http://divascommunityofpractice.blogspot.com/

Case Study by one of the FCET tutor

I had an interesting informal interview with one of the FCET module leaders with respect to validation process. Various points were discussed as below:

Research
The notion of designing a new award will generally be based on the research undertaken by the academics in the faculty. Teaching staff are constantly trying to identify the gap of their programme and create the appropriate award or module to fit the purpose. They by and large rely on their personal networks (e.g. colleagues from other HE institutions) and their placements students. Tutors have informal discussion with the employers about the students as to whether their skills were sufficient to do the job, this information then has to be fed back.


Award Aims and Learning outcomes
The tutor argues that there is an art to write award aims and learning outcomes. They ought to be generic enough to be adaptable, but not too generic to get all questions and issues when it comes to the validation. This will reduce the need of redoing the programme spec every time the module is changed. Professional bodies (BCS and IEEE) requirements need to be considered closely when writing the award aims and learning outcomes. Awards with professional bodies’ accreditation will have a bigger opportunity to attract more students i.e. it is crucial for marketing purposes.


Drawbacks from tutor’s point of view
Resources - It was claimed that additional support in conducting such research will be necessary (e.g. budget)

Politics – It was discovered that some faculties may feel threatened by revealing their validation documentation to others especially in cases when two faculties are announcing similar course(s).

“Would the faculty of AMD producing multimedia course been happy that computing copy elements of their course design,…..especially when you fight for students” ( Tutor J)

That to some extent explains why Validation Support Network community is not developing properly


Support for beginner tutor
The tutor said that new colleague(s) could rely on others in the faculty to obtain the advice and support on how to write the documentation, but not from outside the faculty because it will not be relevant.


What do they suggest?
With regard to course design and preparing validation documents, tutors spend a lot of time emailing each other in this area. Having a discussion board (discussion between panel members) was thought to be a useful approach to handle all the communication and file sharing

it was presumed that 3 discussions are needed with:
1. people who are working on validation documentation in house ( e.g. course designer, tutors, module leader)
2. internal validation panel members( faculty level)
3. QIS and Faculty members (university level)

The tutor said that “it would be nice to define, so each group of people above, can talk together. What we do now, we save work to a server and email each other with ideas. However it would be beneficial to have an area to keep a record of documents, file share (e.g. wiki) and use the discussion board to replace the emailing.”

Potential improvements

Once the development work on linking the Ning Validation Support Network to the University’s HIVE repository (where all outputs from validations will reside) is completed, the practitioners will be able to search validation documents through Ning platform via a “self-service” approach. This will increase the chance for members to visit the community network and participate in the discussions. The incentive will be that we are giving them a service to help them with their jobs; hence there will be more likelihood to add threads or respond to queries.

New methods created to enhance the traffic

Fleur Corfield a community member created a group for those who are interested in Validation around Foundation degrees or involved in Enable JISC project. This hopes to bring together thoughts from those in the university and partner colleges about the experiences around curriculum design. This may create an opportunity to get them engaged in the validation activities.

A Validation Administration group was created for people who are involved in organising 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 to discuss administrative issues with other colleagues.

Community Recession

It looks like we are having a ‘contribution crunch’, some community members seem to be saving their thoughts, ideas and experiences for themselves. As a remedy we need to inject some motivation and enthusiasm in order to get the wheels in motion again. The community atmosphere has been quiet the last few weeks, even though the discussions were part and parcel of validation process and taking place every week only core members engaged.

The majority of the participants fall into wolf, mouse and mole types according to Gilly Salmon 5 stage model, as they visit the community with low or no contribution to the resources.

Few reasons could be behind this:

• Lack of time, practitioners could be busy with their work schedule and not have time to follow the discussions
• Newbies may have seen the community as a source of information and best practice, rather than a participation environment. Perhaps they do not feel confident to raise their queries or they are too shy to ask questions fearing that these questions might be naive or stupid, so they keep quiet.
• Expert users may be hesitant to add a forum, start a blog or link an existing blog, as they may feel like they are show-offs
• People are not feeling comfortable, especially when they know that managers and directors could view their questions, opinions and views , so they become reluctant to open up
• Members do not find the subject interesting and motivating, the validation topic in general could not be a task they enjoy practising.
• People look at the Validation Support Network as new initiative which used top-bottom approach, so they perceive it as another tool they need to use.
• People who are technology phobic do not prefer to collaborate and interact using social network software, they prefer other methods of communication i.e. talk, phone and email. Faculty members seem to rely on their colleagues in answering their queries or using their personal approach to contact other members in other faculties and schools
  

Meeting with the project development team

I looked into more than 130 discussion forums on Ning developer site to identify similar cases to our project. I found the contents of discussions very useful. The community members raised a lot of queries and solutions which answered a lot of my questions. By looking at the size of the Ning developers community and the high volume and diversity of discussion forums, it made me realise how enthusiastic Ning is in promoting and encouraging the development work on its infrastructure especialy its dedication to online support.

