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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.