Awards Aims and Learning Outcomes

Once course teams have undertaken their market research and discussed the proposed programme with employers, the next stage is to agree the overall aims of the award and the learning outcomes that students should be able to demonstrate at the end of the programme.

We had several discussions with the stakeholders. Kathryn McFarlane (Curriculum Dev Advisor -Centre for Professional Development) said that she found the Staffordshire University Learning Outcome Statements very helpful starting point. However there were two problems that she and the other members came across:

1 - On one validation they were criticised for sticking too closely to the learning outcomes statements and not customising them to the focus of the Award.

2 - On another recent validation, their outcomes were criticised in terms of appropriateness to level, despite using the same verbs and indicators as in the outcome statement. While there could have been deficiencies in their own practice, this also suggests that possibly the outcomes should be revisited, or panels could be more fully informed of them.

It is advised by QIS that when writing outcomes, course teams must ensure that they map on to the University's eight plus two, whilst also encapsulating the needs and flavour of the subject. The wording of learning outcomes will be seen as too generic if they could be achieved by students studying a range of subjects.

Award leaders need to ensure that the aims and programme learning outcomes are clear and appropriate to the articulation of the core features of the award, so learning outcomes provide a sound basis for student achievement on the award. This would involve a judgement concerning the Aims of the award as registering a distinctive identity for the qualification.
Sue Lee (Module leader - Learning Development & Innovation) pointed out that she had difficulty in writing outcomes at masters level, she has been asked to incorporate progression from certificate to diploma to masters when they are all supposed to be masters level. She argued that it was very difficult when a lot of the modules can standalone as university accredited modules as well as being part of a wider programme.

However, this issue was clarified by QIS member as he explained that each stage of a Masters programme does not have to address all eight University outcomes.. Given that each of the three stages of a masters award is at the same level, it is not possible to show progression in the same way that you can for an undergraduate programme. You may therefore decide to assess particular University outcomes at each stage. In contrast to the undergraduate awards, teams often write their own outcome statements and then link them to one or more University statements in the same way that you would for module learning outcomes.

John Erskine ( Senior Tutor - Health Faculty) described the process he undertook in writing the aims and outcomes for his awards "The process is to get hold of any support materials I can regards writing learning outcomes (e.g. materials from the HEA, materials from QAA etc and get hold of some good examples of learning outcomes from other awards. Have a clear view of the overall aims of the award....Start writing!"He advises novice award leaders to understand the level that they are writing for- Ug Pg levels are very different for example. He recommends that they should have a look at as many examples as they can both from inside their faculty, within the university and other higher education institutions especially in the subject area.

7 November 2008 at 10:34am

Validation Administration

We set up a discussion forum for the administration staff who are involved in organising the validation events(e.g. collating validation documentation, organising validation panels, writing validation reports or tracking the completion of amended documentation) within the faculty/school or at a University Level.

This forum aims to highlight the issues the administrators face when they arrange or support validation events, offer them appropriate solutions by QIS staff to make the validation process easier and allow administrators across the university to interact with each other, exchange ideas and best practice.

Jackie Campbell (Quality Officer – Faculty of Science) raised the issue with wording of the standard condition which says that “' definitive course documentation be lodged with QIS by ...”with regard to tracking the completion of amended validation documentation, she suggested that award team should send their amended documents to QIS via the appropriate staff within their Faculty (eg Quality Officer / Manager, FD Learning & Teaching). This would make tracking of amendment much easier for Faculty Quality team. Later Chris Gray (QIS) agreed to amend the report to include a statement that the amended documentation must be signed off within the Faculty/School before it is sent to QIS.

Kathy Wood (Senior Administrator Quality- FCET) had difficulty in finding panel members, she suggested that it would be more helpful if the University has a central ‘register’ of University staff and their subject area, experienced in attending validations. This could also include a register of interest from academics who have not attended a validation before. This could feed into validation training for staff at a University and / or Faculty level.

7 November 2008 at 11:00am

Restrictions on Employer-University engagement

For engagement to take place and flourish there must be mutual benefits for both partners in the relationship. Even where such potential benefits exist there may be constraints on their realization. Few barriers were identified by academic staff:

An award leader at Health Faculty explained the difficulty in identifying ‘who does what’. Where links were established they often depended on interpersonal relationships that were vulnerable to staff turnover so it was difficult to maintain links even where they had been established;

Lengthy and slow process, some employers felt that the university is deficient in terms of customer service and delivery to agreed timetables. Outdated and cumbersome university management practices tended to be slow.

