviour, we are ensuring activity within the university is focused and driven by issues now and not solutions, and stakeholder engagement has certainly increased for new initiatives.

Part of the work was done before the meeting, where we were asked to think about six activities we had done as part of the project, and six outcomes we felt had been achieved. We came up with:
Activities

modelling of processes to communicate need for change
creation of validation documentation with built in guidelines for TSL and general support
developing an internal Flexible Learning Toolbox to support the development of new awards using workflow, probably drawing on Pineapple software and including linking roles, competencies to the e-learning models
Creating a pilot for Enterprise Architecture and supporting centralised
Guiding work in spoke development for example TransAPEL and investigating streamlining validation
developing a "change heap" to allow staff to input & search initiatives within the university.

Outcomes

Understanding the requirement for programme management (Programme, Portfolio, Project)
Embedding Enterprise Architecture into new innovations
Stronger governance for innovation that is not restrictive
Stronger relationships between college partners and faculties; Consistent message about partnerships
Reducing course development from +18 months to under a year
Understanding by executive / senior management for a holistic approach to managing change

At the time of completing this task we hadn’t really put much thought into how the two linked, which was an important part of the second session of the day – how were they linked, and what was the evidence? We were told to put a story together of the points above, and during the session (thanks to us trying to fit the same story example) we ended up in a bit of a mess, with a diagram with the need for supportive notes!

So today I tried the exercise again without thinking about the example or the distractions that were inherent in the session. This gave us a much more understandable diagram - which has helped in our understanding of where the project started, the outcomes that have been supported through the work of Enable, and the impact they have had on activities within Enable. I'm now wondering the value of us documenting activities, outcomes and evidence based on themes from Enable but I think that should be kept for the Cluster to create - and perhaps write more on. I'm going to think about sessions 3 & 4 (focusing on Transformation) and consider whether evidence needs to be added to this diagram? I will blog those thoughts, plus what was discussed on the day a bit later (otherwise would have a massive blog here!).

Flying forward

2011-05-06T10:43:00.004+01:00

As part of the interviews with course designers undertaken by the Enable team, and with feedback down from executive, it has been noted that course development and design could be more efficient by bringing together all the relevant documentation, guidance and advice into one 'ToolBox'.

Issues it will address:

Difficulty in finding the right advice on course design at the right point
Knowing which source of information would be the best/ most up to date
Identification of champions to support stakeholders engaged in course design
Reduction in faculties having to produce own advice and guidance
Takes burden off staff to hold expert knowledge in the whole process

The tool will be designed to align information, advice and guidance to the workflow and decision processes surrounding flexible course delivery and design. It will bring together work done in faculties, services, by our e-Learning Models project, and work by the LDI on bringing together course design roles and competencies. Initially we envisioned this to be a 'quick and dirty' tool based on hyperlinking in documents, however we soon saw this would not be the best solution (and as mentioned in previous posts) quick wins are often not the best solutions, and often make more quick loses. We are now hoping to use software created by the University of Plymouth and the core Pineapple software.

However as the process of course design/development is already perceived as being very arduous we need to ensure we don't add to it with an extra level of complexity. This is in some way addressed by the fact that we aren't embedding this as the one and only way of doing course design, it will simply be available for those who want/need it. It should be viewed as a support tool and by engaging stakeholders throughout the process we will (hopefully) avoid this issue.

Having seen, through Enable, projects that start without clear issues to resolve, in isolation, with inadequate stakeholder engagement and without clear goals and success factors we have taken a leaf out of our own book and started with a project plan. We have used a JISC project plan template (with some adaptations for accounting for the internal nature of the project). This plan will be used to why we started the project, what we hope to achieve, how we are evaluating it and the time-scales to achieve a pilot state. We even (possibly) have an acronym 'FLAG' (Flexible Learning Advice and Guidance) subject to agreement with the rest of the team. This can lead to project slogans like "Flying the FLAG for Course Design", well we all have to get our smiles somewhere!

A project plan on its own can't, however, be considered the best method of communication across the university. Across the university projects are often accused of communication failure. As a result of this we have already informed our SMWG about the work, asking for initial feedback (which was positive once it was recognised that no one would be forced to go through the process if they felt confident enough with flexible delivery/ design course development) and the project plans first stage is discussions with relevant stakeholders. We also have another spin off from Enable that will help with communication, this is something known internally as the 'Change Heap' and I'm planning another blog on this tool soon.

Guidance on Validation Documents

2011-04-20T11:58:00.013+01:00

I'm based in the Learning Development and Innovation team at the University and have been working with the Enable team since the start of 2009. My focus within the team has been on being able to integrate my previous project work (on creating Best Practice Models for e-learning) with PHOEBE. As part of this work I've been developing some new versions of our validation documents that incorporate guidance and advice for those completing them. Here I have reflected on my experiences to date, with the hope that it will help others considering how to start on the process.

Starting Point
Some time ago I explored PHOEBE (developed by the Technology-Assisted Lifelong Learning unit TALL at Oxford University) and thought that it was an excellent tool to assist teachers when planning and designing learning that included technology. I explored the possibility of using this tool to integrate with my work on Best Practice Models for e-Learning and worked with the team at TALL to edit the template as well as the guidance notes. I demonstrated it to a group of staff in 2008 and they were very impressed with the way that PHOEBE supported the design and planning process with links and resources embedded into a planning template. However, they commented that ideally the tool would be linked into our own course information and processes to improve ease of use. As part of this it was expected that PHOEBE would be an integral part of the Enable work in helping to guide and create validation documents. Although the PHOEBE team had hoped to be able to develop a version of the tool to integrate into an institution's systems, this was not possible in the time of the project. In addition, after consultation with colleagues from the Enable team it was felt that the tool needed to be fully integrated into our systems and should not be developed as a stand-alone tool. The Enable team suggested that any tool used to support the creation of validation documents would need to be interoperable, with content created in the tool being accessible from other tools etc. We initially envisioned being able to create our own tool that would enable this to happen, however the main show stopper at the start of the project was the lack of document management within the institution, this was picked up as an issue for other innovations within the university and since the start of this work the university has started a Document Management Project Group. In the meantime it was felt a proof of concept would be useful, so I worked on developing some new versions of our validation documents that incorporate guidance and advice for those completing them.

Creating the Proof of Concept
The screen-shot above (from PHOEBE) shows the design template to the right with a series of headings and boxes to type the content of the learning design. The headings are clickable links that display help files to the left of the screen. As the basic principle of having guidance at the point of need was seen as an opportunity to aid validation development I then developed a very simple version by adding a 'guidance column' to our existing validation documents in Word and including a range of suggestions and links.

The guidance and links were summarized from the Best Practice Models work and also included some general advice and links to other sources of information about course planning and design, mostly to existing resources on our website. The QIS team were happy with my suggestions and provided a few additional links that were relevant. Originally, I had envisaged having two versions of the documentation - one for courses that included some element of e-learning/TSL and a different form for those without. However, QIS thought the forms so useful that they asked me to incorporate the additional general links and guidance so that the forms could be used by all courses and remove the need for two different sets.

This process of gathering existing guidance about planning and designing learning highlighted for me the wide range of resources available that are difficult to find. Some were not available online and I had to make them available, and many were sourced from different places on our website. Since then, a new web-page on Teaching and Learning at Staffordshire University has been planned that will collate a number of these resources together and will improve access.

The screen-shot below gives a flavour of the new documentation. QIS have approved the documents developed for both undergraduate and postgraduate programme specifications and have invited staff to pilot the documents to gather feedback for evaluation. I hope to use this feedback to check the usefulness of the links and guidance and to update and modify it as appropriate. The use of a document management system will simplify this process, as it is likely that the guidance and links will need regularly checking and updating.

Where Next?
Since the start of the work in creating guidelines within the validation documents a number of developments within Enable have moved forward:

The university has started investigating an institutional document management system
The Enable team are trialling a workflow / document management system with transferable skills for External Examiners that could be applied to this work
Discussions have started around creating a Flexible Learning Toolbox which these documents will become part of

Once we have the feedback from the pilot for this and the work from the External Examiners we will be able to look at a roadmap for moving this work further.

Mob rules

2011-04-18T07:46:00.007+01:00

Something that has been simmering in the background for Enable for a while has been the subject of governance and managing innovation. This is a main aspect of TOGAF and something that the Enable team wrote a number of internal documents about for the then Pro Vice Chancellor, in particular within the recommendations for setting up a Change Management (AKA Programme Management) office. Since these documents and the change in senior management things have become a little quiet, but recently the whole "Governance" thing has come back to the fore. This has been for a number of reasons.

Two of the project team attended the JISC EAPG which had a day focused on Governance giving the project team a couple of thoughts to follow up including:
- Although seen as Governance exists or doesn't there is a third state - exists but is worked around
- How is it managed/ reviewed?
- does governance ensure quality control/ stakeholder engagement?

The project manager and director are writing a short survey based on internal interviews (that they hope the community will help participate in once complete - keep an eye on #jiscenable on Twitter) on perceptions of governance and finance models in Higher Education

The project manager is writing a number of pages for the Design Circle with the help of the rest of the project team, and one of the subjects is Governance.

Obviously Governance is an important part of any institution but it has been noted that institutions have a number of issues with it. We are hoping over the next few months to unpick a number of the issues highlighted above, to try and understand what is happening, how it is happening and what we can do to change cultural behaviours & perceptions. This has only been seen as possible thanks to the re-engagement of senior management, and the fact that the messages we have been saying are starting to filter through and be repeated back to us. Without this change in behaviour and understanding I believe that attempting to address the above would be too difficult an issue for the Enable team.

Dripping Tap

2011-04-04T08:10:00.002+01:00

Over the last two years(!) we have been constantly sending out messages at all levels of the university, regarding managing:

our projects using a Change Management Office Approach (i.e. P3M3)
our information

Methods we have used included:

One to one meetings- with a focus on faculty/service needs
- with senior staff
- with project managers
raised at committee meetings
- informally with a focus on issues raised in committees
- presentations raising issues that have been raised during one to one meetings and how they link to points above
Summary documents and articles

After hitting a number of issues with getting these messages across including:

Loss of executive staff
Loss of engagement when making presentations
- Using wrong language
- Not using relevant examples
- no real examples of what success looks like
Starting new initiatives without full stakeholder engagement
Limited communication by projects outside of committees

We have now found that the message has sunk in at all levels, so would like to say to all our colleagues trying this to hang in there! We now get to hear the same message being said back to us during committees, and have got the new senior executive sponsor fully engaged with the project. After a few false starts initiatives are starting to be run with stakeholder engagement, communication across the university is growing (including the development of an online change service - more on that later). We are starting to look at projects from a central perspective and understanding that changes to one area of business impacts can impact other areas. So it's all good here at Enable.

We make it so hard

2011-01-31T07:56:00.007Z

Thank you Mark for the welcome back!

As Mark said in the last Enable Blog, the Enable methodologies are being successfully embedded into relevant plans and strategies, and more importantly the message that we need to think about our information as a whole and separate to our systems is becoming widely accepted within the university and we are hearing it repeated at different committees, and was widely accepted at our SMWG meeting.

The SWMG meeting on Friday, left us feeling very positive about what we have already done and the way we can move forward. We spoke about the recognised opportunities that adopting Enterprise Architecture & Programme Management would give the university, and that the lead for this needed to come from Executive. More importantly Executive recognised the need for them to be able to lead it and have gone away with a number of papers, with actions, to consider. We look forward to what takes place over the next few months.

Rather interesting it was clear that discussions around how the university needs to have a corporate view of university systems/ information/ processes, and how we manage them had taken place in other meeting where it had been deemed "to hard", and that it was easier to focus on changing small issues without recognising the projects longer term impact. We discussed that we make things hard for ourselves - by repeating the same mistakes the job becomes harder. We need to understand is using EA / TOGAF too hard? Or is it simply a matter of understanding that it's a job that needs doing, requires time and (the right) staff to enable it to happen (with the right governance)? Once this understanding has taken place and actions taken surely it is simply a matter of time and effort rather than any sort of brain surgery/rocket science? We shall see!

Another useful message we managed to communicate during the SMWG meeting was that stakeholder engagement was vital to successful engagement in managing change and the curriculum development - and this doesn't simply mean engaging in committees. It means talking to people and, importantly listening with out judging/ justifying.

Lastly we were able to successfully demonstrate the two mini projects External Examiners and TransAPEL - but we were very clear that Enable used these two mini projects as proof of concept and was not something the Enable team should be doing day to day. We need to focus on the wider aspects of Curriculum Design and Development, and help the university make good choices in the future about project work and developing its business processes etc. We need to be able to advise the Executive but not be those who implement it. It will be interesting to see how our developments are (if successfully piloted) will be embedded into the university processes. Watch here over the next few months as both systems enter a piloting phase.

Edit (07/02/2011)
Our Presentation (with sound) to the SMWG

Onwards!

2011-01-21T09:37:00.004Z

Firstly, let me say how good it is to have Fleur back in action!

Since my last blog entry a number of things worth commenting on have happened:

Firstly our Technology Supported Learning Strategic Plan 2010-2014 has been approved by committee and is now in place. The work and goals of ENABLE are embedded in this and this will allow these to be sustained beyond the end of the funded period of ENABLE. The TSL Plan has informed the University's Teaching Learning and Assessment Strategy (nearing publication) and will also guide current work on the emerging Information Strategy.

Work on our external examiner mini-project, the TransAPEL project and the "Change Heap" are all progressing well, and the first two will demonstrated to the ENABLE Senior Management Working Group next week. Neil Witt visited us in November to progress the Pineapple benefits realisation work that links to TransAPEL and had a series of good meetings with staff engaged in our current APEL processes. Ultimately, the work on APEL will link to the University's CRM initiative as well.

Michael Gunn, our new VC, is now in place, and I have meeting with him in early February which I am looking forward to.

I had a useful meeting with our Partnerships Team in November and went through the feed back from the ENABLE partner colleges with them. The team has reorganised and each partner college now has their own designated Partnership Manager. This will go a long way towards addressing some of the concerns expressed by college partners earlier in ENABLE's work.

Sam's work on Enterprise Architecture has resulted in him being engaged to provide consultancy to the Bracken project in Wales (led by Professor Tony Toole, ENABLE's Critical Friend).

Helen Walmsley is working with our Quality Team to embed her work on eLearning Models in the curriculum development/validation process. We plan to link this to Ben Scoble's work on Role/Competence based approaches to staff development to enable courses to identify their requirements in delivering chosen approaches and aid capacity planning.

Our interim report to JISC has been well received and looks like it will result in a range of valuable dissemination opportunities and further engagement with other projects.

As I noted in previous blogs, I have been chairing a group looking at the need for document management in the University (an issue ENABLE picked up on early in our EA work). The position paper produced by the group was accepted by our Information Strategy Group and our Information Services are now charged with carrying out a full feasibility study and producing a business case for consideration by Business Development Group.

Lastly, it is becoming increasingly clear that the ENABLE message that we need to take an organisational view of our information and move towards ensuring that information can be used and shared flexibly and easily has not fallen on deaf ears and senior colleagues have begun to express similar views in committees...

Bits of light in tunnels...

2010-10-28T09:38:00.004+01:00

As the University enters the run up to the arrival of our new Vice-Chancellor in the middle of 2011 and the government announces some worrying changes with Browne and the CSR, I'm living in "interesting times"!

Nevertheless ENABLE soldiers on...

