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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.

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.

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.