Developing course and meeting business needs takes time but businesses too oftenchange their requirement which means that the university has to keep their courses up-to-date and rapidly innovate new courses to maintain the relationship with the employers and establish long-term strategic commitments towards them

Employer Engagement

We had several informal talks with tutors & award leaders about their experiences with employer engagement during the validation process we have set up an online discussion to exchange ideas. The majority stressed the importance of employer’s involvement in course development and their collaboration with the University which is considered imperative to bring significant economic benefits to the Midland area.

The role played by Staffs University within Staffordshire depended on the nature of economic activity in the region, bearing in mind the other competitors institutions (Keele University, University of Wolverhampton and Manchester Open University)

The most successful example of this type of activity in the past was the orientation towards the ceramic industry and NHS which stimulated the local economy. The University supplied these organisations with highly skilled and qualified labour. It played an important role in developing local and regional economies; however more awareness to the new diverse businesses need to be addressed.

A Computer Science tutor from FCET pointed out that some large companies have already developed relationships with the University e.g. Siemens ,BT and IBM to ensure that the system produces the type of technical and generic skills they require, and to ensure that they have access to a supply of suitably skilled graduates.

However, it is essential to consider the orientation and aspirations of different types of regional growing businesses and develop courses that meet their requirements. Faculties and Schools are willing to collaborate with local employers to provide them with graduates fitted to the jobs. This raises the questions of extent to which employers are willing to work with university to develop the required skills and the actions they are willing to take to participate in developing these skills, and also the extent to which the academic staff are willing to work with employers.

The University is trying to minimise complaints made by some sections of the business community. They argued that the University (and other UK HE institutions) do not produce graduates with the vocational or generic skills that meet their needs as employers. Others mentioned that the University is overly concerned with ‘academic’ research and publications at the expense of applied or innovative research.

The opening up of markets means that businesses in the UK can source skilled labour or services from overseas (often at a much lower cost), therefore, the products of the University must be a key to competitive success for local and national businesses.

Market Research

We started a discussion last week for those who are involved in market research, for new and projected awards and modules. We encouraged members to share their experiences and concerns on the subject. Some Members did not reply to the discussion because they had other commitments so we decided to take a more personal approach by visiting them (colleagues that we know) or contacting them informally by phone or email and surprisingly we received great feedback, members preferred to talk about their experiences rather than writing them down into the community site.

Based on the feedback we received, it was interesting to know that award leaders/tutors conduct their own researching methods for the new awards (e.g. networking with colleagues from other institutions, attending workshops and conferences, visiting the employers and gathering students’ opinions). Most of them agreed that a well- thought out market research programme on any planned award or module is very important in order to recognise the need for it in industry.


Issues

Replication - not all of them followed a thorough research programme, some just researched briefly this stage of the validation process, relying on other institutions’ research and replicating awards running in other universities which were unsuitable for us. As a result of this, some awards did not run in the university because of insufficient numbers of enrollers.

Time-consuming - market research can be a very lengthy process which may not be acceptable to employers who are expecting the research to be undertaken quickly.

Support – some award leaders/tutors required more support from the university in terms of the resources (time, expenses, more guidance) to enable them to make proper research.

Engaging the Community

After “Ask the Experts: Validation Process” online event things have gone quiet on the community site. We have had a discussion on how to engage the members and encourage them to interact with each other, create groups, make friends, and start a discussion. We have asked members to create their own blogs on the site or to link their existing blogs to it.

This followed with another informal meeting on Monday 6th Oct. with Helen Walmsley (e-learning models co-ordinator) who approved our work so far on the community and she went through the best way to cultivate the community of practice. This helped us to rethink how we could generate more interest from our members. We thought of minimising our emails to one each week which will summarise the activities for the previous week and inform the members of the agenda for the forthcoming week so members will get into a rhythm of the community. We agreed to update the image on our main page to match our weekly discussion accordingly.

