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.