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.”