I met Chris Gray On Tuesday 7th Oct. and discussed the activity issue and decided on breaking down the validation process into logic phases by organising weekly- based discussions so members will focus on one aspect at a time. He suggested to start a market research topic. This will involve consulting the marketing team to act as an expert on this discussion forum. The following day I had a meeting with Ian Jones from Marketing who explained that tutors faculty carry out the research by themselves. However he will reply to tutors’ queries by giving them some guidance and advice in the next week discussion.

On Thursday we met a tutor from the FCET faculty who had been through the market research stage for her new module and she provided us with an excellent business case (P.S. the details of this meeting will be published in the next blog).

We organised face to face events for the next coming weeks in Stoke and Stafford Campuses, to briefly introduce the project and demo the community to the members and answer any queries.

Backup & Restore Issues

I have been working with Ning and was very impressed with the capabilities it offers compared to other social networks.

However, before our last online event, one of the support team deleted one of the discussions forum by accident and could not retrieve it. This made me feel concerned about the restoration and backup procedures on Ning. If our network continues developing and being successful and then its contents are accidentally lost, there will be a lot of very unhappy members and an even more annoyed creator.

In order to avoid this I started investigating and digging into the existence of any restore or backup functions by exploring the admin features, looking at help centre questions and contacting other network creators and developers. My finding was that there are no restore functions implemented for a network creator to restore deleted contents. Ning provides backups of the content and code on social network on a daily basis which can be restored in the case of a catastrophic production incident. At present we do not have control over backups so we trust Ning to cover our backs.

On the other hand, Ning allows us to access the source code of our validation support network on their server and maintain it by ourselves so it becomes our responsibility to backup our data (i.e. exporting them to Spreadsheet which can not be restored) Please see the script below to be integrated into our network site.

If we take this approach there is no guarantee that Ning will maintain several copies of our source code or content for restoration in the case of a developer accident or user error. In other words if we delete code or content, the deleted version of our social network will replace the backup before we'll be able to get to it! For this reason, we need to keep our content backed up and our code in a code management tool like subversion. This can be a time-consuming task and because my role is to cultivate the community of practice rather than undertaking development works I will not be able to supervise the network technically. I agreed with Sue L to leave this issue for the time being until I have some spare time in the life-cycle of the project.

From a personal point of view I think Ning should look at this issue more seriously and consider easier and more efficient backup processes for network creators.

Ask the Experts:Validation Process (online event)

This event aimed to answer stakeholders’ queries about the validation process using threads as an asynchronous communication. It ran for 2 hours on Thursday afternoon. Primarily Chris and I thought of running this event side by side from the LDI office however we later changed the plan as it was more useful to have his colleagues around him for consultation in the ADI office.

A reminder was sent to all community members a few days before the event. We asked Chris Gray to start a new discussion on the Forum page and decided to name it with the event name so his photo appeared on the discussion.

Members were provided with a guide on how to enter the discussion on the help page and also informed on the forum page to contact me or Sue for any technical problems

The event started at 2pm with a welcome message from Chris to the attending members prompting them to ask their questions. Members entered their questions in the forum and Chris answered accordingly. As there were some pauses in the discussion we (I and LDI team members) asked the validation team some questions to keep the event running. Members had to refresh their pages on the community to view any new threads on the discussion. The event closed at 4.00pm.

Although we had 57 members join the community, not all of them joined the discussion. Maybe this was because this was the first event we had held and members had prior commitments but we were pleased with the response and participation however we are hoping that more members will join in in the future.

Sue K suggested it would useful to keep the Ask the Experts: Validation Process forum open so members could submit questions as and when they have them, either Chris or one of his colleagues could reply at a convenient time. However this would require checking the forum discussion every day for any new queries. Sue L did not agree with this as she preferred the event to be concluded at its finishing time on that day and that if there are any further questions they are to be directed to the validation team or community members.

Launch Day

On the launch day we had to alter our invitation message before we sent it. This was because Ning did not allow us to attach a file in the invitation message (e.g. guide on how to access Ning); hence we thought we needed to send this file under a separate email to the users.

Another issue was that Ning did not let us input more than 200 characters in the invitation message text area.

