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.