The work of ENABLE has been built into (and greatly influenced) the new Technology Supported Learning Strategic Plan, which is now in full draft and will shortly go to committee members for initial comment prior to be being discussed at the next Learning Teaching and Assessment Sub-Committee. I also have a meeting with our Finance Director, Director of Information Services and one of the Deans to discuss the relationship between the TSL Plan and our "emerging" Information Strategy.

The Information Strategy draft was discussed at the various governance boards that report to our Information Strategy Group, and it was heartening that the "ENABLE message" that we need to have a corporate view of our information and how it can be used to enable the university to meet its plans seems to have "taken hold" amongst increasing numbers of senior staff. I am now part of a group which will redraft the Information Strategy to ensure it is a "University" strategy and reflects the needs of all stakeholders. (This was following a full meeting of ISG to discuss the strategy).

Other messages from ENABLE have also shown signs of taking hold. ENABLE has a "mini-project" on External Examiners, and through no-one's particular fault, the University came perilously close to starting a parallel, overlapping, project. This highlighted shortcomings in governance and communication, particularly around the management and sustainability of innovation, and I shall be working with colleagues in our Information Service and others to try and find solutions...

That takes me on to "knowing what is going on". Changes in the Executive (and my own line management) have sadly slowed down progress towards having an institutional Programme Office (but the need for such a thing is increasingly recognised) but I've had a "cunning plan"! We will (with the support of our Dean of Students, Head of Academic Development, Business Re-Engineering Manager and colleagues in Information Services) being trying out a "Web 2.0" style approach to ensuring change across the University is easy to find out about. I'm calling it the "Change Heap" - more will be revealed in due course!

Aside from that, I've had meeting with the team working on the External examiner mini-project, the team working on the TransAPEL project (and associated Pineapple benefits realisation work - Neil Witt will be visiting us in November) and have been looking through the updates from the partner colleges and will be discussing those with our Partnerships staff. We have also had two meetings with staff managing the University's CRM project and looked at it against "the big picture"...

It has been suggested that the work of ENABLE should be presented to the University Business Development Group - that would be a great step forwards and I hope it comes off.

So, despite frustrations, I really believe that the message is finally beginning to "get out" and that the light I see is not a train coming the other way!

Ploughing on...

2010-09-30T09:45:00.004+01:00

Well, since my last post, I've been working hard on getting the revised and updated version of the University's Technology Supported Learning Strategic Plan ready to go to Committee. Whilst the overall focus of the plan hasn't changed, the emphasis and priorities have. Many of the things we have found from the work of ENABLE (the original plan was written before ENABLE started) have become much more pressing and have become vital parts of the revised plan. In particular, the need for a hollistic view of Information and the wider availability of, and access to, readily shared data are paramount.

I had a useful update meeting with a colleague from Information Services who updated me and one of of team on progress on implementing the Snapshot integration facility for Blackboard. Progress on this had been slow, but at last implementation is drawing close.

Our TransAPEL project has established a link with Plymouth's Pineapple project. The Pineapple team will be creating a version of their software (which manages the business processes surrounding APEL) based on Staffordshire's APEL business processes - and this can then be "wrapped around" TRansAPEL (treating TransAPEL as a "black box" - important as we are keeping the detail of TransAPEL "under wraps"). In terms of TransAPEL itself, work proceeds apace...

I've been in contact with our College Partners on the ENABLE project and they have been very quick at providing me with updates on curriculum developments they are involved in with the University - thanks!

We had a great visit from Mark Stubbs from MMU, who talked to myself and our Director of Academic Development about their institutional EQAL initiative to transform their curriculum and associated information handling. The parallels between their situation and ours was very marked.

Sam and I attended a Curriculum Design & Development Programme Cluster meeting at MMU this week and heard more about EQAL and also heard about progress made at Leeds Met and Bolton with their CDD projects. A very useful day...

Various things of late have strongly reinforced the need for an "Enterprise" approach to information and the need for a institutional programme office - no doubt Sam will say more about this...

Well - it's down to me then

2010-09-09T11:05:00.004+01:00

First congratulations to Fleur and her brand new baby boy Ewan!

With Fleur off on maternity leave for while, Sam and I are moving on as best we can. Sam is working hard on the External Examiner mini-project (and the ENABLE spoke TRANSAPEL) and of course carrying on with the Enterprise mapping work. Sadly, as well losing Fleur for a bit, Jenny Yorke, Learning Development Coordination Manager, and a Strategic Manager for ENABLE, has been off with ill-health for some months now - she is sorely missed and I wish her a successful recovery.

Since Fleur had her happy event (somewhat unexpectedly) a couple of weeks back, I've had some meetings with our senior management about the whole area of EA and particularly Course Related Information, and we are lucky to have Prof Mark Stubbs coming next week to talk to us about what he is doing at MMU. Hopefully this will help emphasise the importance of the work and findings of ENABLE at Staffordshire.

In late July I attend the JISC Innovations Forum at Royal Holloway. This was an excellent event. I attended a really interesting session (honest!) on the pros and cons of Prince 2 and Agile approaches to project management and another on organisational change. I also met up with Prof Peter Hartley from Bradford - as well as it being nice to see him again, he was very intersted in our EA work at Staffs and offered to discuss his own institutions work on mobile technologies as a "knowledge exchange" - I hope to progress this soon.

The TRANSAPEL work has being going really well - seeing a group of academics agree a definition of something as contentious as "a competence" in a very short time during a meeting highlighted how much everyone is "up for" the projects goals...

I've had a good meeting with Sheila Dexter who updated me on progress in the area of Academic Planning and another with colleagues from Information Services about on-going work on Study Skills - an important area at the moment. (They commented on the interesting perception issues between some teaching staff and professional staff based in services....)

Work on rolling out the OER work and getting our Hive repository on a "service footing" still proceeds, and I had an excellent meeting with Information Services which made real progress on the issues around process ownership and roles as we move the repository into wider use...

I'm now wrestling with the list of jobs Fleur left me - along with very precise instructions ;)

The Daily Scrum

2010-08-14T10:45:00.001+01:00

One of the key aspects of an agile approach to software development is feedback and refinement. This pertains to the software product being developed but also to the processes used to develop it. Feedback from stakeholders is used to refine and steer the direction of the product. Feedback and reflection from the project team on software development practices is used to refine and continually improve the software development process.

Practically, this boils down to the team identifying useful practices and adopting them and identifying practices which don’t work and abandoning them. I think it’s rare, nowadays, that a team will adopt a particular ‘brand’ of agile approach wholesale. Far more common is an agile-flavoured approach combining practices from a number of agile ‘brands’ - XP, Lean, Scrum, DSDM, etc.

One such practice, that we adopted a long time ago, has value for a much wider range of practitioner than software development teams alone.This is the Daily Scrum.

Scrum is a flavour of agile software development/project management. The name is derived from a scrum in rugby and implies getting people to work closely as a team which is what it is all about. At it’s core, it is all about getting people to talk to each other.

The daily scrum (a.k.a. daily meeting, daily standup) is a short (circa 15 minute) meeting held every working day at the same time in the same place. Each member of the team takes a couple of minutes to outline what progress they made yesterday, what they are working on today, and what problems they have had. This gives everybody a good flavour of what work is going on within the team, it allows team members to help each other – if they have encountered a similar problem they can suggest getting together after the meeting, and it allows problems to be escalated via the team leader (aka scrum master) who is responsible for removing impediments and creating the environment to get the best out of the team.

With our department, and even our office, split over sites and parts of the buildings, getting awareness of what the rest of the department is working on, engendering a single multidisciplinary team ethos and providing the chance for team members to help each other with problems, has always proved difficult. I recommend the daily scrum as the most low cost (only 15 mins) but most effective tool we’ve discovered to help with this type of awareness-raising and communication.

If you want more information about Scrum, chickens and pigs, the Wikipedia entry for Scrum has nice summary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(development)

Take me to your leader...

2010-07-27T11:00:00.008+01:00

We have had an interesting few weeks where our Pro Vice Chancellor, our Executive Sponsor and the chair of our Senior Management Working Grouphas left the university. This could have had a big impact on the project, and left us with a number of questions. Who would become our new "leader", how would they feel about Enable, and how would it fit with their role in the university? These were big questions. Thankfully our Project Director, as head of department was facing the same questions and knew the right people to talk to, and temporarily at least, we are now reporting in to another member of the executive, the Deputy Vice Chancellor. This was good news, and better was to follow. Thanks to the practice we’ve had getting the message over to senior management and being further into the project we were able to communicate what the Enable project was about and how this related to University plans. This seemed to resonate with him and the Director of Academic Development. We are now busy writing some new documentation about how Enable can help with some possible executive-led initiatives that they are interested in exploring. What appears to be useful is that the focus is less on immediate quick wins but an understanding that making useful changes will take time and planning. More on that later!
Thanks to the work of Enable, and the cross dissemination we have been doing with the other institutions in the area, including the workshop we did in June around managing change, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Director of Academic Development have requested that Prof Mark Stubbs comes to talk to them and others involved in Enable about the work they are doing within the CDD programme at MMU. This is all very positive for the message we are communicating about managing change and information within our institution.

Reflections from Day 2 (pm) EISTA 2010

2010-07-07T11:35:00.004+01:00

Academic Integrity was something discussed over lunch as it was the last presentation of the morning, this was done by Greg Williams who linked reducing cheating to strong instructional design (ID) (a systematic approach to curriculum development, using ADDIE - Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation). He believes that ID staff need to work closely with subject matter experts to get the best out of it. Sounds very similar to the work of the LDI team at Staffordshire University! We discussed the technologies that are supposed to help with cheating such as turnitin and a colleague mentioned a YouTube video can be found showing students how to get around this (and other) technologies. Greg spoke about the fact that a lot of elearning assessment is low level (true/false, multiple choice etc) and this assessment needs to be reviewed to support strong learning objectives that are more specific to learners and using world examples, and that the tutor needs to be involved further to the start of the assessment, reviewing drafts and feeding back on work already taking place.

The afternoon covered the session I was participating in. The presentation was kindly recorded by Nasir Butrous who also did a presentation in the session and I will be editing and publishing this soon, but have a video back log at the moment from the workshop in Stafford too. We had some good discussions around the role of a trusted individual in managing change in an institution, which was very useful. In the same session we had a presentation around Industry based assessment (ERP), which looked at supporting learners using relevant software in the classroom and getting employers engaged in developing the assessment so that they have real world examples to work with. Hiram Bollaert spoke about learning objects and I was surprised that this seemed a new term for a lot of the audience, along with IMS and SCORM. Hiram and I had an interesting discussion after his presentation around finding a SCORM player that does more than show SCORM packages but does all the tracking you want, that is also open/free/cheap and can be multilingual . Hiram discussed how the learners were the creators of the learning objects, helping them reflect, develop their ICT skills and encourages them to manage their knowledge. As they are displayed to a wider audience it also gives them recognision beyond their tutor.

Nasir spoke about how he had analysed online access patterns against student performance, by looking at learners accessing content online, and their performance at the end of the course he could see when the best time would be for tutor intervention on the course to improve performance.

Reflections from Day 2 (am) EISTA 2010

2010-07-03T12:37:00.004+01:00

The first day was very focused on curriculum change, the next day focused more on supporting blended learning using online tools and different approaches. A number of presentation looked at how "e" can replace paper, and whether "e" was in fact better. I noticed that in some cases there was an assumption that it would be better, and in others, where stakeholders were engaged from the beginning there was a recognition of the fact that user perceptions were that in fact it would be much harder, more time consuming and require extra resources not necessarily available to the tutor. Project that captured those perceptions at the start of their work were able to demonstrate better the success of their work when at the end those same stakeholders said that the "e" approach (for example to learner evaluation to teaching) actually improved the process and made them think more about the questions and the approach they had previously used. This relates to Enable nicely, we need to be able to show how people feel now, and how things are better due to intervention, support and adaption of new approaches. It also highlights issues with some initiatives and how they haven't captured that information which has made it harder for them to measure the impact of their work.
A particular paper that caught my attention focused on studies around software and if learnability of a particular tool impacted on its adoption to the mainstream. Interestingly the work demonstrated if the need/ motivation was high enough to use the technology even with negative learnability it will become adapted. This has come as no real surprise as it reflects my own experience of using technology, and those of people I talk to in the university with regards to some of our internal systems. It raises the question - should we (as a university) be looking at replacing these systems as the motivation is there from staff to use them regardless? It's a sticky one as surely with more positive learnability then tools may be used in more intuitive ways and information used to support learning more than what can be seen as a "chore" at the moment?
More reflections from EISTA coming soon!

EISTA 2010 Day One - Managing the curriculum

2010-07-01T11:19:00.005+01:00

This is a quick summary of the first day of the EISTA 2010 conference. The main focus of the day, for me, was around presentations on transforming curriculum. The first thing I noticed was although the speakers (USA: Drexel University, and University of Texas, along with AEFIS) talked about Assessment, they were discussing what we would call curriculum review and that their award programme structures were very similar to ours and they are experiencing the same problems with how they managed their curriculum. The presentations didn't address this from an institutional perspective, but rather a faculty. They were also presenting the benefits of using AEFIS who also presented, and mentioned that they were looking for academic partners from across the world.

The first presentation talked about creating & sustaining change, linking reviews to student outcomes. They note the same issues with change that has been encountered by Enable, culture, hierarchy, communication, lack of understanding of reason for change. They discuss a faculty top down approach to change and how they managed communication to set up a new review process (the old one did not work, people never did it as they felt it was too much effort, and that the one size fits all approach does not work). They they talked about their implementation of the AEFIS to track development and review of course curriculum to improve the student experience. They now use the system as a central point to deliver resources to faculties.

The second presentation focused on how curriculum mapping with, at first Excel, and then AEFIS, helped them recognise that often course units where not being assessed in the best way to promote student experience, that they had too many units at an introduction level (14 programming units at introduction level and none at emphasis, reinforce or applies level so the students could say "hello" but not hold a conversation in any of them). The mapping exercise involved looking at 14 different learning outcomes and then breaking them down to 70 performance criteria (this break down took a couple of months of research as they did not start from scratch - nor would they recommend that anyone tried it from scratch). They said that the entire process of mapping took them 16 months in Excel but with AEFIS a lot of the work is automated and could be done in a day! We then did a nice paper exercise around curriculum mapping outcomes against level of learning and means of assessment, manually identifying issues with the curriculum - the presenter pointed out that the software helps but can't do everything.

The next presentations I attended focused on managing the curriculum using analytics to improve and inform learning. The first stressed the importance of being able to use good quality data, and that the most important needs to be selected from the avalanche of data that faculties and institutions collect. We were shown a model of developing learning analytics, with the focus on the individual student learning experience, to support optimising the student path through the course - this seemed to link to APEL and allowing students to use what they already know to skip units.

The second discussed the development of an Instructional Decision Support System. This system is designed to link student characteristics (learning styles etc), student performance, instructor characteristics, learning outcomes and instructional methods to inform faculty decisions (yes that was straight off the handout!). After collecting data on students in different courses they were able to show, for example, that on one course students were sequential learners but the teacher was using global learning and as such the feedback from the course was not positive, by adjusting her teaching to fit sequential learners over two years feedback from the students was much more positive.

The final presentation for this area was around creating EduApps - creating support documentation and applications for faculty staff so that they can focus on innovative teaching, these "apps" are not necessarily technological solutions, but can be guidance notes on using different technologies. They are developed based on faculty issues, and those faculties that raise the issues become owners of the solution. The main criteria of the apps is that they should be focused on a particular problem, pose low risk for faculty adoption, the tools should not require a learning curve or a significant investing of time or resources to use it.