Sue L, Sue K and I had a thorough discussion on the invitation message and the best format that should shape our message. Our challenge was to introduce the project by email to the university in as few words as possible. Most people do not have the patience to read a lengthy email so we agreed that the email had to be brief and concise and also mention the forthcoming events & project introduction. The invitation message has been transformed

FROM:

TO

We decided to send award leaders:
An email which will briefly explain the project details with a guide attachment on how to access Ning.

An invitation through Ning where they will be asked to try the questions on the main Forum.

We tweaked the community interface (e.g. we hid the QIS Panel member training event, Introduction to DIVAS, etc…). We temporarily removed the old questions (e.g. New User & Expert User) from Ning and replaced them with

1. Introduce yourself to the community
2. Tell us about your own experience of the validation process.
3. What is your expectation of this community of practice?

We changed the launch day to Tuesday 16th Sep as we thought it would be a less busy day and decided to launch the system at 10.30am (normally it is a coffee-break time for the staff.)

Sue K exported the CSV file from Outlook and uploaded it to Ning using Invite More People function. However on that day only 2 staff joined in who had requested the invitation individually. The following day, Sue investigated the issue and realised that she needed to change the format of the email address in the spreadsheet (e.g. she had to change it from “SMITH John (j.smith@staffs.ac.uk)” to “j.smith@staffs.ac.uk”) surprisingly it worked and staff were able to access the network.

Ben S, Sue L, Sue K and I had an informal discussion on Wednesday morning. It was agreed to change the name of the network from DIVAS to Validation Support Network. This would sound more familiar to colleagues who are involved in validation so we removed DIVAS words from the whole network.

We decided to spread the word beyond the award leaders and thought of inviting the whole staff in the schools, faculties and relevant departments.

These alteration had been made on Monday 15th Sep.

Meeting with the Finance Team

Ning by default adds adverts to its pages; these can be removed by paying $19.99 a month. Sue L mentioned in previous meeting that there is a budget so we can remove these adverts in order that COP will look neater and more professional.

I arranged a meeting with Tracey Proctor from Finance Department to arrange a monthly payment to Ning but this was not a straightforward process. She entered the credit card details into the online purchase form then after Ning asked us to confirm the purchase process by entering a password. I presumed this would be my Ning password, but it did not work. I had to contact the Ning support team to investigate this as shown below:

After that I arranged another meeting with Tracey Proctor and the transaction was then processed smoothly and the adverts disappeared.

Two meeting were held on the 2nd week of Sep.

Meeting with the Development Team

I had a one-to-one meeting with Sam Rowley discussing the gadget development on Ning.

I have demonstrated my initial experiment with Ning on how an XML file can be linked from an external server to Ning using the gadget feature. This triggered an idea by Sam R about the possibility of integrating a webpage into Ning and indeed we managed to incorporate a wiki webpage residing on Hive into Ning using a text box feature. This will enable the user to search documents throughout the webpage. This step was a real success and the picture became clearer for the development team on what can be implemented. We came to the conclusion that the developers need to create a webpage which will be an interface for searching queries from HIVE and this webpage will be embedded into Ning.

The meeting was held on Friday 5th Sep

Brain Storming Sub-Meeting - 2nd Sep

After the meeting on 2nd September Chris Gray, Sue K and I had a follow-up meeting. We discussed the structure of our forthcoming activities for this month

I went through DIVAS COP on Ning with them and we agreed on the interface of Ning. We decided to keep the interface simple, clear and concise and we removed some features like video and music player as Ning only has a 10 Gb storage capacity. We have to pay for any extra space needed. We can always link these files (video & audio) if needed from HIVE once the linkage between Hive and Ning is up and running,

Chris G thought that Gadget feature can be removed as well because the 59 built-in Ning gadgets are not relevant to our community. These gadgets vary between games, igoogle gadgets, small flash programs, etc….

We decided on the date of launching our COP which will be 15th Sep and we will be asking award leaders to input their comments and views under New user & Expert User forums.

Expert Users:
* What advice/tips you would like to tell the new users of validation process?
* What pitfalls to avoid?

New Users:
* What matters concern you about the validation process?
* What information you would like to know?

This will be followed by an online event on Thursday 25th Sep for 2 hours in the afternoon “Ask the Experts: Validation Process” and supervised by 3 of us.

