Bits of light in tunnels...

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...

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

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

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...

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

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

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!