Despite the great promotional work done by the universities and AEFIS themselves I did have a concern that they spoke about being the one system for university's fitting into different areas, rather than looking at how to support universities with different systems (along the lines of the work already happening in the UK around FSD and SOA). Although this could just be me and unfortunately I could not follow up on this during lunch as they did not provide any and I really need to eat at the moment!

Photos of Sam presenting at the last FSD Event

2010-06-30T13:45:00.001+01:00

Sustaining Innovation and Enterprise Architecture

2010-06-23T13:41:00.005+01:00

The last month has been quiet, mainly due to holidays and attending workshops that have resulted in giving me long to do lists! The month started with a workshop here at Staffordshire University, Sustaining Innovation via Organisational Development Workshop. This was a great day that resulted in some useful discussion around how we engage Senior Management in supporting innovation and embedding it into the day to day. We had guest speakers from Australia, Manchester and Plymouth (among others). I tweeted heavily on the event (and others I have attended) and to read them and others on Enable check out Twapper Keeper http://twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/jiscenable. Useful thoughts from the day included

Mark Stubbs rethinking what we do with the curriculum. Asking fundamental questions, why is approval process face to face?

interesting question from @markstiles about institutional values and data: secretive? open? risk-taker? risk-averse?

Enterprise Architecture as a model for managing innovation but role of effective governance also critical

USQ's Australian Digital Futures Institute - yes please! Can we have one?

Strategy & structure need to be scrutinised & regularly realigned

After this event it was back to interviewing faculties about their involvement in working with External Examiners. We have learnt a lot with these interviews and discovered extra stakeholders involved that had not been considered during the review. We are now planning an extra round of interviews to get them engaged. The best way we have done this is with three of us attending each meeting, one specialist from QIS, our Technical Manager to roughly bring together a model as we talk and me, to make a narrative note of the processes and issues faced by stakeholders. This seems to work well with each of our different perspectives opening up more questions about what is happening in faculties at the moment and what they would like to see happen. Everyone (so far) has been pleased that something is happening to support the work taken in this area.

This week I have attended the Enterprise Architecture Workshop in Birmingham. A useful blog post has been written on this by John Townslend (http://jwt23.wordpress.com/2010/06/21/jisc-enterprise-architecture-practice-group-workshop-june-21st-ea-impact/), who usefully has blogged about the management stream that ran at the same time as the practitioner session I attended. The hands on session was very useful, with discussions about whether there is a right way to model, with a practical example that we could model using Archi (http://archi.cetis.ac.uk/) I was able to use this time to talk to our technical manager about my first attempt at modelling for one of our SURF colleges, which resulted in me re-modelling more explicitly and getting me up early on the second day to continue working on it before the sessions. You can certainly find yourself losing hours to working on models if you're not careful! The second day focused on the future of the group, what did we want over the next year, where did we want it held and did we see a future for the group to become a professional practitioners group as it grows in experience and numbers. There was also discussion around supporting the development of a foundation programme to support those who are just entering the EA arena, there were a lot of takers for the programme, including wanting to get Senior Management to get engaged with the programme so that they understood terms etc used by staff - although not have them attend the full 4 days. At the moment I am preparing for next weeks visit to Flordia for the EISTA 2010 conference where I am talking about managing strategic change in HE. I will let you know how that goes!

Communication is the key

2010-05-28T14:40:00.001+01:00

The last two weeks have been busy dealing with the fall out from Ning changing its charging model. After doing analysis of a number of different tools the choice was made for Grou.ps which makes much of its ability to merge with Ning content. Our first step was to merge the user accounts so people did not have to re-register. This did cause some confusion as the Grou.ps site sent an automatic email out to all the users using a generic email address. Still the confusion was kept to a minimum due to contact with the partner colleges and staff via the SUN network and Twitter.

As part of the launch of the new network, Hamza and I visited Newcastle Under Lyme College. This included going over a history of Enable and why we picked social networking as one of the tools to support the partners engage with Enable. This event was to a small team, however the discussions around their experiences around CDD were very useful.

As part of the new network launch and the modelling work we are planning I posted a query on what the processes and roles are used at the partner colleges – using a demo flowchart start discussions going. One college has been quick to respond to this which has enabled me to do my first attempt of modelling using the Archi tool provided by CETIS (http://archi.cetis.ac.uk/) and some helpful Archimate websites. This first attempt was difficult for me, from understanding the different relationship links and spotting the holes in the information I was given. This has required a number of subsequent emails to the partner college. I have passed my first attempt on to Sam, our resident expert for comments before I move further on it – and doing any others.

More modelling is taking place around external examiners with our first meeting with quality staff in the faculties. This was very useful and we have a number of these schedules in the next few months. It helped to have one of us typing notes about the process while the other worked on the model.

This week I attended the JISC cross programme meeting on Employer Responsive Provision (ERP). This was a great event which involved meeting some new people and sharing experiences around ERP, and recognition that work in this area impacts on all CDD.

I’m off on holiday next week, but will be back on the 7th to see what interesting discussions pop up at the workshop “Sustaining Innovation via Organisational Development”

For the Greater Good

2010-05-13T11:27:00.003+01:00

Sorry about the Hot Fuzz start to this blog, but it matches the out comes quite nicely for the programme meeting we had yesterday.

Last week has been interesting for the project. In discussions with one spoke it was clear that some changes had been made to the processes around course design with little expectation of making a large impact on the creation of more flexible awards. This matched discussions at the programme meeting about whether changing processes and documentation alone will make the desired changes we need within institutions. There is hope that the changes made as part of the spoke will support more responsive curriculum design and a slicker curriculum portfolio. Discussions then turned to how these expectations would be evaluated, there is some difficulty in this a much of the baseline for the spoke was based on perceptions. The spoke will be using the expectation spreadsheet it completed at the start of the project along with the JISC Evaluation workshop notes, to support the evaluation process. The spoke is also reviewing the usefulness of recording date information against each stage of the process for faculties to measure responsiveness.

The JISC programme meeting raised an interesting discussion around institutions expectations of learner and staff cultural attitudes to technology and how this differs between institutions. As we, in the project, talk a lot about culture being a barrier to change is there a practical way of addressing this? Bolton spoke briefly on training they are providing for staff around supporting using technology for learning. Does Enable need to think about putting together training for staff to help manage these cultural attitudes, using faculties who we have identified as already making those changes? I’m not sure we would be the right people to do this but we can try talking about it to the right people. Some projects in the programme have created tools to help staff identify their teaching approaches and what others are doing in their institution.

The final part of the day was a discussion summarising the work projects have been doing and how it can be used to help others, stopping duplication of effort at a higher level than simply within an institution. The projects discussed whether it would be possible for them to bring together the combined effort using design studio or whether it was something that needed to be organised centrally with everyone in a room. The idea of an information roadmap was seen to be useful and projects were happy to provide information to support it, although what information was needed and in what form was difficult to determine. Some felt that information needed a context within a process map (or in a model) and Bolton demonstrated the work they were doing with the FSD programme. I personally feel that a generic model to support staff with a starting point for discussion would be useful, and that validation documents themselves would be of little value. Perhaps a quick model/map with each stage a clickable link to a list of information collected/used would be best. It will be interesting to see the out come of this session will be.

Added 24/05/2010

Further relevant blogs:

http://jisccdd.jiscinvolve.org/2010/05/19/sustaining-curriculum-change/

http://blogs.cf.ac.uk/palet/entry/jisc_programme_meeting_brass_tacks

Supporting Innovation

2010-05-10T13:04:00.001+01:00

The last week and a half has been a busy one, with the cluster meeting in Bolton at the end of March (read here for coeducates summary of the day), meetings around our new “mini” project and discovering Ning was changing its charging model. This has highlighted issues with innovation when it occurs outside of the “safe” environment of the university, as tutors as well as the Enable project are looking at alternatives to the Ning environment. We have had to manage how we look at these alternatives, we can’t spend too much time on it as otherwise we would be better off paying for the new service, however we also need to ensure that the choice we make does not impact negatively on the end users. We are, however coordinating our effort with others in the university and it is almost a project on its own – with stakeholders in each faculty.

The cluster event went extremely well, with discussions firstly around managing innovation and the shared experiences of the different projects. This lead to some thoughts around how we could work together towards a single output, rather than working in isolation, and to support our institution making the changes felt needed for the new environment we are finding ourselves in. The afternoon discussion was around managing course related information (CRI) and competencies. As a side product of this day, and the work the Staffordshire University LDI team have been doing towards a conference, a new expert workshop is being promoted at Staffordshire Uni “Sustaining Innovation via Organisational Development” (more information, or register here).

Our project has been moving forward with the focus on modelling the processes, information and roles around supporting external examiners. We have had meetings with the university QI Service and they have offered to give expert advice and attend meetings with QA staff within faculties. As this work progresses a lot of it will be on the shoulders of the Technical Manager, Sam, as I am taking a lot of holiday before going on maternity leave in September. I am working hard at ensuring that the same level of communication occurs during my absence but please bear in mind that blog entries may drop off a little over the next few months.

Working together

2010-04-27T14:12:00.002+01:00

This week has me reading a number of blogs from our partner colleges, this has made for some interesting reading. Mainly they pick up on the same issues that we have already noted but every now and again a real gem of an issue appears, two examples include:

If validation can't occur before Sept 2010 college is looking at having to wait a year to deliver - is this because of the university? because the college doesn't like "mid" year starts, or don't the learners?
Awards are running but access to the VLE across partners is difficult or can be delayed by a year - again why?

With these issues (and others) I am feeling a bit like the kid in school who likes to pick at scabs! As part of this scab picking process we are organising meetings with the UK Partnership office to put a model together of how they deal with CDD with the partners and to see how processes etc help/ hinder or have gaps that need to be filled. This will be my first attempt at modelling although I will have Sam there to help me. I am also planning to try out the new CETIS Archi tool as my laptop with BizzDesign on it has been taken in for another repair.
We are also starting work on the "mini project" which is our pilot on testing not simply technology solutions to issues around External Examiners but Programme Management and Enterprise Architecture also get in on the deal. We have our first set of interviews around this work at the start of May, before that our Technical Manager is sorting out the technical issues around this "mini project".

The end of this week we have a cluster meeting in Bolton which will be very interesting, this will be a one day event with a focus on the use of technology to support CDD - including what I am hoping will be useful discussions and demonstrations around using Wookies, Widgets and using XCRI. I am sure this will result in another blog post!

Everybody's talking

2010-04-21T11:19:00.002+01:00

We have had some quiet meetings this week, as staff have been trapped abroad. This, in particular, has meant that the partner voice was muted at the curriculum group meeting. During this meeting we talked about the SURF Portfolio Review that is occurring at the university, with the support of the Enable project. There were some useful points being raised by partners not directly linked to the Enable project. These points are very similar to those previously raised by partners within Enable.

The partners have noted that there needs to be a clear link between the business strategy at college level to those held in faculties and the university.
They noted that issues weren’t with validation but CDD overall, and often they felt that it was much like a project without a project manager, thus problems with timings, access to information and managing meetings.

These points link with the work we are doing with the modelling, which hopefully should highlight that this role is missing until towards the end of CDD when a link tutor is provided by the faculty, and how strategies need to be linked to the faculties and partner colleges.

As I have been talking to Sam about modelling I am considering attempting the SURF level model on my own to get some real, hands on experience of using BizzDesign and Archimate. I have been putting this off for sometime, allowing Sam to take the lead, however as work progresses on the External Examiner mini project I believe it is important that I get some practical practice on the modelling.

In other areas of the project we are preparing our interim report, I have asked Mark and Sam to review this as they will be responsible for doing the next one on their own as I will be on maternity leave when it is due. We are also attending a one day cluster meeting next week at Bolton and the programme meeting at the start of May.

Taking a step back

2010-04-16T13:54:00.001+01:00

I have been to two very different, and interesting, conferences over the last two weeks. The first was in Plymouth, a general elearning conference covering schools, FE and HE (http://www2.plymouth.ac.uk/e-learning/). This was a packed two day event and it was difficult to see everything, however those sessions I attended were very good. The keynote speech by Josie Fraser discussed the web and privacy, the one by Dave White discussed how do we support what learners need and balance that against what they want, and has some interesting blogs on the subject (http://tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk/index.php/author/whited/).

I also did a presentation at the conference to a slightly smaller audience around supporting innovative curriculum in a traditional HE environment. This was a trail for Florida in June and was very successful, the discussions lasting 30mins after the presentation. There is a clearly recognised need by institutions to take a step back and look at what they are doing and why, without the caveat “we’ve always done it this way”. It was also acknowledged that some of the big barriers to institutional change that takes time and effort is engaging support from senior management, and getting them to understand that often quick wins are quick draws reinforcing the quid pro quo. The leaflet that went with my presentation is available from the project website (http://www.projects.staffs.ac.uk/enable/p3m3.html) although the slides are also available on the same page, my talk was slightly different to the one recorded. It is a shame I forgot to record the new presentation as some interesting points were raised.

The second conference was the JISC annual conference in London (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2010/04/jisc10.aspx). This one day event was also jam packed with good information. Martin Bean (VC Open University) did a great keynote to open the conference and I attended two useful sessions that support the work of Enable, including presenting our poster to the community.

Document Management with (or without) SharePoint

2010-04-01T16:36:00.001+01:00

Fleur and I attended an RSC West Midlands “Document Management with SharePoint” event on the morning of 17th March. We were interested in the enterprise content-management features primarily. Presentations from OfficeTalk and Parabola Software gave a flavour of what could be achieved using ‘lightweight’ implementation of SharePoint using Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) only or full scale implementation using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). See the product guide for SharePoint features.

Key points from the SharePoint presentations were:

Good integration with other Microsoft technologies – Office, Outlook, Active Directory. You might expect this.
Lack of a consistent user (interface) experience across the suite of technologies comprising SharePoint. Some component applications implement the latest interface styles and modes of operation and others do not. It ‘feels like a collection of different applications’ rather than a coherent whole.
Numerous gotchas. It’s important to do your homework thoroughly. For example, the forthcoming SharePoint 2010 components are all 64-bit so upgrading might involved the cost of new hardware as well as the software. For new adopters of SharePoint the recommendation was to go straight to the 2010 version.
Accessibility is not good for SharePoint 2007 but 2010 is much better.

Balance was provided by a presentation from Sirius IT, Enterprise Open Source systems integrators. They outlined their concept of the e-Learning Stack consisting of the following layers:

Monitoring
Contact
- Course Management
Course
- Document Management
Resources

The open source offering for document management was Alfresco, a technology we’re already familiar with.

Alfresco provides facilities for workflows, collaboration and versioning. It tries to minimize the learning curve by employing commonly understood metaphors like the ‘shared drive’. This is where Alfresco content residing on the server appears and behaves to the user as though its on a shared network drive.

An Office plugin exists for integration with Microsoft tools.

A powerful feature unique to Alfresco is format control. Inbound and outbound rules can be defined which automatically convert or transform content as it is added to or copied from the Alfresco shared drive. This happens automatically and transparently. For example, you might have a rule set up to compress any video content over 500MB in size. If the user copies a larger video file to the shared drive, the video is automatically compressed. Another example might be an outbound rule which converts a document to PDF format when it is requested. This would allow documents to remain editable on the shared drive in Word format, with automatic conversion to the more ubiquitous format for sharing.