We agreed to have another face-to-face event “Introduction to Divas” in mid October in Stoke Campus to introduce the project to the stakeholders; this will be presented by Sue L, Chris Gray and myself.

First Online Event

Well, we still have new members joining up and now have a total of 57 members in the Validation Support Network NING community.

We held our first online Ask The Expert event last Thursday where we had Chris Gray, Quality Improvement Officer in the Academic Development Institute, available in a specially created community forum from 2pm to 4pm to answer community members queries reagrding the validation process.

An active discussion took place between about half a dozen members of the community. Discussion covered the issues of induction of staff new to validation, validation of online awards vs validation of traditional awards and also the issue of planning and designing awards where more emphasis and support may be needed prior to the validation process.

With the support of Chris, we have kept the forum open for members to submit questions as some members were unable to attend, due to other work commitments, and others are new to the community since Thursday's event closed.

We are planning to hold some face-to-face events soon - a couple of introductory events to introduce members to the workings of NING in addition to giving them a broader view of the project. This will hopefully encourage more members to become actively involved and become competent with the system.

The Launch

What was it I said at the end of my previous post? -

"... all we now have to do is: 1. Export the DIVAS Contacts folder from Microsoft Outlook into a .csv file. 2. Use the csv file to batch invite the contacts in Ning which will allow us to select invitees from a csv file."

Well, you'd think it could not be simpler! Word of advice - never start a sentence with, " all we have to do now is..."!

NING did not like our csv file - it did not like it due to the strange content of the e-mail field and also the way in which the names/email addresses were exported, i.e. NAME (email address) - it wanted the NAME and brackets part removing. So, following a bit of editing, we eventually got NING to accept and use our csv file. However, this took some time as NING did not inform us that there was a problem - it actually looked like the mailing of the invitations had worked successfully. We became concerned when we noticed nobody was joining up and a couple of potential members had called to ask how they should sign up!

We have now sent out in excess of 300 invitations to academic and adminstrative staff, deans of faculties - basically anyone within the University who may have an interest and/or involvement in validation. The NING invitation is preceded by an email providing a brief explanation of what the community is for and why the recipient might wish to join. NING has a 200 character limit on invitation text so it was thought sensible to send a first email with explanation and instructions which also notifies the recipient that a NING invitation will be on its way.

We have had a good response to the invitations and now have 42 members (including ourselves). Many members have already contributed to the forums, introducing themselves to the Community (13 replies), some telling us about their validation experiences (4 replies) and their expectations of the community (3 replies).

It's early days yet, but people seem enthusiastic, and I have just sent out a second wave of 93 invitations).

Getting a list of Contacts

Compiling an initial list of University staff to invite to join the DIVAS community has been quite a long and laborious process.

It was decided to compile a list of Award leaders as a starting point by possibly consulting the University prospectus's. These did not prove too fruitfull except for the Faculty of Health. I thus decided to consult the University email address book where I was able to locate PAMs (Programme Area Managers) and other likely contacts from their role titles.

I subsequently sent out many emails to PAMs, administration staff, coordinators such as Foundation Degree Coordinator, asking for Award Leader lists and any other possibly interested staff. As a result of this, and including contacts we already knew would have an interest, I now have a list of over 200 staff to receive invitations to the DIVAS Ning Community.

Hamza has compiled an invitation which includes a brief description, instructions on logging in to the community, notification of forthcoming events and a line or two to apologise to invitees who have no interest in validation and ask them to ask colleagues who may have an interest to contact us.

I have compiled a contacts folder in Microsoft Outlook with name and email details of all of the staff who we will be inviting at the beginning of next week. This took about a day to compile - extracting details from emails, attached Word documents etc., looking up emails in the directory and saving them all into a new address folder called DIVAS Contacts. I have done it this way as all we now have to do is:

1. Export the DIVAS Contacts folder from Microsoft Outlook into a .csv file.
2. Use the csv file to batch invite the contacts in Ning which will allow us to select invitees from a csv file.

Experimenting with Gadgets

One of DIVAS project objectives is to have a link between DIVAS community of practice and HIVE repository to enable the documents to be searched using Ning platform.

While I was looking into Ning I noticed a new function called “Gadget”. OpenSocial gadgets are applications written for OpenSocial which should work equally well on all compliant social networks. Thus, instead of writing one application for MySpace and another for Ning, you can write the application once and deploy it on many different networks.