I arranged a meeting with Sam Rowley on 26th January to show him my findings towards Widgets, Gadgets and OpenSocial applications, he was satisfied with the outcome of the research. We then together narrowed down the research into smaller sections and came to conclusion that we need to implement OpenSocial application version 0.8 (the latest) for the project.

Communicating with Ning developers members

I signed up to get access to the application developer sandbox with OpenSocial v0.7 The purpose of this social network is to enable developers to implement and test the OpenSocial Application with Ning. However Ning points out those editorially-selected applications will be featured as part of their new directory. This made me feel concerned about the privacy of our application as we do not want it to be viewed by the public.

I sent a query to Ning to enquire what is the appropriate type of OpenSocial Application to be developed: (e.g. Profile based OpenSocial Applications or Network Wide OpenSocial Applications) taking into account the privacy and security demands.

Research into third-party applications - 2

I have been researching the OpenSocial applications the last couple of weeks. I went through Ning developer online discussions to find out what other programmers are developing on Ning .Ning provides advanced guidelines on how to develop an OpenSocial application. The developer needs to be familiar with XML, HTML and JavaScript languages. I am experimenting with some of them at present.


OpenSocial application

OpenSocial is a set of common APIs standards - mostly based on XML and JavaScript - for social networks. It was initially developed by Google but has been embraced by the wider social networking and application developer community.

Ning will give the developer the ability to create powerful applications without the need to dive into Ning's source code and OpenSocial has been widely adopted by other social networks such as Orkut, Hi5 and MySpace. Eventually the OpenSocial Applications that are written by Sam’s team for Ning should be easily portable to other social networks.

Ning are fully committed to helping application developers use the OpenSocial platform to its fullest potential, they offer a selected number of developers sandbox environments to make sure that Features on Ning work correctly. http://developer.ning.com/beta. Ning Developer Network community can be targeted for a support with the PHP, APIs and CSS/JavaScript.

The differences between Gadgets and Features? It is worth to know that Ning Gadgets previously supported v0.5 of the OpenSocial. Ning Features will support OpenSocial v0.7 and offer access to additional social network information and more detailed documentation. Ning Features will also more closely follow the OpenSocial technical specifications.

Research into third-party applications - 1

It was agreed, as part of the last meeting action points, to investigate into widgets and gadgets which can be integrated into our validation support network. The purpose is to create a similar application to act as a platform link from Ning to HIVE documents. The first thing that comes to mind is, What is the difference between them?

Widget:

Widgets are interactive virtual tools that provide single-purpose services such as showing the user the latest news, the current weather… or even a language translator, among other things. Examples of widget engines include: … Microsoft gadgets in Windows Vista…

Gadgets:

Gadgets are computer programs that provide services without needing an independent application to be launched for each one, but instead run in an environment that manages multiple gadgets and then adds “See: Google Gadgets, Microsoft Gadgets, Apple Widgets.

Difference:

The easiest way to explain it is that gadgets are widgets, but not all widgets are gadgets. Gadgets are a subset of widgets, with the distinctive property of being proprietary. For example, Microsoft Vista has gadgets, which are widgets that work only on Microsoft Vista. Further, Google has their own set of gadgets that users can add to their websites and/or Google desktop. Although Google’s gadgets are technically widgets and they can be used on any website, Google decided to use the term ‘gadget’ to make all of our lives harder :-(

Our 2009 Resolutions

A 'Feedback' forum was setup for members to allow them to post their feedback on any of the last year topics and events. We also added a 'Suggestions' forum to give them an opportunity to discuss topics, ideas or issues.

The IT development team are currently working on linking the Ning Validation Support Network to the University’s HIVE repository where members will be able to hold outputs from validations. Practitioners will be able to search these documents by using criteria, such as subject, which will enable practitioners to learn from previous experiences via a “self-service” approach..


Chris Gray (QIS) started Learning and Teaching Strategy (LST) discussion on VSN. He asserts that LST represents a key element of the programme specification. The strategy should articulate how the course will be delivered, whether this is on-campus, via technology supported learning or in the work-place. He suggests that when designing a new programme course teams must consider the types of teaching, learning methods that will be used. These should reflect the market, aims and outcomes of the award.

Validating Technology Supported learning event

We organised an online event on Technology Supported Learning and Validation on Thursday, 11th December which consisted of two presentations. The first one was led by Glynn Skerratt, principal lecturer from Faculty of Sciences, who has been involved with designing for distance learning with off-campus students for many years. The second one was presented by Barry Wardle & Keith Booles, senior lecturers from Faculty of Health who talked about their experiences using podcasting (audio files) to support enquiry based learning for pre-registration nursing degree and diploma students.

We made the presentations available in a forum on the main page in Ning social network in .wmv and .mp3 format. The idea was to enable the community members to view these presentation prior to the event and note questions so they can ask the presenters on the event day

Glynn, Barry and Keith were available online from 2pm to 4pm on Thursday 11th December to answer members questions in the forum. We provided physical space, both at Stafford and Stoke, so members could get help when they had problems accessing the presentations or the forum on that day. The event is followed by interesting and valuable threads of questions from academics.