This format control feature could be a hugely important tool to avoid runaway resource consumption as learning content is deposited into repositories and VLEs.

The community version of Alfresco is free. The Enterprise Edition, with technical support and extras to smooth deployment and management across the enterprise is available via a subscription.

Practice makes perfect

2010-03-26T11:19:00.001Z

Both Sam and I have had two days in Birmingham this week as part of the FSD programme. These were very useful. The first day was focused on the work different projects are doing around Enterprise Architecture, and how it works best where the approach is used but the term isn’t! It was good to review where we where as a project not just in terms of Enable but also with the mini project around e-enabling our External Examiners processes. There was also a review on the last meeting and that we needed to be careful not to try and take too many big steps (Ross et al 2006) but rather move from silos, to standard tech, to optimised core and finally the Holy Grail – Business Modularity. By doing the baby steps we reduce the chance of failure. I got a few to do reminders out of the day – including read the book by Ross on “Enterprise Architecture as a Strategy” and reading the Cairo final report, along with trying to track down the governance documents provided by Liverpool John Moore. It is really good how the more advanced projects are helping those of us just finding our feet. It was also good to see how different institutions addressed creating models and that there was no single right answer for everyone. There was general agreement that EA should be used as a method for enabling change, part of a strategy to support projects, which links back to those times I have spoken about programme management (Managing change and innovation, More Snow time, Merry Christmas and many more!).

We got to see a demonstration of the application CETIS have been developing to support those interested in doing EA modelling, with the right tools, but without the scary BizzDesign software and their licensing! This looks like a great starting point and something I would be interested in as we don’t use a lot of the features of BizzDesign at the moment, although I can see how BizzDesign is useful as the model and we get more sophisticated in our needs.

The second day was more generalist in talking about shared services, supporting student services, and SOA. This is the harder day for me being less technical than I used to be but I find it really useful seeing what other institutions are trying and hearing about their experiences. We talked about how others could benefit from this expertise, it was clear that the group wanted somewhere “safe” to discuss issues and models.

The afternoon session started with an extremely useful Dragons Den where we had to sell our projects, this was the first time I had done it without support, and I think it went ok. It has certainly made me realise that I know more than I thought about EA and also helped me with the understanding of what we need to communicate to senior staff about our “mini” project. Hopefully this knowledge will stick with me as we move forward in the project.

Moving Forward

2010-03-18T10:45:00.003Z

The team has had a busy week, we had the Enable SMWG meeting on Tuesday which is our first get together since the middle of last year, we also had some dissemination events to attend and a Document Management workshop. It was good to get everyone around the table again for the SMWG. We were able to give them a quick update on what we had been up to and how we have been using the Enterprise Programme Approach to support projects, including working closely with initiatives such as the Quality Review and the SURF Portfolio Review. We also gave each member a copy of all the issues that arose during the first interview phase, broken down by those already being addressed and those not being addressed. Those highlighted as not being addressed also had an “impact” column. The SMWG has been asked to look through this list and see whether they agree with the issues (or whether they are perceptions – as discussed in “Barriers to being flexible – Myth or Reality?”. We have also asked them to consider which issues they think should be the priority for the university.

One of the main streams of the Enable is to help support a change in how we do CDD. As part of this we do the programme approach mentioned above, but we also want something tangible. As part of this we have taken the work of the Quality Review and their recommendations and taken one aspect we could use within Enable, as an example of the benefits of using a holistic approach. We will be using the same modelling framework that we used to create the baseline report and intend to fully engaging all stakeholders involved. We are looking at a 6 month initiative to e-enable the External Examiner process within QIS and Faculties. This was deemed to be be a practical scope for the Enable project team to handle, and with the help of those within the Quality Review we will also be creating the “to be” model mentioned in previous posts. This was presented at the SMWG with the use of a PID (Project Initiation Document) which raised some questions that we needed to address:

What technology are we planning to use? this was raised as we need to review document management as part of this work, and we mentioned that an example would be SharePoint. This made the SMWG think we had already picked the technology. We haven’t and in fact we are part of a steering group that is looking at university wide requirements for document management. This group is designed to give the university a solution (or number of solutions) for document management within a short time frame.
Is this just a solution for solutions sake? No, this was a real problem highlighted by the Quality Review, it is a small scope project that will be able to prove proof of concept that can be moved to other areas of CDD once the “to be” model has been created, and the skills have been acquired to implement the solution.
Are we really planning to model both “as is “ and “to be” of the whole of CDD in 6 months? Yes and No, most of the “as is” model has been produced as part of the baseline report from last year, although some changes have taken place that need to go in, the “to be” model can not be created without the input of process owners, we will be modelling how they see the “to be” not creating it in isolation as we don’t own the processes. We can however use the “as is” model to help identify areas of improvement.

We have had the go ahead on the “project” however we are all meeting again in 6 weeks to discuss the proposals given by the Document Management Group as to what technologies need to be in place and what the cost implications would be and how they would be handled.

Learning to stretch – becoming flexible

2010-03-12T12:49:00.001Z

This weeks interviews have been very useful in understanding how we need to learn to be flexible, where we need to bend to make CDD easier.

Communication – we need to be flexible on how we communicate both internally and externally. We can’t assume that because we know something everyone else knows it too. This has been raised a number of times this week as an issue, “information may already be out there but I don’t know where it is without help.” and “I try and get information but can sometimes feel like I know less now than I did before”. Examples include, knowing about our QIS website, knowing changes have been made to processes and supporting documents, knowing where documents are stored, knowing the right person to talk to and having the same language. All big things that need to be considered.

External delivery – we need to trust those in our organisation who are putting forward external staff to deliver content onsite either at partner colleges or employer sites. We need to be flexible with our assumptions about employer delivery of awards. By being flexible enough to move away from “standard delivery” we can ensure that we have the same standards applied across the board, if it is good for us it is good for them. We can give clear ownership of processes and decisions so that we can find out (and communicate) why things have happened and how we can change them.

Barriers to being flexible – Myth or Reality?

2010-03-05T13:06:00.001Z

As we have spent time talking to different faculties and services it is interesting that we each have our own perceptions of reality. During a recent interview it was noted that as a university we did not encourage cross faculty working, that our processes were not flexible enough to share funding for example. This was then discussed in another interview where the person mentioned that the university did have processes that allowed for sharing funding. What is the reality? It appears to be both are, depending on your own experiences and point of view. As Mark Stiles says “often the perception shapes the reality”, can we turn this around?

One member of staff (lets call them A) was able to achieve the “miracle” of cross faculty funding by looking at things from a different angle, another (B) tried to get the same result using the traditional point of view and was unsuccessful. At the moment there is no way of telling B about this way of working, or thinking. As Enable moves forward we will be able to share the experiences and the processes from staff member A and give them to staff member B to help change their reality. This is a fairly simplistic view that breaks down as we get into perceptions on what is responsiveness. Depending on who we have spoken to some staff members believe that for an employer lead award a years turnaround from design to delivery is perfectly reasonable, other staff (and employers) however find this an extremely long time to wait to train staff. Staff often say that validation takes too long, but investigation has shown the processes are very responsive, it is the information that takes time, along with organising meetings with relevant staff and employers (where needed). There is a recognition that as a HE organisation we are often obsessed with having meetings when it would be possible to discuss things either via email or online tools such as GoogleDocs or OfficeLive. A lot of the problems around these perceptions are based on changing peoples behaviours, supporting them using new technologies and providing tools to help reduce the amount of input they need to do into forms required for the CDD process. This is the next 6 months of Enable, as we put together a “to be” model of the university, and plan the stages around how we get there. Along with this we will be implementing some prototypes, focused on supporting our quality service with external examiners.

Dissemination and promotion

2010-02-26T20:26:00.001Z

The project has being focused on producing a Project Initiation Document to support the work it is doing around modelling course related information within CDD (Course Design and Development). It has also started working towards creating the “to be” view of CDD. The team has pulled out all the interview notes from different faculties about issues around CDD and also a list of issues from its interviews with the staff involved in the different initiatives at the university. I will be recording our next stage with some photos as we try and group together all the different suggestions and issues we have collated using post it notes.

Along with the work Sam has been leading we have also been meeting with deans in each Faculty to talk about their plans for the next year and to keep them up to date with the progress of the Enable project. This has been very useful and Mark will be writing up a summary sheet of our conversations, and about some of the issues that the deans see as needing to be addressed in CDD.

We have also been supporting the SURF Review, although we were unable to attend one of the meetings we have been able to pass on the issues highlighted by the project partners. There was some interesting discussions during this meeting between perception of progress from colleges, the university, and employers. Enable is supporting this work and has provided a lot of information from the partners experiences based not just on the annual report but on the spreadsheets we ask them to complete during the design and development process of a new idea.

Seeing as I called this a dissemination and promotion post I better say a bit about the dissemination we are planning to do outside of the university. We have had our abstract approved for the Plymouth e-Learning Conference which is in April, and we are also presenting with the rest of our programme at the next JISC eLearning experts meeting in Birmingham in March, and the JISC Conference 2010 in London in April.

Project Partners feedback

2010-02-15T10:53:00.003Z

Last week was focused on collating information from partners, tying the information together with feedback from internal interviews. As part of this work a number of positive aspects with working with Staffordshire University were highlighted:

Annual review follow ups to colleges is very useful
Some faculty processes encourage partnership developments
Consortium award developments works well
University is seen to work hard at providing suitable progression
University respects employer feedback
Colleges appreciate being able to start awards in Sept and January

However there have also been some issues that have been highlighted by the partner colleges:

Getting resources released in time for college teaching via VLE is difficult
Can be a delay in getting a validation date
Communication is slow, especially when working across faculties
Faculty processes to award development are all different for partner colleges
Faculty support towards award development in partner colleges is diverse
Perception of inflexibility in awards

These points have been highlighted (in more detail) within our own network, plus we have a SURF Portfolio Review that they will be able to feed into, along with into the work of the Course Related Information we are doing. We have also updated the Partners Ning site with the new documents already created by internal projects around improving the validation process.

Measuring the costs and benefits

2010-02-05T13:11:00.002Z

The project is working hard at planning for managing course information with regards to the work of the Quality Review Process. As part of this I have been reviewing and attempting to write scenarios based on some of the issues around the Quality Review. This has been much harder than I expected using TOGAF and required me to look at a number of samples online to help me. This will not be a quick solution, however there is real value in doing this, and I am considering writing one for Enable itself. This could be a very useful communication tool to use with the executive. This is important as I try and get them to understand the benefits to an Enterprise Programme Office and how it will save money for the university. It seems as though the message is being lost somewhere at the moment. As part of this is the issue around the SMWG and the fact that it hasn't been able to meet recently. There was one scheduled for today but this has been cancelled, although the project team is meeting with the executive sponsor for the project and the Business Re-Engineering Manager for the university.

We have had some interesting interviews and informal conversations this week around managing course information, one discussion was focused on how accessibility could be embedded into course design rather than bolted on as part of induction or ignored completely. This was an interesting point, and one that was particular to that stakeholder, which reflects back to last weeks workshop about different views by different people.

We have also met with one of the faculties to talk to them about issues they have with CDD, and with the Quality Review team. This meeting was valuable in that it gave us a real insight in how to market content to the executive, but also about what the executive expect from projects running under their view. We are now writing a mini PID for this so we can communicate some of the outputs of the work we are doing and how it all fits together to create a bigger plan for the university whilst still giving them some quick wins

Managing Change and Innovation

2010-01-29T11:23:00.002Z

This week has been a busy one, we spent the first two days down in London with the Flexible Service Delivery programme, the first day was catching up with projects and talking about the use of SOA, and other solutions to managing data. The second was focused on modelling and using Enterprise Architecture. This was very useful for us, and in particular for me, as it highlighted a number of issues around governance and process ownership that is needed for the modelling to be successful. It was also interesting to see during the modelling exercise that everyone had their own perspectives to a similar process, depending on their experiences and knowledge.

I have had my paper successfully accepted to the 8th International Conference on Education and Information Systems, Technologies and Applications: EISTA 2010, held in Florida in June – this is based on my document I wrote a while ago for the Senior Management Working Group on Programme Management, to fit with the presentation I gave them last year. I’m pretty excited about this, and looking forward to discussing the theories etc. As part of this I have submitted something similar for the Plymouth conference as a trial. It’s the first time for me presenting all on my own!

Edit: Read my experiences here

As I am becoming more and more focused on Portfolio Management /TOGAF it is clear that support from the whole of executive, along with clear governance and business strategy statements are needed. How ready are we for all this? At the moment I would have to say not very, however with the work of the project and by constant communication with staff, this will change over the next year.

Using TOGAF

2010-01-22T12:40:00.001Z

This week has been a planning week, with looking at the issues raised, and putting a plan of recommendations together for the SMWG. This document is designed to support how the programme office will work, and the work we are doing with EA and TOGAF.

As part of the work of Enable we are now talking to our Quality office around how they see the information used to support curriculum design being better utilised. This has had us discussing the issues found during the Quality Review (as well as those from interviews with Enable) and some ideal solutions to these issues using supporting technology. We will be following TOGAF for this information and are using our initial meetings to complete the “vision” stage. Sam is using the TOGAF guidelines to create scenarios from these meetings as part of it.

Next week is a heavy one from the perspective of EA as both Sam and I will be attending the next FSD meeting in London which is followed by an EA day. We then have an Architecture Elluminate session scheduled for the Wednesday afternoon. All EA hands on deck! I have installed BizzDesign on my little laptop which could also be quite interesting!

More snow time

2010-01-15T09:47:00.004Z

As mentioned in my last blog the SMWG was supposed to be this week, however snow once again fell from the skies making it impossible to run, therefore it has been rescheduled for February. This is useful as there is now further discussion occurring at Executive level around the development of a programme office. We are waiting to hear what happens with those discussions and how they impact on the programme office governance and ideas we have already worked on in Enable. As part of the work we are doing for a programme office we are organising individual faculty meetings with Deans, heads of service, and FAD's as part dissemination about Enable and part discussion about their individual initiatives that could impact on the university, in the arena of CDD. This will then lead to meetings with those leading the initiatives to find out more about the work they are doing.
This leads on from last years interviews with internal projects and the issues mentioned in the last blog, along with these we have also managed to have most of the meetings with award leaders, finding out their experiences of validation, annual review and the 5 year review. We have had some interesting discussions about what would make these experiences easier and more responsive, and in one case had a good open discussion about the culture of lecturers and attitudes to senior/ executive management. These have been noted down to discuss at the next Enable team meeting.
Next week we have more internal Enable meetings, and we will also be talking with CETIS. Sam is also helping me with my first adventure into using BizzDesign Architect, could be interesting.
By now I was hoping to know whether a paper I have written on the development of a programme office in supporting a change in CDD had been accepted in the US but nothing has been said yet. I will let you know as soon as I do.