I thought this could be the start towards the linkage between HIVE and Ning

I recognised that Ning allows us to import OpenSocial gadgets from its library. It also enables the devlopers to create their own gadgets, I have created my first gadget as shown below

I have saved the file as an .xml and uploaded it to a web server

I Then copied the URL of my file and went to the Gadget area in My Page on Ning, named the gadget Hamza’s gadget and pasted the URL link in the URL text box

The outcome is simple at this stage. However it shows that information can be transferred or linked from an XML file residing on an external web server to Ning Platform.

Adding Documentation tab on Ning

As a start I thought it would be useful to have a specific tab on DIVAS so validation documents can be displayed on that page and I called it Documentation.

This required investigation through Ning Developers Community on how to implement a new tab on Ning. I have uploaded the validation documents’ links that I have received from Chris Gray.

Hectic Work in August

I had a busy period in August, organising our activities and tasks liaising with Quality Improvement Services in order to have everything completed before the launch of the community of Practice

At present DIVAS COP support team consists of Chris Gray, Sue Kneill and myself. We have agreed to complete our action points before the next DIVAS meeting in September.

Chris Gray has not decided on the online event‘s name for September. However he found out the meeting date of Teaching and Learning Enhancement Committee (LTEC) which will be 13th October. We can demo DIVAS project to senior managers to raise the awareness at this meeting. He sent me links of validation documents of The Quality Improvement Service website to be posted onto the main page of DIVAS COP.

Sue Kneill has got a list of names of award leaders and is still looking for an online live presentation software to be used in our online events.

I have created a guide for new users of DIVAS Community of Practice on how to get into Forum discussion. Sue Kneill and I decided to attach this guide in the invitation which will be sent on 15th September, to ensure that all users are getting smoothly into DIVAS social network and avoiding any frustration and wastage of time.

I have edited a brief introduction to DIVAS project to be included in the invitation email which informs staff about the project and next online event. This should be included with the invitation

I have produced an initial presentation of the DIVAS project. The slides will demonstrate the aims and objectives of the project and the approaches and techniques that will be used to implement the system. Chris Gray and I originally thought about presenting these slides in a face-to-face event in October, however Sue Lee being the project manager, decided to create the presentation by herself and asked me and Chris Gray to present it with her.

I have not had the chance to shoot an introduction video of DIVAS project as we gave this task a low priority.

Few questions I thought of to be appeared on the registry page e.g. Could you please introduce yourself (i.e. brief idea about your role), What is your expectation of DIVAS community of practice?. This will help us to know more details about our clients’ requirements and expectations.

Launching Approach of Community of Practice

As a team we have talked about how to launch DIVAS community of practice to the stakeholders but we do not know what is going to happen or whether it will succeed. There was a concern about the approach we should adopt to develop and support the community. To announce it to our award leaders is likely to cause problems if the initiative fails to gain support.

It was agreed with the project manager to start approaching the existing in-house communities creators .I had a meeting with Helen Walmsley (E-learning Models Co-ordinator) who runs and supports Models of Best Practice online community. We discussed how to develop a successful community of practice; I took notes of several helpful tips and advice from her.

To be familiar with this subject I looked into relevant books in the library (e.g. Cultivating Communities of Practices) and online articles. I came to the decision for the prevalent approach in getting the community started:

1. Identify the domain of the people, who will have an interest in this community, they are award leaders in this case

2. Arrange a face-to-face meeting with them where we can have the opportunity to explain about the project and introduce DIVAS community of practice and give them a chance to login to the system. The most important activity will be getting to know them more closely, capturing their expectations and requirements of the community and establishing good relationships with them.

3. Let them know about the next online meeting’s subject and date.

However, the plan was slightly changed. It was recognised that September can be a hectic time for award leaders to physically attend meetings because of their involvement with students enrolments and they need to prepare their learning materials for the new academic year, hence the project manager recommended to start with an online event in late September followed by a face-to –face event in Late October.

Our Preparations Towards September

Sue K and I had a meeting on Thursday 7th August to review the events Chris and I had generated in the last meeting. We confirmed the first two events ( the ones in September and late October) and decided to launch the DIVAS COP at beginning of September ( since the majority of staff will be back from holidays). We created action plan in co-ordination with the previous one produced by Chris G and me.