Having a n-ice new year

2010-01-08T10:08:00.004Z

Sorry about that! Things are quiet for me at the moment, as I have been house bound for the last three days thanks to the ice on the roads by where I live. Fortunately Sam has been carrying on with interviewing staff around the curriculum design processes for mapping and for capturing more issues. We have created a long list of issues from the 2009 interviews, as part of this I have tried to group them in different areas and themes it seems that the issues can be broken down into the following areas:

Strategy (Culture, Product, Resourcing)
Student Support (Communication, Marketing, Systems)
Course DD (Communication, Annual Monitoring, Marketing, Engagement, Product, Processes)
Course Information (Communication, Systems)
Course Support (Resourcing)
Global (Communication, Culture, Engagement, Id Management, Processes, Project Management, Resourcing, Systems)
Partnerships (Communication, Marketing, Processes, Progression, Resources)
Project Management (Resourcing, Scoping, Systems, Timescales)

These will be discussed further at next weeks SMWG as long as snow doesn't get it cancelled. We really need this SMWG as the last few have been cancelled due to clashes either with JISC events or with other senior management meetings. We were hoping to be discussing the Programme Office principle at this meeting but it looks like this has got bigger than Enable and the executive are now interested in the model I have documented. Not sure what is going to happen next on this, but all sounds very positive still.

Other than the spreadsheet I have been catching up on previous Elluminate sessions that JISC have been running via the circle network, and managed to catch one live on Wednesday thanks to working from home. Some interesting discussions are going on out there on how to manage organisational change and addressing cultural issues to changing curriculum delivery.

Over the next week I am expecting some interesting reports from our project partners summarising their experiences over the last year with Staffordshire University. Will report on these and other points raised in this blog as soon as I can :)

Merry Christmas

2009-12-15T11:36:00.003Z

Well this will be the last blog before the Christmas break, so Merry Christmas & Happy New Year from me to you. This week has been mainly working on the interim report, adding more detail to the outcomes we have had so far and adding useful information from the report to the website so others can see information about the project, this includes the issues raised from the first year of the project, and the development of the programme office. I have also changed the tone of the report based on the knowledge that it will be published online for all to see.

At the team meeting this week we have continued discussion on the governance of the programme office that will be raised next week with the Pro Vice Chancellor, along with what to name the office. I'm tempted towards "Enterprise Programme Office" as it is across the enterprise and seems to be an accepted term in business, however there has been some discussion about the fact that "Enterprise" has a different meaning in HE and that it should be called something generic such as "University Programme Office". We will have to see what our Executive think. It is an interesting idea that we should be changing what is a recognised term to something that fits the language of the HE environment even while saying that we need to change our language to fit that of employers to assist in employer engagement in award development.

We have also been discussing our modelling work, we need to get a head with this over the next couple of months as it will be vital to have a "To Be" model to support the programme office and also to support the work we need to create useful models within the pedagogic planner Phoebe. I have also submitted my first paper to an international conference, relating to embedding EA and Programme Management into an institution. I am keeping my fingers crossed!

Our project partners are working hard at the moment creating their first snapshot report based on the work they have been doing for Enable. I have already received one draft - thanks guys - which was interesting reading. I am looking forward to the others arriving before the next SMWG meeting so that the findings can be covered in the meeting.

Flexible Service Delivery

2009-12-11T10:32:00.002Z

It has been a busy week, I have been writing a paper for a conference next year on developing an Enterprise Programme Office and using Enterprise Architecture. This has coincided with the FSD JISC meeting down in London and discussions with our Finance Director. All of which have helped with giving me clear ideas of how we should be working as a university, and how to communicate the work both internally and externally to the project.

The discussion with the Finance Director lead to “imagine if..” statements which give basis to the “To Be” model that we need to build into our modelling. I need to capture these for sharing with the project team. A number of our “imagine if” scenarios relate to the work done by the FSD programme. The workshop I attended was on behalf of Sam, but in fact, I can see a real benefit to attending these events as a project manager, as well as those with a more technical leaning. There was a lot of useful discussion about enabling institutions to talk to vendors with one voice, and enabling institutions to be clear about their requirements by using Enterpise Architecture. Although EA isn't the be all and end all it is certainly a useful framework that can be used to help FSD and has helped the Enable project, and the institution, including giving us structure to collating evidence of behaviour within the university. It has also helped us identify the need for an Enterprise Programme Office that fits with the existing Executive Programme Office that already exists.

Here is a useful blog from the session by John Townsend (Liverpool John Moore) who was part of the last afternoon session group I participated in around effective change as part of the FSD business case. He reflects on the the idea of a Programme Office, and the need for effective governance. The governance put in place by Enable has been very useful in effecting change with the use of the SMWG but we need to be clear that the governance needs to go further to support our Enterprise Programme Office.

Notes from the Leeds Cluster Meeting

2009-12-01T17:04:00.001Z

Just back from another useful cluster meeting, this time at Leeds.

It’s becoming apparent that there’s a lot of closely-related work going on in other JISC programmes and the curriculum design work will benefit from our participation in these other programmes. Specifically, we’ll be participating in the Flexible Service Delivery programme’s Strategic Technologies Group (STG), a community exploring and using enterprise architecture, and we’re running the OpenStaffs project in the JISC OER programme.

I now understand coaching as distinct from mentoring and tutoring. The PC3 coaching approach seems ideally suited to work-based learning. The kind of skills the coaching approach would develop would be a big selling point for employers.

From a support point of view, so far we’ve had lots of meetings to discuss the ideas, concepts and problems and theoretical approaches and solutions. We’ve got to the stage now where we need real world examples and advice from people/organisations who have ‘done it’ and lived to tell the tale. Input from outside the sector would be refreshing.

Costing new approaches was a major topic of discussion. This is also a main area of interest for the STG. I’m looking forward to finding out more about approaches to costing in the enterprise architecture sphere.

A key risk for our enterprise architecture effort was reiterated at the meeting – scope creep. We need to keep a very tight reign on architecture scope and partitioning to ensure the work fits the resource available.

One of the benefits of our enterprise architecture will be the ability to explicitly communicate how the University goes about its business. Currently, a large part of the organisation has a folklore-oriented architecture. Business processes seem to be passed down in oral tradition from one generation of administrators to the next. To get anything achieved you find the go-to person for that domain and ask them what to do. Processes are not documented and are therefore harder to identify and communicate. Enable gives us an opportunity to paint a picture of how we currently operate, making it easier to spot problems.

Now it’s nose to the grindstone to produce outputs and outcomes we can discuss at the next cluster meeting.

Yet more CETIS 09 - it was that good

2009-11-27T15:15:00.002Z

An overdue blog post following the excellent CETIS Conference 2009. Highlights of the conference were discussions and contacts made over coffee and demonstrations of the Wookie widget server and Google Wave.

Gold star to whoever decided to have long coffee and lunch breaks. Such breaks are at least as valuable as the more formal sessions. Discussions about our Enterprise Architecture strand of Enable during one such break got me introduced to Alex Hawker, Programme Manager of the JISC Flexible Service Delivery Programme. They have set up a Strategic Technologies Group (STG) as a forum “for members and their institutions to discuss, disseminate and exchange useful practices and good ideas, and do work to advance practical knowledge on major themes that enable progress towards realising a flexible service delivery environment.”

Though we’re using Enterprise Architecture (EA) from a curriculum design rather than a service delivery viewpoint, an awful lot of the issues and problems we face will be common to STG members so I’m looking forward to participating in the group. It’s been encouraging to see that there’s a great deal of EA work being done at the moment. This is a reassuring indicator that an increasingly number of HE institutions have identified it as a valuable approach. It’s also good to know we’re not working in isolation so we can share ideas and solutions. Being part of a community like the STG will provide support for our efforts and will contribute to solving problems across the sector as well as locally.

The Wookie widget server looks as though it will form a core part of our approach to diversifying delivery of information in the future. One of the problems we’ve had in recent years is how to cope with an increasingly large and diverse range of delivery platforms for our information. Writing bespoke widgets for each and every platform imposes a large development overhead on any innovation. Each innovation costs more, takes longer and requires more maintenance.

I believe the solution is to put in place a platform of APIs and/or services to make it quick and easy to hook into useful information when developing widgets and then to use the same widget across many platforms to reduce the amount of development and maintenance needed. The Wookie widget server provides the means to accomplish the latter. You can develop one widget and then run the same widget on many different platforms via Wookie plugins.

Google Wave was also demonstrated and discussed. It has the feel of a technology looking for a problem to solve. Lots of folk agree it has potential but no-one has produced a compelling application of it yet.

You can use a wave for threaded-style discussion which seems a bit more interactive and ‘live’ than existing forums but it’s not mind-blowing. Collaborative live wave/document creation is similar but doesn’t add much value compared Google docs or Office Live. Use as a substitute for a Wiki falls down on the ability to track (and potentially reverse) changes.

I suspect the real value of Wave will be using it behind the scenes via APIs to provide applications with new collaborative capabilities that are impossible or very hard to implement currently. One to keep an eye on.

CETIS for me

2009-11-23T11:56:00.003Z

I also attended the CETIS Conference with Fleur and Sam. I also went to the http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/Technology_change_in_education_-_involving_Senior_Management_at_last%3F session that Fleur did. I was struck by two things: firstly that the processes by which an issue rose to the "top of the heap" in a university was as nebulous in other institutions as is is at Staffordshire, and secondly that US Universities work very differently from UK ones (not really a surprise).

I also attended the http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/Notes_from_Universities_and_Colleges_in_the_Giant_Global_Graph session on linked data. I was one of the referred to in the comment "it became clear there was quite a split in the participants and those with senior institutional roles were forming the opinion that we were not talking about anything of immediate relevance to them" in the notes on the CETIS site... I think this was partly due to the constant reference to "potential" and also to the somewhat inpenetrable jargon used by the "enthusiasts". However, by the end I realised that linked data was being was outside of "library world" (eg by Chrysler) and did have elevance to things like course related information...

CETIS, Modelling and creating life

2009-11-12T14:44:00.007Z

We have had a busy week, with three of us attending the CETIS Conference in Birmingham. This was a very useful event, mainly for the networking opportunities it gave, but also due to the great opening keynote from Roehampton University on the usefulness of Enterprise Architecture for institutions and the end Keynote from Bill Thompson (@BillT) about the concerns for where England will be with countries overtaking us with their technology backbones. Bill also covered whether we are ready for the big changes that could occur in the future with developments no longer in the realms of sci-fi (microchipped contact lenses, e-ink, next gen communication devices etc).
I participated in the Technology change in education - involving Senior Management at last? discussions on the first day where we covered areas such as who should be setting priorities agendas? How do we manage between the university and the staff cultures? We found out that JISC have a network set up to support those of us engaging in EA so we have great hopes for some useful connections from this group. We found a number of institutions were interested in the work we have already taken in this area, and we found an institution with a programme office which is very nice so we have agreed to talk soon about their experiences. It is clear that as I went through this conference the human element is the most important part of the programme office and supporting the EA at the university, so no pressure there!
These thoughts followed me back to the office as I have continued my research on Programme Management Offices, a big thing is that they can be different things to different people. We are trying to get to grips with what a PMO should be for us and how it can fit within the existing structure of the institution. Just like Frankenstein, we are wary of creating a monster office that tries to do too much at once, we don't want to see it crash through walls, but to be able to suggest and guide the university with incremental changes.

Useful Reading

2009-11-03T10:56:00.002Z

Well the last few hours have given me some interesting reading thanks to Twitter, in particular @mikehamlyn and @theopengroup. The first article was from the Guardian and talks about "treat students more like customers and become more responsive to the needs of businesses" and about exposing more information to the learners and to businesses "The food-labelling style system to tag each course is designed to give students more information, which has widely been interpreted as preparation for raising tuition fees." This links to Enable, and helps us keep our focus on course information and how it will be used and who the audience is, if the audience is the learner we need to ensure that information is not hidden under a difficult language as discussed in an earlier blog.

The second bit of interesting reading was from Tom Graves' blog, about his experiences at the TOGAF Conference in Hong Kong. This blog entry relates Toms experiences, showing "... the unique Chinese perspective on what has historically been a somewhat Anglo and technology-driven construct". He notes that the first speaker was interesting due to "an almost complete absence of any reference to IT – instead almost all about management and business-architecture" and the balance between Western best practice and national principals, he also notes that speakers talk about the long term, and balance. Both the article and the blog entry are, in my opinion, well worth a read.

Partnership Meetings

2009-10-27T10:53:00.003Z

I attended a recent SURF meeting at Staffordshire University that discusses the development of Fd's. This was a very informative meeting, as issues raised were clearly linked to work being under taken by Enable. The main conversations were around a new review of products for our partnerships which Enable will be assisting in, UCAS course data and issues with systems.
The group discussed UCAS course data and how it is handled between colleges and the university, and who should be supplying the information to UCAS. This is something that had not been discussed with Enable, but as we start looking at course information it is an important part to consider, and if the process changes, or should each college be handled the same way?
As part of the discussions around system issues from this meeting we had a get together with a member of staff from faculty to talk about their experiences of using university systems to support non traditional courses. This was an interesting discussion that showed that sometimes we, as a university, move faster than our learners, and that some processes need to be more flexible with the ability to support non-technical approaches, including e-enrolment, and that we should be encouraging the use of plain English for anything learners are involved in rather than assuming a level of literacy that they may not have not just for handbooks but also for the their online experiences. At the same time as this the partner colleges also reported issues with assumed learner access to technology, which can impact on learners being able to access systems once they attend lectures. Hopefully with the input of partner colleges we will be able to resolve this and other issues. Which links nicely to our next stage of the project which is where we look at issues raised and how they can be addressed and piloting some changes.

TOGAF - learning, doing, iterating

2009-10-21T11:03:00.003+01:00

On the technical side of Enable, we're developing an Enterprise Architecture. An Enterprise Architecture is a conceptual blueprint of an entire enterprise including business principles and motivation, organisational structure, business processes, data architecture, application capabilities and hardware and software. Enterprise Architecture gives us a tool to capture and communicate current problems, create a strategic vision of how those problems can be solved, and manage the realisation of that vision to transform the curriculum design to be more agile and responsive.

The main driver for this work is illustrated in our 'Burrari' image.

Our business processes have been reviewed and refined and are in good shape. The problem is the underlying platform. We need to put in place an infrastructure based on open systems which will provide the necessary support for innovation. By open systems I mean systems which provide APIs or services which allow developers to hook into and make use of information in those systems. With such a platform in place, developers can quickly build applications to plug into tools people already use.

I'm currently getting into the heart of the Enterprise Architecture work using The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) to guide development. I'm learning TOGAF as well as using it so I'll be blogging about TOGAF and my experiences as I go along.

TOGAF is an architecture framework so it provides support for the development and maintenance of an enterprise architecture. The core of TOGAF is the Architecture Development Method (ADM) which describes a
method for developing and maintaining the enterprise architecture and using it effectively as a master plan for transforming the business. It is backed up by comprehensive techniques and guidance on implementing the ADM. Other sections of TOGAF deal with describing and categorising architectural outputs for reuse as building blocks, classifying and partitioning architectures for effective management within an architecture repository and developing architectural capability.

Find out more about TOGAF with the online TOGAF 9 document.

A key strength of the TOGAF approach, in my mind, is the ability to explicitly express the relationships between the business processes and supporting IT. Capturing the big picture of how every element fits together should give us a hugely powerful tool for communicating across the business-IT divide. One of my favourite rules of thumb is that you can never be too explicit!

Programme Meeting in Manchester

2009-10-16T09:41:00.003+01:00

Well it was an interesting two days in Manchester, I found them very useful, although often the session discussions did not have clear guidance the discussions we had during them were very useful. Participants used twitter to make general notes as the sessions went on and it's now time to go through them and weed out the useful points that need to be remembered. The main theme for the sessions I attended were around initiation and planning processes. We discussed how programmes are initiated can have an impact on the processes and how we have both supply and demand driven initiation processes. I really like the work being done by ViewPoint and could see their software being adaptable to the early initiation phase to help staff consider why an award is being developed with prompts to think about innovation, engagement, and rationalisation etc.
We discussed the fact that employers attend validation when involved in an award but do they attend annual monitoring, and should learners also be able to attend reviews on awards? We also discussed whether reviews should be annual but triggered by certain events - and what would they be and how would they occur. How do we value content from processes? We need to be able to look at time inovled, re-use of content created and what the outputs are.
This is just a sample of the thoughts raised at the event, so as you can see some interesting discussions took place, its just being able to clarify them for the project and how many can be considered/ actioned within the project. Especially considering this was just one of the themes from the event.

Supporting Innovation

2009-10-09T08:51:00.001+01:00

It has been a week of thought, discussion and production of media for the programme meeting next week. I have to say I spent some time on this, the poster should have been a quick job, and in fact the design of it was, but getting the computer to produce the required output resulted in a number of “may be out of space” and “out of memory” errors that resulted in an afternoon of me swearing at the computer! If, as someone with a “high spec” computer has so much trouble doing this simple task is it reasonable to expect staff at the university to be able to do this, and more with the technology they are provided with? Even producing the video for YouTube resulted in a number of software crashes and restarts that would cause frustration in an end user – do I want to send a report to Microsoft and let them know I have a a problem? Yes and I would also like Microsoft to fix it thanks very much!

I have also blogged on the more personal http://jiscenable.wordpress.com site about ALTC and how there is a perception of slowing innovation, based around discussions at ALTC. I also found the CETIS blog on barriers to innovation interesting (http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/christina/2009/10/07/barriers-to-innovation/) which references a future lab report, with barriers that include Leadership, Shared Vision and Change Management, among others. This links nicely to the Enable project which is trying to address those particular barriers.

Video Released!

2009-10-07T13:32:00.002+01:00

Well after a bit of editing, alot of messing around the video is now available via YouTube

Be kind!

Poster for the programme meeting

2009-10-06T16:45:00.002+01:00

This is a small version of the poster for next weeks programme meeting that is being held in Manchester.

Engaging

2009-09-30T09:44:00.001+01:00

I have realised that it is difficult to to get stakeholder engagement after the summer break. I have added a new discussion and sent a welcome back email to my online group in Ning, and will have to see how they respond. It may mean a trip around the colleges to see how they are all getting on.

In the meantime we are continuing to engage staff at the university in conversation, both those involved in project work and those using the systems/ data being changed through the work of the projects. I have blogged my thoughts on some of these conversations at http://jiscenable.wordpress.com as they are as an aside to the project but still useful to be be captured.

We are also working on a poster and video for the programme meeting that is in Manchester in 2 weeks time. The video will contain some content from our Project Director, the LDI Technical Manager and at least one stakeholder. I am using some of the images from our presentation at ALT-C as they sum up the work we are trying to do around changing the nature of curriculum design and development for the university. At the moment I concerned it looks a bit plain as I’m not the best with creativity!

It’s good to talk!

2009-09-24T09:32:00.002+01:00

A big thank you to Manchester, Bolton and Leeds who made their way to Staffordshire yesterday for our second cluster meeting. We had a lot of good discussions around what we have all been working on and found that we have shared experiences in the following areas:

Costing/ Resourcing any change in the curriculum is difficult
“On ground” staff see limited value in QA based on the time spent doing it
Business maps have little value without the extra layers (application etc) as processes themselves appear to be in ok shape – issues at deeper levels.
How are processes that sit within faculties managed?
Big focus on managing culture change
How do we discover the hard cost of developing and delivering modules
Useful process mapping tools are expensive, but TOGAF and Archimate very useful in themselves.
A requirement to link awards/ modules with learning objectives and competencies.

In the afternoon Bolton University started a discussion around managing curriculum across partners and ensuring an equitable experience to all learners. This caused further discussion around how universities support dispersed interpretation of module delivery.

Manchester presented their work so far and talked about the disparity between senior staff and staff “on the ground” and how they view what would constitute improvement of CDD. They used the statement “One source of truth and the truth will be trusted” which sums up a number of issues here at Staffordshire University, not only do people consider the need for one source of the truth but also that it needs to be trusted, but how can one source fit all stakeholder needs and how can we get people to trust it?

Internal Projects

2009-09-17T10:42:00.002+01:00

We have been talking a to a few more internally managed initiatives that are not part of the executive register and are not externally funded and discovered some interesting aspects to managing projects that has helped highlight some issues with managing innovation in the university.
The discussions we have had with project leads has included concerns. This includes often there is limited or no formal project plans to ensure scope of project, which can lead to misunderstandings as to why a project has been started, what is expected from the project and what the outputs should be. Beyond this is a fear of writing down both positive and negative aspects of cross service working - as comments that show that teams may not have worked well together before a project started, or that there were problems that could not be overcome could be politically sensitive. How can we learn from projects if there is this political fear of sharing issues and lessons? Is this only in particular services or is it across the institution, and more importantly what can we do to stop this fear? What needs to be in place to help internal projects, as a member of staff rightly pointed out - they have no way of seeing the different initiatives on in the university and who is running them. Another issue was how to understand the resourcing of projects, how do we manage cross service resources?

ALTC Presentation

2009-09-15T11:42:00.003+01:00

As promised here is the conference presentation we did at ALTC, it is approx 14 mins long

Back from ALTC

2009-09-11T08:14:00.001+01:00

Well what a three days! One of the first sessions after the keynote was the one done by Sam and myself (http://altc2009.alt.ac.uk/talks/show/6792), which I recorded and will try and post either later today or at the start of next week. It was a very busy session which was very positive. Sam, Mark and myself attended a number of different sessions looking at different aspects of Curriculum Design and a number of symposiums where done by the different programme clusters.

The experience of ALTC can be broken into three areas – shared experiences, suggestions in supporting Enable and questions that need asking. A lot of my thoughts have been captured in my Twitter, and need collecting along with the fuller notes I made in the sessions. Some of these include:

can we be more flexible with tasks in CDD and delivery?
Getting academic trust in information from central services is difficult
Need to keep in touch with other JISC projects to ensure not reinventing the wheel
Learner built curriculum is now a big theme for lots of institutions
How do we embrace the informal processes and feral systems?

ALT-C 2009

2009-09-03T11:05:00.002+01:00

The main work for this week has been at getting ready for ALT-C and finishing off the baseline report for JISC. Sam has done a lot of model work to get the baseline together and done a great job. I was very lucky in the sections on programme management and change management in the university related to work I have already written for the executive and the senior management team. The presentation is something we have had to work on to ensure that Sam and I don't find ourselves repeating the same points, and to ensure that it relates to the baseline report now that is finished. Sam has taken time out to be able to make sure that both the presentation and the leaflet we are taking with us looks nice and professional. I have also been sorting out the final preparations for the cluster meeting at Stafford on the 23rd.

Planning ahead

2009-08-18T07:45:00.001+01:00

With the summer holidays nearly over normal blogging service will be resumed in September. However we have not been quiet in the time available to us and work has been progressing on a number of different levels.

We have completed the document I mentioned in the last blog about how Enable has been working with the Executive Programme office, this has lead to us working even closer with them in creating a university wide plan for four areas:

"Award Portfolio"
Curriculum Development and Course Information
Curriculum
Learning and Teaching

This plan will be the basis of moving forward, the first iteration of the plan (covering the top two areas) will be submitted to Gill Howland in the next few weeks but before it can be completed we need to meet with the Programme Executive office to go through initiatives which cover the first two areas mentioned above.

Some of the things we are preparing for at the moment is ALT-C at the start of September and the Cluster Meeting in the middle of the month.

Enable keeps spinning

2009-07-22T11:36:00.002+01:00

As mentioned in the last June blog, this month has been fairly quiet due to Summer Holidays, which will be continuing over August too. Still things have been happening in the world of Enable.

At the start of July we had an interesting meeting with the Student Union with regards to using their members to help spokes engage with learners, they are very interested in supporting Enable and engaging learners in the process of curriculum design and development more than they have been recently. This is really positive news that will be passed on to the spokes.

Straight after the Student Union meeting we met with a possible new Spoke around the subject of supporting learners through APEL to make it quicker, and more efficient that the existing process. This is a new idea that has been submitted to JISC for funding, although the Project Initiation Manager is hoping that the project will go ahead regardless, as there is a real benefit to the university if it goes ahead. Whilst in this meeting we got some feedback about the usefulness of Enable, where the Project Initiation Manager was very positive, calling us Critical Friends for the project and useful for bouncing ideas off and getting a different view point than thinking about their particular area. This is very good news!

We have also spoken to Paul in the executive office about Programme Management at the university, and managing change. We are going to put together a document for the Executive to cover the work Enable is doing and the work that the Executive Office are doing around this area and how we are working together.

We have now finished the Investigation phase and now in the refinement phase as part of which I am doing some work for the next SMWG meeting, to include a general list of issues around CDD and around change management that can be discussed and prioritised. We are also doing a second round of interviews, including a closing interview with DIVAS.

The Learner Experience

2009-07-07T09:57:00.003+01:00

Last week I attended a focus group looking at the learner experience for the distance learner from point of induction onwards, I spent a lot of the time listening to the experiences of staff around the table dealing with learners different needs and thinking about how the learner experience can be made better during the curriculum design and development phase. A number of issues appeared to be linked to this area including providing materials for study (could be reading lists, amazon shopping lists, or posting resources) costing models for awards (including how study materials are costed into course costs, should they be fixed for period of study, how clear are costs communicated to learners, is this included in validation documentation?) and what online tools should be included to support distance learning - and getting the learners to understand what skills they will need when enrolling on a distance learning course. These last two points need to be considered at design stage, what is good practice (for example photos of staff online, managing expectations with online communication etc) to promote the relationship between tutor and learner. I will be keeping an eye on this work for Enable, and will be using its outputs to feed into any work we are doing.

It seems that once these focus groups are completed with staff there will be a number engaging learners after September, I have mentioned the workshop I participated in with JISC (mentioned in my last blog) and how that could be helpful with the learner experience, in particular the diary room approach could give a good idea of the learner experience changes in the time they spend studying with Staffordshire University.

Summer Holiday

2009-06-30T11:09:00.004+01:00

Well you may have noticed that blogs have been a bit thin on the ground, this is due to a number of reasons, one of which links to the summer holidays, I have been enjoying some short weeks, and will continue to be doing so until the end of August (which is nice!) as has my colleague. Sam has been working hard on the baseline for JISC and the project, while that has been going on we have also been talking about the next stage of the project, the review, while sorting out the next stage of interviews, and attending JISC workshops on Phoebe and Learner Engagement. All these things have been very interesting and are worthy of mention.

The Learner Engagement workshop was very interesting and linked nicely to a meeting I was in the day before with our study skills team, and I will be passing my notes from the day on to them and other spoke projects we are engaged with talking to. As part of the day the project team need to write a learner engagement plan, which I have started, and am hoping that the rest of the team contribute to before the 15th July (when it needs to be "handed in"). I will be using the information from this day during the meeting with the Student Union too.

As part of the next stage of the project, we have created a new, closed, Elgg group at Staffordshire University to discuss issue groups (such as do we even want to call them issue groups) and the up and coming SMWG that we are planning for at the end of July. We are still putting notes from events and interviews up into our open Elgg group so that our spokes can see what is going on, and I am in talks with the Elgg administrator to see if we can get any useful statistics out of it about views to see if it is being used at all.

Documentation and preparation

2009-06-16T08:08:00.002+01:00

As the project moves on we have now completed the evaluation plan - this will go up on the project website over this week (along with the project plan). I still have to go through the workpackages in more detail for the second phase of the project planning what needs to be done based on the meetings we have been having as a team over the last two weeks. Other project work has included registering for the ALT-C conference in September, as we are doing a short presentation on Enable and Enterprise Architecture (and Archimate) and sorting out a draft agenda for the cluster meeting we are hosting in September (which is looking to be a busy month). As part of the draft agenda we have asked Paul Barron to do a presentation on the work he is doing at the university, fingers crossed he will be able to attend.
Mark had a meeting with the Students Union which hopefully he will blog about here, and Sam and I have a follow up meeting in July, along with a number of catch up interviews with initiatives we last spoke to in January. These interviews will be very focused to create baselines for the project with regards to expectations and defining things like "quicker" and "better" that were used in the project bid. We are also looking to use the work we have already done to redefine the project "problem" as per the bid and project plan.
As part of reporting to senior management we have pulled together a summary document on the main issues with initiative management in the university and have also given them a copy of the leaflet I did for my course that links to the presentation I did at the last SMWG.
Project Partner involvement is still growing, although it has been noticed that some partners are more involved at this point than others. I am wondering whether it is time to get on the train and do some more visits on this.

Video Dissemination

2009-06-03T11:06:00.004+01:00

Here is the promised video (approx 5mins long):

Enable Workshop

2009-06-02T10:56:00.004+01:00

Yesterday I ran my first workshop at the Staffordshire University TSL conference focusing on the work that the Enable project is doing at trying to bring together the individual projects within the university. I did a few slides based around previous presentations on the background and what we were doing which led to some interesting discussions from the group around a few points that are worth noting:

Tutors can feel disengaged from an institution, there was a feeling that tutors that don't feel included in strategy will pick their courses up and move to other institutions. It is important to have a strategy that does not appear to exclude a particular group of stakeholders that you are trying to engage (for example excluding post graduate awards etc)
It is important for any programme team to be outside of any particular service (this reflected conversations at previous meetings such as at Bolton last week)
It is equally important that senior management and executive are supportive and involved in the work taken on by the programme team - they felt that the Executive office was the best place for this type of work as easier to get attention of the right people at the right time.
It was seen as beneficial that the Enable project team was small, with an innovative and familiar character (Mark Stiles) leading it.
Any programme office/team should be seen as helping projects rather than reporting back to senior management, or enforcing views from top down.

I will post the video of Mark Stiles talking about Enable as part of his key speech later on.

The next step

2009-05-28T08:27:00.004+01:00

We had a full day yesterday as a team working through the next step of the Enable project, talking about the final part of the Investigation phase and the evaluation plan and what we are actually looking at evaluating, considering the bi-polar nature of the project. We have noted the usefulness of the Archimate/ Enterprise Architecture work that Sam has been doing for the process of Curriculum Design and Dev and we are now planing to use the same method to look at how we manage the process of change with this area. By creating a baseline of how the situation is at the moment, and how Enable has already been embedded in how we get new issues raised with senior staff we can track how we want to move forward, what roles will be needed in the future and what works.
I have a number of jobs to do based on this day too, a number of documents that need to be written to summarise the work we have been doing up until now, a refined project evaluation plan and motivating stakeholders (such as the partners) to write not just scenarios about what they would like in an ideal world, but their expectations from the Enable project (and the spokes involved in it). When doing the evaluation we need to think about measuring the totality of impact of the spokes, rather than the impact of each individual spoke (as they should be doing that as part of their own projects). This again links to managing a programme of projects and requires a bit of research on how we can do that. I have a number of spreadsheets and questionnaires that should help with this process.

Where angels fear to tread

2009-05-20T13:04:00.001+01:00

I have just finished a day at Bolton looking at the benefits of using Archimate (http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/Archimate_Workshop) for modelling the Business processes at the university, and the way it has been used in past projects. Before today I rather thought that Archimate should only be used for Enterprise Architecture purposes, however it seems that each project had used it in a slightly different way. The two that resonated most with me were Roehamptons examples and those by APS Ltd. I noticed that the use of Archimate was by Business Analyst roles in a team such as a programme office or, in one case an Innovation Projects Office. The projects ranged from one person involved to a team of three, although each person had other roles as well.