Action Plan:

SK - gets the award leaders’ list ready (by end of August- early September)
HB /SK - send invitation to award leaders at the beginning of September.
HB – prepares a brief guide 2-3 pages on Ning Discussion
HB - prepares a brief introduction of DIVAS to go with the invitation
HB - tells staff about the next “Intro to Ning” event. This should be included with the invitation
HB/SK/SL – think about questions (2-3) to appear on the registry page (e.g. what are the staff expectations and motivation to join in COP, what benefits do they aim for?)
SK - looks for online live presentation software (free, robust, reliable and easy to use)
HB – thinks of shooting an introduction video on DIVAS

Meeting with QIS

I had a meeting with Chris Gray (Quality Improvement Officer) on Thursday 5th August to discuss the events which will take a place on the DIVAS Community of Practice through the academic year.

We agreed on these initial events:

• First Online Event: Validation Process presentation by CG and HB - early September
• Second Face to Face Event: : Introduction to DIVAS by HB and CG - late October
• Third Online Event: Developing Foundation Degree by Richard Benefer or CG - November?
• Fourth Online Event: Technology Supported Learning by Glynn Skerrat - December? Or E-learning by Sue Lee or HB - December?
• Fifth Online Event: Validation Panel member by Mary Furness? Month?

A demonstration of DIVAS community ( functions and facilities) was given to Chris Gray who agreed to cascade the demo to his colleagues in the ADI department.

At the end of the meeting we produced an action plan to be completed before September.

• CG thinks about the online event‘s name for September.
• CG finds out about the meeting of Teaching and Learning Enhancement Committee so we can demo DIVAS to senior managers to raise the awareness.
• HB creates PowerPoint presentation and sends it to CG
• HB designs snapshots of DIVAS system prototype using Graphic Design application
• CG sends HB the links of validation documents of The Quality Improvement Service website to be posted onto the main page of DIVAS COP.
• HB finds a method on how to send events/forums adverts to all COP members
  

Copyrights & Security

Copyrights issue was raised in the meeting on July 8th. This was concerned about the uploaded validation documents, will they be belong to NING?

I have designated the network as private so only invited staff can sign up to become members and it will be visible to them only.

Investiagtion has been carried out by contacting Ning support team who ensured that any content submitted to private network will be deemed to be private content. Private content is licensed for use only within the network into which it is posted. Ning does not claim any ownership rights in the content we provide. We own the content we create and upload.

Ning uses industry standard security measures to protect the loss, misuse and alteration of the information under thier control. They store the information in a secure operating environment that is not available to the public. However, they do not guarantee complete security. as they cannot guarantee that their security measures will prevent third-party "hackers" from illegally obtaining this information.

Exploring Ning

Creating an online community of practice was identified as one of the DIVAS project deliverables. It is aimed to provide an architecture of participation to build a cross-university Community-of-Practice with flexible and convenient access to user-contributed validation support information for re-use and further exploitation.

In the past I have joined several social networks like Facebook, MySpace and others , they were general with no specific interest other than people connecting with people while I have found Ning network is a DIY social space - anyone can create a little social network (like a website) without coding. I have created a DIVAS network, gave it a tagline, description, keywords and network icon. I have customised the theme and its settings (Body & Content area) to get the intuitive and user-friendly interface. Ning allows Network creators & Adminstrators to alter the appearnce of the theme to a certain extent by modifing the code of the Cascading Style Sheets. I have configured CSS to remove the "Invite" tab from the interface which was a bit confusing to some users (sorry SK I did not mean you ;-)

See the code below

/* Try to remove Invite Links */

div#xg_module_account small,div.members_module div.xg_module_foot li.left,div.xg_widget_profiles_friend_list div.xg_module p.left a.add,div.success p,html[xmlns] .xg_module_friends,div.xg_module_friends div.xg_module_body p a.button,div.xg_module_friends div.xg_module_foot li.left,form#xg_member_form a.add,#xg_tab_invite,div#xg.xg_widget_profiles_friend div#xg_body div.xg_colgroup div.xg_3col div.xg_module div.xg_module_body p.right strong a.add { display: none; }div#xg_module_account small.nobr { display: block; }

The adverts that run in the right column of the network were a bit irritating, it would look nice without them. They can be removed once we purchase the "Control the Ads" premium service for $19.95 per month. ( Horray! Sue L. agreed to purchase the service :-)

"Invite more" is visible for members and Admin, so members can invite other people. I have put a control on this, so when member sends an invitation to a friend, a notification email will be sent to me to accept or decline this member. I have invited all team members to DIVAS to share with them the experience and identify issues before luanching it live in September.