So why this blog title? This links to the realisation that there is a real recognition to having to have a team in place (linking to the Programme Office I have mentioned in previous blogs) that can map all aspects of the university. This team would be required to map at a certain depth for executive overview – however further mapping would be required for assisting particular projects. The issue is around funding the department, should this be costed (http://fcet-comments.blogspot.com/2009/05/call-for-efficiencies-in-universities.html) to each project as part of the expected work? At what depth should the mapping be done if a day to day role? It has been recognised that this team needs to sit outside of faculties and services to ensure that they are not perceived as having invested interest in particular projects or systems. Perhaps I need to think in terms of scenarios…

Capturing Perceptions

2009-05-18T13:21:00.003+01:00

We have had a busy week and this week will continue in that theme. It was the programme meeting in Birmingham, followed by a presentation on Strategy and leadership for my course, and a visit to a project partner. This week I am doing a fair bit of training, looking at TOGAF and Archimate with CETIS in Bolton tomorrow and then mentoring and coaching on Thursday.

In between these days I am still looking at evaluation and capturing perceptions of stakeholders, and at the structure of a project team event for the end of June. I have been given a very useful questionnaire from Cardiff University that originated at BAE on finding out what people want from a project, and then measuring how successful we have been in providing it in the future. This has gone out to our project partners via the VSN. I also found a useful questionnaire online "The Organisation Perception Questionnaire" although this relies on rating some statements, so the team needs to think about what needs to go in there.

Partner engagement has really picked up after visits have been completed at the partner sites, we are seeing blogging from tutors in Shrewsbury college on the VSN. Hopefully more blogs and discussions will grow in the next few months with the support of college coordinators such as Emma, Richard and Gerard. I will be sending out a reminder email to them all towards the end of the week to ensure that they are all happy with what is happening at their colleges.

The Programme meeting in Birmingham had a few useful sessions, although in some cases information was appearing at the wrong level for some project managers. I certainly found the networking activities/ directed discussions very useful although the form filling in the afternoon was probable less informative. When we looked at the type of organisation we felt Staffordshire University was we were surprised to see such a strong leaning to Innovative Culture, however we felt that we needed a balance across some of the other cultures, in particular Business. There was some interesting engagement methods used by some of the presenting projects that I would like to consider for projects at the university, including posters in hallways for commenting on with post-its and workshops that included stakeholders to look at how they see failure rather than success! There was still not enough "here is how we did it" - in particular the change academy model was used by a project - what is this and how did they modify it and why? It looks like some investigation on their website as it was not easy to find on the HEA site.

Being connected

2009-05-08T12:42:00.002+01:00

As part of the work we did in the cluster meeting last week I have made an additional page for the Enable project under PageFlakes www.pageflakes.com/staffsprojects this site already has a page for the old WBL-Way project so those of you interested in that work can read about it and the work the partners have done here too. At the cluster a few of us were Twittering about the conversations taking place, these got tagged as jisc0509 and are all collected onto the pageflakes page.This has made me think it might be worth tagging my Twitters around the project so will be doing that from now on, and will bring the information together on the same site, although this hasn't been done yet.

First Cluster meeting

2009-05-05T13:56:00.002+01:00

We had a very interesting time at the cluster meeting last week, and we would like to thank Robin for all his hard work in hosting the event. There was a focus on looking at how each institution recognised the need to develop rationalised products and discussion formed around the different stages of reviewing product at the respective institutions and linking to competencies. The main discussion on Friday was around validation with three of the institutions summarising what was happening with them and comparing it to experiences with the others. Mark did the presentation on behalf of Staffordshire University;

At the end of the two days we discussed some of the programme management we were getting from JISC and sent our critical friend back with some suggestions on future support. It seemed the hardest part of the two days was discovering when people would be free for the next cluster meeting. We recognised the need to get dates in early and that some meetings did not need to go over two days. The next meeting is going to be hosted here - so need to get our thinking caps on for that as well as the SMWG meeting in a fortnight.

Continuous Enhancement

2009-05-05T10:41:00.001+01:00

As mentioned in an earlier blog I attended a very useful session in Birmingham on Quality Assurance and Enhancement done by the HEA to support the Curriculum Design and Development and Curriculum Delivery programmes. I have published my notes in the Elgg Enable group for discussion within the project. I have also shared my notes with members of the programme cluster who where unable to attend the day. For those interested in QA/QE then you can register with the SIG at www.qe-sig.net and view the presentations under Events.

Some of this information will be old hat to people in Staffordshire University and done almost everyday, either with our without recognition, as Enhancement has been a key term here for the last few years. However is that message across the whole university? I have encouraged staff to comment on the notes I took and hopefully I will get some response. Some of the interesting points raised that link to Enable:

Understanding scope and developing baselines
Constant changing environments for institutions – the need of institutional Reform
Development of Enhancement Academy
Communication strategies are vital as are linking strategies together
Supporting staff development
Engagement of all stakeholders
Student Experience

Themes and Issues

2009-04-29T14:34:00.001+01:00

We have got together as a team to go through the different initiatives against the 5 themes that were created at the start of the project, and we noticed something very interesting. In each case although there would be one main theme highlighted by the initiative team, the initiative would often fit into three or more of the themes highlighted, that may not have been recognised by the initiative team . Is this due to the closed nature of the initiatives themselves and how we as a university manage them? We also realised that there were clearly two different types of themes emerging the first around the Curriculum Design and Development, the other change management. As each initiative was highlighted we were able to see 9 emerging change management themes, including issues around breadth and depth, stakeholder engagement, and silos. A full break down on themes and how they fit with the initiatives will be made available once the initial process mapping stage is complete.

QA at Birmingham

2009-04-28T13:57:00.001+01:00

By 10:30 I have already had some useful conversations around the Enable project, in particular I have now got 2 emails coming to me with regards to the process mapping. I have also got to send 2 emails out based on strategy, change, and communication. It appears to be that institutions have much the same issues, University Derby have offered to come and share their Pathfinder experiences, and some implementation they have done with regards to this project.

Supporting our Partners through validation events

2009-04-27T13:04:00.004+01:00

As part of the partner work for Enable we had a successful partner validation recorded in the Ning community last week, with Stafford college. They were complemented on the working relationship between the college and the university, however they have been told to change their Award handbook, to be less Staffordshire University focused. This is interesting as the Award Handbook is a faculty document that is partially built from a template provided by the Student Office, however this template is purely for Staffordshire University, on-site, learners. I have spoken to our College partnership team and found that they don't provide anything so how do faculties handle award documents for colleges? What guidance (if any) do they get? This has now been raised in Ning and hopefully we will get some answers. As part of us understanding the partnership relationship I have also added a short quiz on the site around how much support partners perceive they get both from colleagues and the university, so far 100% of results is possitive about the support they get from both. In the meantime I have sent the relevant colleges the next spreadsheet for finding out the stage that the awards they told me about in January are now at.

Back from Easter

2009-04-21T09:06:00.004+01:00

Well I have been quiet on the blog for the last month due to holidays and meetings, and for the next two weeks this will continue to be the case as I am out of the office with a friends wedding, a JISC day and our cluster meeting. I am also busy writing an assignment on Strategic Management and Change which has been presented to Gill Howland. I might post it, and the related presentation here if people are interested. As promised to Ashton I have finally had time to put their video up of them signing the consortium agreement.

One thing that has changed with the project is the slower that anticipated co-ordination of project partners. This is due to the very busy schedules both here at the university and at the colleges themselves. This may actually benefit the project as it will be able to involve the partners more towards the end of the project than initially considered.

Week of perspectives

2009-04-02T09:38:00.002+01:00

This week has been very interesting, with the start of it at Warwick University for the HE in FE conference. Although I have not got a direct link with Staffordshire University partners, obviously partner input is vital for the project and the university as a whole. I found the different partnership methods used very interesting, plus the attitudes of some of the partner insitutions. I was surprised to hear that some partnerships are more competitive with others in the partnership than I would expect. I heard a fair bit around how universities should adapt to fit more of the FE environment (use their quality assurance rather than imposing second ones being the main issue), and when asked about adapting to a private, business, model they realised that they hadn't considered the impact of requirements of employers and the changing nature of HE in FE with the Fds as they perhaps aught. This then goes back to how flexible do institutions need to be to continue delivering learning in the emerging environment? Do we need to ensure that assessment boards etc run throughout the year? Should we be delivering learning throughout the year? Should we be matching private providers delivery of courses over a business 37 hour week? Is it even possible? Do changes need to be driven by government or can insititutions drive the change? A lot of questions, and not many answers. I am interested on how these questions get answered here at Staffordshire Uni, do they fit with the development of partnerships that we have in the University strategy? I would say yes, and a big part is the Enable project in enabling (sorry) these changes to happen. It is important not just for the partners but also for the university.

Processes and Management

2009-03-27T13:36:00.003Z

After a number of posts last week I have been very quiet this week due to attending a number of meetings on process mapping and also continuing my training on Leadership and Management. This week has highlighted a number of issues with processes that exsist within the university where they are implemented against non traditional, flexible award development. We have spoken to 4 faculties and found that the same issues keep reoccurring around document management and resource allocation. I have also attended a college HE Forum to present the Enable project, the first time without a PowerPoint presentation! It all appeared to go well and I got some interesting notes out of it - and they are already joining our Validation Support Network so that is brilliant.

We were going to have a meeting with Gill Howland today but that has been cancelled but we have put a document together to support the presentation that I did last week to the SMWG that also links to the training I am doing which is handy! We have also looked at the themes that were mentioned during the project bid (and the project plan) and have mapped a number of initiatives to the different themes, we did discover that with our holistic overview that they had impact on themes that the initiatives had not acknowledged. We also looked at themes we could create linked to issues around change management. I am now off to a Quality Review meeting to see how that fits with the Enable project. April will be a quiet month for blogging for Enable as there is a fair bit of holiday and me attending conferences, so don't be disappointed if you don't hear from me as much!

SMWG: A Third Issue - Resources

2009-03-19T13:53:00.002Z

Resourcing is a recognised issue that has been raised with the Enable project, and with other members of the SMWG at different meetings, although the project is highlighting the issue it recognises that it sits outside the scope of the project.

Dissemination

2009-03-19T13:29:00.004Z

As part of a presentation Prof Mark Stiles did for an internal conference on "Seize the Technology" Mark mentions the work of the Enable project and how it is disseminating the work it is doing to people in the university and the wider community.

This part of the presentation is just under 3mins long.

SMWG Presentation: Strategy and Change

2009-03-18T13:30:00.002Z

As promised here is the presentation I gave yesterday to the SMWG around Strategy and Change Management. Due to the presentation being images only you will need sound. I have tried to summarise what I said at the presentation.

Getting together

2009-03-18T08:15:00.001Z

So far this week there is a big focus on getting together, first with the colleges on Monday and then yesterday with the Senior Management Working Group. This meeting was to give an update on the progress of the project, including updates on the interviews from initiatives and the work taking place on process mapping. As part of this work we presented two short presentations, the first covering previous blog rants on joining up university level strategy to work taking place on the ground, the second around understanding the issues with resourcing new and flexible course development. During today I will post both these presentations up here. I was also hoping to put a short presentation up from Mark which I recorded last week on the Enable project, yesterday I forgot the cables and today I forgot my phone so you will have to wait another day before you see it!

Treacle

2009-03-16T17:29:00.001Z

Just back from the Shrewsbury HE forum, got some interesting feedback about the perception of how the University handles it's partners and also that it is often not clear to colleges whether they are talking to the right person to get the job done. An output asked for was a process map with contact lists, so it is clear who should be contacted when. Richard also suggested ensuring that the SURF groups roles are clear.

Joined-up thinking for the Enterprise

2009-03-13T12:52:00.007Z

The Enable project is concerned, in part, with facilitating joined-up thinking across Curriculum Design-related projects and initiatives running at the University. As an institution, we're generally very good at aligning initiatives to the aims of the business but such initiatives tend to run on separate tracks. Only peripheral consideration is given to alignment between initiatives or reliance on the IT environment. As a consequence, projects can create information silos and hinder or even derail other projects.

To encourage joined-up thinking we need a picture of where each initiative sits with respect to other ongoing activity. We also need to establish where an initiative fits into the overall Curriculum Design process and what impact it will have on that process. In other words, we need a Curriculum Design Programme. Effectively retro-fitting aspects of programme management to existing Curriculum Design-related initiatives is an important aspect of Enable but it is not the whole story.

As a University, our business is knowledge-based. Our products are information and process-based. We're not a manufacturing organization. Everything we do essentially boils down to passing around and storing information. As such, tight alignment between business processes and supporting information services and IT infrastructure is key to the success of the business.

Often, business processes are considered in isolation from the supporting IT services. In a similar manner, IT projects tend to create solutions to support individual business processes, independent of the wider business context. This tendency is understandable as there is a natural division between the business and IT knowledge areas. Business professionals rarely have the background or opportunity to delve into technical details. Similarly, technical professionals are usually asked for a solution to a particular business problem and rarely get the chance to develop a broad enough view of the business environment to fit their solution to the bigger picture.

To begin the process of joined up thinking across the Enterprise, we are using existing business process maps to start creating a model of the Enterprise Architecture. An Enterprise Architecture model is a model of the entire Enterprise, not just the IT Architecture. It encompasses the business processes, IT applications and underlying technology infrastructure and makes explicit the relationships between them.

The model has tremendous potential for communication of the 'big picture' to all stakeholders. It will describe how the whole business tackles Curriculum Design. It will allow inconsistencies, gaps and duplication to be identified and a future 'ideal world' model to be developed to act as a road map for incremental change. It will be an essential tool in transforming the business, allowing the development of holistic solutions to business problems. Solutions that transform the IT environment along with the business processes rather than transforming business processes in isolation (i.e. rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic).

More about the nuts and bolts of how we're building the model and what the model looks like to follow in a future post.

University view

2009-03-06T12:57:00.002Z

This week I have attended a number of meetings around work being done in the unversity around looking at our provision of product available to our partner colleges and their learners. This has included being able to be part of two working groups, one on looking at 2 year, part time, Foundation degrees and another on looking at how we support progression onto degree level awards. This has highlighted the fact that the university already validates different deliveries of Foundation degrees beyond those that sit within the standard university calendar, and that there is some need to think of standard frameworks that faculties can use to help designing an award, although these frameworks may differ based on the subject area being taught (such as education - where the work based learning aspect has to fit with the colleges calendar).
I have spoken a bit on my own blog about my thoughts on how the university is handling strategic management, so I wont go into it here. I will simply say that I am now working on a short presentation for the senior management working group on the 17th to raise this with the executive.
We have started having meetings with regards to mapping the processes, however most of these wont be happening until towards the end of the month, which means that we might be a bit late on the mapping for JISC, although the information we already have can be used to create the first draft of the evaluation plan and the "final" project plan.