Group - members can create their private groups within DIVAS network e.g. Faculty/Dept-based groups.

Ning comprhends useful collection of features e.g. creating events, forums, blogs, notes, text boxs, RSS, etc.... It will also allow members to upload documents, photo, audio and Video. Worth knowing that Ning provides a quota of 10GB of storage and 100GB of bandwidth. For more storage we have to purchase additional units of 10GB of storage and 100GB of bandwidth which will cost $9.95 per month, per unit.

I have set up a Flickr Import facility to enable DIVAS members to import photos from Flickr. I have incorporated a Frabbr map which will allow members to plot specific points and collaboration with the community of practice.

Getting into Ning

Last week I received an invitation from Hamza, who has set up the DIVAS Community of Practice in Ning, to join the community. I had a brief look and added a comment or two for other members but did not get to look in detail. Confusion arose when I was asked for my Master Key which, it turned out, is to do with me being set up as an Administrator.

Something I often do when I go into the Ning community through http://www.ning.com/ is almost create a new community. It's really just a case of not reading the screen properly but the Name Your Social Network box seems to be the first thing to catch the eye and it's asking for a name for a new community not the name of an existing one. 'My Social Networks' is much smaller, and fainter, at the top of the screen. If I go in through my initial invitation email I very nearly create a new account for myself but going in through the Welcome message (received after initially signing up to Ning) brings up a straight forward login screen.

It was good to see there had been some activity in the community and, in particular, Sue Lee has started up a discussion to which I have contributed and also started a new one concerning organising event(s) to get folk involved. Discussions seem very straight forward to start and contribute to and, I think, will prove to be one of the most valuable areas (for exchange of ideas and experiences) in the community.

The navigation in Ning seems pretty intuitive, however, it is not easy to read the locations (on the navigation bar) that you are not currently in or pointing at due to the pale blue on grey. It is possible to change the appearance of the community's environment and also, if we wished, to add a logo. This might be something to look at and discuss with other members.

Adverts are always a bit annoying and can be distracting but, as we have to put up with them, I'm just practicing mentally editing out most of the right hand column of the screen.

The Blog Posts are tucked away in the bottom left hand corner of the main page. I think it might be useful to invite academic community members to contribute blog posts - it may be valuable to have people 'blog' their experience of the validation process from beginning to end - starting with preparation. Some may have their own personal blogs and they could be encouraged to share their blog (or some of their relevant blog posts) with members of the DIVAS community.

I'm thinking it may be time to invite Chris Gray and Glynn Skerratt to join the community now and involve them in discussion concerning publicising events etc.

A few more points and questions about Ning:

How is 'Send a Message' different to 'Add Comment'? Does it show up in the recipients email and, if you opt to keep a copy of the message sent (as I did) where is it kept?

Note - everyone can see everyone elses comments - I'm suspecting this is ok but people may need to realise this. You can't switch this off under the Privacy settings in My Settings, however, you can opt to 'approve' comments before they appear on your blog or your comment wall. You can keep photos, videos and blog posts private by default (and override this when you add something) and limit the people who can comment on your photos, videos and blog posts (e.g. only friends). However, due to the nature of the community, to be a sharing community, I would not encourage this - if there's a real need to keep some communication confidential from other community members then I would discourage use of the DIVAS community of practice for that purpose.

Going against what I've just said in the previous paragraph, I am now wondering if there is a way to have a private discussion - I have not found anything obvious in Ning but it has occurred to me, if we are supporting both validation panel members and academic staff with modules going through validation - might these be separate communities, with some overlap, that may wish to discuss some issues within the confidence of their own peer community?

Well, that's me done for now. Feel free to comment. Cheers.