Useful Information from external sites

2009-02-25T12:34:00.004Z

I have just been doing a review of the CircleSpace.net which is the JISC programme environment for Enable and related projects. As part of this I see that they have some useful resources linked through. Including the following

A Blog reflecting on the Report on identity management for lifelong learning along with a link to the original report
A video on how institutional processes best support flexible learning, how institutional processes best support flexible learning. This links to work that I participated in last year at the Cetis Conference which is why some of the thoughts seem familiar!
Delicious liks to JISC_Curriculum_Design

Initiative meeting

2009-02-25T10:41:00.005Z

We have had two initiative meetings this week, the first was around APEL; what issues we had in handling APEL from potential learners, and how we generally handled learners wishing to embark on HE without formal qualifications, but with years of experience in the work place. The discussions lead to the thought that we could become much slicker in this process and use the negotiated framework from existing awards in Health and FCET to back up APEL and learners getting the right award at the right level.
The second meeting was focused on the way the university handles information, originally called the Intranet project it became clear that it was more of an information project in that it was reviewing the information held in the university. This included discussions about what the target audience was for the information, where it was stored, and whether there is a way to share that information online - or if there was a need to share it online. There were some big problems highlighted in this meeting and it comes back to earlier blog comments in previous posts, there was little clear vision from 'higher' as to what was expected from the project, what it's aims were and the direction it was expected to go. There was talk around the governance of information for the project and it is clear that this governance (including a group of faculty and service leaders) needs to be in place before the project (or any project embracing the information in the University) should start so that changes to information and how it is delivered can be managed in the right direction for the university.

Critical friend visit

2009-02-20T15:33:00.003Z

We had a successful critical friend visit with Tony where I gave the first version of the new partner presentation I did, to give him an idea of how the partners fit in with the project. We also gave Tony a break down of the Hub / Spoke / Theme idea for the project and discussed some of the issues that the project is unearthing including identity/ role management, funding devolved faculties, work planning and managing the development of new product. Tony stated that some(or all) these problems exist within most institutions, and it is how we handle solving them that will be interesting. The fact that we have had initiatives that keep bringing up the same issues means that we need to sit down and think about how we solve them. As part of the visit we have given Tony viewing access to the Live Office environment, where we are holding our draft project documentation and have invited him to one of our SMWG meetings (see when the next one is yourselves with the calendar on the right).
Sam spoke about the work he was doing with the process mapping and the standards that we are going with and how they are converging. Hopefully when his thoughts are more clear there will be more about that on this site. Jenny gave Tony a quick view of what one of the initiatives was up to - DIVAS (blog links on the right) and we spoke for some time about the validation process, the perspectives of partner colleges about the experience and supporting those participating in it.
This week has also seen me writting a chapter overview on Work Based Learning and thinking about writing an abstract for ALT-C 2009 on this project and managing change. Next week I am attending a number of WBL and product design related meetings along with some more initiative interviews so a busy week. Have a good weekend!

Catching up

2009-02-18T10:01:00.001Z

The weekly catch up meeting was very interesting with Mark this week, we have a number of tasks for the next week, mostly based on the blog I wrote last week while Mark was away. We are still planning to speak to Gill Howland about the Change Groups that have been set up within the university, and as part of this we will be pointing her to my notes in Elgg around project management. For this I needed to spend some time making them a bit tidier than they were originally. We need to get this sorted fairly quickly so we don’t have a number of different groups going off in different directions.

I have also given Mark, Jenny and Sam access to the work I am doing in MS Office Live, which gives them access to all the contacts for the project, and the start of the evaluation document. I have requested a meeting on this with the whole team as it is a big job that needs to be done with the entire team rather than just me in a room on my own. At this meeting we will need to discuss our strategy around engaging employers and learners. Mark is planning to talk to the Students Union before this meeting to ensure they are on board.

I have finished the presentation to partners, including me speaking over it, and have published it in the Elgg group for now. I have also uploaded it to sliderocket but this has stripped out the sound, so I am having to spend some time getting that back in, which is a pain as I recorded it in PowerPoint directly rather than using MP3’s which means I have had to use Audacity to pull the sound out of PowerPoint (rather than re-doing it all again)

Finally we have a critical friend meeting today with Tony Toole, which should be interesting.

Life, the University, and change

2009-02-12T11:25:00.002Z

As Mark has been away this week the project has yet to hear back about how the new change groups will fit within the Enable project. I have, however, updated Elgg with my notes from the training Sam and I did late last year (which I always meant to talk about but never quite got around to) which talks about managing complex projects, programmes and portfolios. As I continue to try and read the Project Management book I have it has become clear we need to manage what is going on in the University with regards to managing change around curriculum design and development. Obviously this will be discussed at my next Enable meeting with Mark next week.

I have also started thinking about writing the Evaluation plan, this is something that looks like taking up a lot of time, but as part of the work I recognised we need to find a baseline for the employer stakeholder. I have been on the email with Richard Benefer who seems to have provided me with the answer to my prayers, an Employer Engagement report for Staffordshire University in 2006. I have uploaded it to the new Live Office space I have created (yes I’m testing new communication tools for the project as GoogleDocs doesn’t quite hit the spot). Of course the next step will be to get baseline from learners too…

Last but not least, based on feedback on the partner presentation and discussions with Sam I am attempting a new approach to the presentation for the visits to Shrewsbury, Ashton, Stafford and Burton. See it here soon!

one week and one day ago

2009-02-06T10:19:00.005Z

I released the Elgg network to the SMWG last week and found that only one member has managed to successfully join the network. We will have to keep an eye on this and see if the others join slowly over the next few weeks, or even just before the next working group in March.
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Edit 02/2011
Since then all members have successfully accessed the Elgg (SUN) site and it has been used to disseminate the different aspects of Enable to those SMWG members unable to attend the meetings. It has also been used to store sanitised versions of the interviews for members to read, and has started some useful conversations. Using it as a consistent source of information for the SMWG has helped make it successful. As a whole using Elgg has been very successful for internal communication, much better than using outside tools that can change their charging models at a moments notice (Ning/ Grou.ps).
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There have been a number of discussions this week about the role of Enable and how it should work in the university, the main idea being that this project is a "programme" that focuses on managing change around Curriculum Design and Development, to include looking at the curriculum, the student experience and learning and teaching. Rather interestingly the Executive are also looking at starting and number of change groups in these areas, as well as Research. This could end up with being a duplication of effort or confusing roles. How will Enable be fitted into these groups? This is something that has been top of our minds this week as we go on with our work.

Other thoughts have been around CETIS's phone call and supporting the change of the learning and teaching using PHOEBE, this is something that will not be addressed in Enable yet. However these thoughts raise the question do we need an initiative that will look at ways to use HIVE and learning object creators in the best way? This will be something that can be thought about more when we get the latest version of HIVE as some software that comes with it may answer some of the questions being raised at this point.

Documents, Social Networking and Helping Others

2009-01-29T13:52:00.003Z

Since Tuesday I have been very busy working on the Enable Social Networking side of things, the university has been developing a new tool, elgg (http://learning.staffs.ac.uk/elgg) that I have been investigating for the project as the tool for communication for those involved in the project at Staffordshire University. So far my work has been very successful and I have managed to create pages to link to resources in HIVE, and have uploaded files directly into elgg where they don't need to be accessed outside of the university. All good, it is a shame that the links to HIVE still open up that extra window, and therefore there is still no easy right click/ download file option for end users, but it seems much better than using forum software. I have also created pages based on the events JISC have run with regards to supporting the project.

I have also been working on getting the Validation Support Point right for the Enable group, including changing the logo to just being the power button, so it is clearly associated with the enable project, and sending an invite from that group to the main project partner contacts. I have also started making friends with partners who have already joined the network. This has not resulted in anyone new being a member to the Enable/ Foundation degree group but hopefully it will over the next few weeks - this could be linked to colleges not being able to see the site correctly.

Sunblock needed?

2009-01-27T12:49:00.002Z

OK so I had a SURF meeting and unfortunately not one that includes sun, sea and ice-cream. The meeting went well, with talk around how colleges go about contacting the university and working on new products with the university and what would be the ideal. We were brought back to the validation process and the academic planning process being a long and difficult - often with what appears to be documentation that seems redundant once it has gone through the processes. It was also seen as an idea to train those involved in validation panels, and even review if Validation Events are necessary in all cases. Is there a better, more efficient way of handling validation?

I have also had a meeting about the Validation Support Network, this has been to see how we can make it as easy as possible for partner colleges to use. I have written a short help file on writing a blog and posted it in the Foundation degree group, however it does not look like anyone from the colleges has made themselves members of this group. I will need to think about how I handle this work and whether we can have blog templates and other documents to help colleges with their work in this site, especially as some of the colleges are having technical problems with accessing the site.

Partner Colleges, language and terms

2009-01-20T12:47:00.002Z

We had our last project partner welcome meeting on Friday afternoon, and all in all it was a very interesting meeting. We did the usual presentation (which can be seen on the main project blog - http://jiscenable.blogspot.com/2008/10/partners-join-in.html) and some good points were raised:

The presentation uses a number of slides from the SMWG meeting and were seen as too academic in language in comparison to the FE colleges, although the language for the presentation was pitched at the right level the slides on their own were too much. I guess this means I might have to record a "pitch" to go with the slides on line...
That the language used for the partners was assumptive - use of "HE Forum" is not something at each college, some use the term lifelong learning group, although they do the same thing.

This leads to a couple of thoughts, and I hope that it will raise a discussion up either here, or in the Validation Support Network that the partner colleges are all invited to (http://divascommunityofpractice.ning.com).

How does the join between colleges and the university work? From the University there is a Link Tutor, but what about before the award is developed? Who contacts who from the college to the university?
How is HE provision managed at the colleges?

Any thoughts/ comments etc welcome

New Year, No moss

2009-01-13T13:29:00.004Z

The new year has now got rolling, and the project is still moving forward, so there is no moss sticking to the sides ;). There have been a number of project meetings including one around Distance Learning which was very interesting, and a SMWG meeting that was this morning. We had a number of the SMWG missing from today's meeting which was a shame but we still had some interesting discussions around the Spoke issues identified so far, the MIAP initiative and how it could be part of the work on Roles and Indentity Management, and the project progress. Role and Identity Managment is still the main issue that has been highlighted by the project and is something Mark is working with the IS team to create some scoping criteria. We then raised a second issue at the meeting around Course Information. Mark provided a presentation on this:

For the rest of this week I have an evaluation day to attend in Birmingham, and then I will be finishing off the first draft of the project plan for submission to JISC on Friday. We are also having a second partner meeting on Friday for those who could not attend the first one last year.

Partners

2008-12-11T14:43:00.004Z

The project partner presentation at Newcastle went really well and seemed very positive. They gave us some thoughts on where they would see the Enable project, plus seemed very open to the idea of using blogs and reflecting on the processes involved in curriculum design, and development. We managed to make a clear distinction between the Enable project and DIVAS during this meeting, as we are still planning on using the Validation Support Network to capture the reflective process. They have collected a number of awards that are in development at the college, and have one more interview before we get the templates back all completed. We will then need to think of a way of capturing when those developments change status - something to think about for the new year I feel. I have also contacted Shrewsbury to find out where they are with capturing award information, it looks like we might be waiting for the New Year before that information comes to us, but is on the list. I will be popping to see the Shrewsbury team just before Christmas to see if they are happy and also give them an overview of the project and what is happening. Once I have finished this blog its time to spend some time with the To Do list in Outlook so nothing gets over looked.

Linking together

2008-12-11T09:35:00.003Z

Had an interesting conversation with Sam on Monday afternoon about how the spokes will all link together, and that we need to start thinking about the themes and who will fit in each one. We have started on a simple map of all the spoke names we have spoken to and put in initial lines on how they fit together. We have been pleased to note during some interviews projects have been talking together, but there are still some obvious gaps where the theme groups will work.
This morning I am off with Richard Benefer and Sue Lee to talk to the HE forum at Newcastle college about Enable, I have loads of handouts for them, including what we will expect from them for the funding and how they fit into the project as a whole. A lot is a duplicate of the meeting we had with the partners at the end of October. I will feed back on this meeting as I am hoping for some useful conversation to come out of it.

Perceptions of Staffordshire University

2008-12-08T14:05:00.002Z

We had an interesting conversation this morning around how the university markets itself to different learners. We found that the recruitment of learners can be something that is the responsibility of a faculty, an award leader, a link tutor, the marketing team, student recruitment or AimHigher. There is an initiative in the university that is looking at bringing the efforts of student recruitment and AimHigher together, however there are some interesting holes in the processes around recruitment and marketing within the university. This links with work being done by Paul Baron, who we spoke to last week and how we manage the product portfolio, how new markets are identified and how communication is managed between the university and prospective learners.

Faculty and Process Spokes

2008-12-05T14:21:00.003Z

We have had another busy week here, talking to members of faculties, those reviewing processes in the university, and taking part in Annual Award Reviews. It all feeds into what we would like from Curriculum Design and Development. We have found that there are some issues around using templates for faculties in that even when training is provided they can still be interpreted completed in a number of different ways. When asked for "blue sky" ideas we heard about the idea of the personalised prospectus and website, that experiences should be personal to those we are trying to engage and that the addition of negotiated modules onto traditional awards as options would be useful. I have yet to have time to blog about last weeks training and conference work, but I am hoping I will get some time free soon to do that! Next week we have more interviews and we will be presenting to our first college partner HE Forum.

Feedback, Planning and Meetings....

2008-11-28T09:06:00.002Z

We have had some feedback about the logo, fortunately it is all positive and therefore we now officially have a logo! Thanks to Sam for his hard work on this and to Marketing for giving us a nice vector version of it.
We are still organising initial meetings for the different initiatives highlighted by the SMWG, as we are making initial contact there has been some issue with project staff understanding the purpose of Enable and their involvement. However this has been addressed with a simple email paragraph to explain what the project is and how they have been identified as a person of interest.
Mark has been talking to the MIAP (Managing Information Across Partners) project (external) around the unique learner number, and how it can be implemented as a pilot in Staffordshire University. This linked to the work I did at the CETIS conference around supporting flexible provision and around technology supporting WBL, and whether this project would be of use to the community (yes!). We also looked at how processes needed to change. We looked at the Validation process, which links nicely with the work being done in QIS and I will need to send my notes on this to Sue Lee, the project manager for DIVAS. The CETIS conference will be written up more on my own blog, along with my thoughts on the training I had yesterday with Sam around complex project management.

Investigations

2008-11-21T13:28:00.003Z

I promised to write a bit about the project interviews, at the start of the week we spoke to Beebe about work in marketing around collecting course information from faculties and then delivering that to both perspective learners and to existing learners, at the time they were investigating using Blackboard as a source, however since we meet she is now thinking about the problems around duplicating data silos and also about not linking new data to what already exists in the university. This linked to the fact that she had not been aware that courses could also be delivered at colleges, and in these cases they could use either Blackboard or their own VLE. We were also able to tell her about the repository work that is going on in the university that could be used to help her. She was able to tell us about another initiative she is working on, around the university intranet "MyPortal" and looking about providing learners with more personalised information. We have been invited to the next two meetings around these areas.
We also spoke to Mike from Faculty in Computing, Engineering and Technology (FCET), about his negotiated learning award. This was very interesting as this is a programme of awards from undergraduate to post graduate that has been designed with an employer. It has successfully gone through validation but due to managing resources within faculties there is limited resources available to run new awards at this time of the year, although the employer wanted to start delivery the day after validation.
Further converstations this week included one with another member of FCET, who was speaking about their internal investigation into looking at Distance Learning, marketing of awards, and internationalisation of delivery. He was experiences issues around trying to change staff attitudes to delivery and how we, as a university, deal with marketing courses in other countries. He did say that the faculty was very proud of its ability to support work based learning and work placements, and that they were interested in taking this further with their distance learning.