What I learned:

• Many projects start out with an over ambitious scope and have to be adapted to become more realistic
• It can be really hard to secure buy-in and decision-making from senior management, a common cause of project bottlenecks.  People are sometimes appointed to chair project boards because of their seniority, but the  skills required to chair meetings effectively, and drive decision-making, are often underestimated. Tactics to combat this include making efforts to win support by briefing key individuals outside meetings
• Sometimes small changes can be introduced almost  “by stealth”, but real strategic change requires concensus and organisational maturity
• There are risks associated with an over-reliance on technology - we need to be aware of the pitfalls of platforms disappearing and changing, and upgrades and migrations
• If we don’t have time to do justice to the outcomes of consultation exercises and workshops, it might be worth considering delegating some of the analysis to the participants, who might have an interest in resolving issues
• One way for a project leader to draw a line at the end of a project, and extricate themselves, is to foster and empower a community of practice to continue the good work
• When it’s hard to identify obvious indicators to measure progress, consider looking for metrics that reveal inefficiencies – eg how long it takes to find information, how many people are involved in achieving something – and demonstrate how this has changed
• Plan consultation carefully, considering which methods are most effective for what you want to find out and, above all, consider at the outset how you plan to use the results

Thanks also to Sarah for chairing so supportively, and effectively by ensuring that we all agreed to some specific actions. This should ensure the day has practical outcomes that help us move our projects on, rather than being a talking shop or group therapy session, however valuable that might be!

This work is running alongside the legal education and training review (LETR) that is due to publish its report soon. Members of the team have attended a lecture by Professor Richard Susskind OBE who has produced a working paper for the LETR called Provocations and Perspectives.

All the students I met have agreed to try out the e-Portfolio and feed back in some follow-up sessions later on in the project.

The headline findings from the total survey are that 87.6% students love digital technology and 81.5% believe themselves to be digitally literate. This latter figure leads us to conclude that any marketing of sessions focussing on digital literacy will need a more sophisticated hook than ” Come and learn digital literacy” if it is to appeal to this significant majority who believe they already have these skills.

Further finding were encouraging:

• Academic staff were considered digitally literate by 64.9% and support staff got a similar rating by 69.2% of respondents
• 92.3% of respondents consider it important for students to develop digital skills
• 55.9%  agreed with the statement, “The university has the responsibility to equip me with the digital literacy skills I need”

In terms of ownership/access to digital tools:

• 91.6% own a smartphone
• 93.3% have a laptop
• 79% have access to a desktop PC
• 39.1% have a tablet
• 28.4% have an e-reader

For technology based applications the findings were as follows:

• 97.9% use Blackboard
• 85.8% use Skype
• 85.4% use facebook
• 75.8% use iTunes

There were some variations in attitudes by school, for example:

• Students from the Business School agreed significantly more with the statement that it is the University of Westminster’s responsibility to equip them with the digital literacy skills that are required, than did the students affiliated to the School of Law
• Students in the School of Law felt a significantly lower need for training regarding digital literacy than reported by their counterparts from the School of Media, Arts and Design or Business School
• The difference with the highest significance was found with regard to the statement that the digital literacy skills needed in the courses get more complex as students progress through the course. Students from the Business School agreed significantly more with this statement than did students from the School of Law, Social Sciences, Humanities and Languages or Architecture

In addition:

Overall, 95.7% of the participants agreed that using technology is essential to their studies, with 90.0% seeing it as essential for teaching and 90.6% regarding it as essential for learning. In terms of assessment, only 5.6% of the participants regarded the use of technology as not being essential.

Approximately 56% of the participants agreed that, in their opinion, most students like to engage with learning material while travelling and 81.9% use their laptops for study/all aspects of their life whilst only 1.6% use their smartphone for study.

We have yet to fully digest the figures and share them more widely with our colleagues both in the Schools and in Corporate Services but we hope they will contribute to a clearer understanding of our students’ current  use of technology alongside their understanding of and attitudes to digital skills. The findings will also feed into wider university work such as the Learning Futures project.

On March 21st we are hosting an event of workshops and seminars for students that will further explore the link between digital skills and employability. The marketing plans for this event will draw on some of the questionnaire findings.

The Unified Corporate Communications Policy became a very long document and it was agreed to strip it down to a basic policy with a separate guidance and best practice document.

Following the catch up with the critical friend, it was noted that the impact measures of NSS scores, retention, etc would not be relevant until the next round of NSS.  Therefore to collect some initial feedback the critical friend suggested collecting staff stories of how they used the information to improve services to students and the experience of getting that information during the year.

Their experiences shared confirmed our feeling that it can be a real challenge finding a common language for effective communication between IT, Information Management and people working in the business units.

Applying Enterprise Architecture involves taking a more holistic approach to connecting people, processes and technology than earlier business re-engineering models might have done. It can usefully “wrap around” other disciplines and methodologies.

One participant asked how it relates to Action Research (a form of self-reflective enquiry undertaken by a community of practice to improve the way issues are addressed and problems solved, involving active participation in organizational change). The answer suggested that Action Research could almost be considered a lightweight version of Enterprise Architecture.

There was some discussion about which tools people found useful. Staffordshire found the CETIS Archimate modelling tool http://archi.cetis.ac.uk/ preferable to Visio, liking the way its flexibility enabled them to tailor presentations to different audiences, to convey messages in a professional way that boosted credibility. Someone else found the Ketso Creativity Kit was good for generating ideas, identifying problems and priorities http://www.ketso.com/learn-about-ketso. Another participant used the Moodle Virtual Learning Environment to bring 40 individuals together.

Whilst diagrams have a role in cutting across the silos that can develop, forming barriers between IT, Information Management and the business, we are all keen to bring about actual change rather than just keep mapping things.

Sadly, there are no magic answers. It was acknowledged that raising awareness – and the professionalization of process review – is a long game!

Thanks to Andy Stewart and everyone else involved for a stimulating session.

EPISA networking event: ‘Impacting on future talent’

It was decided to develop and deliver a networking event at the end of February 2013. The focus of this event was very much about the idea of getting businesses involved in student learning activities and assessment.

 [click the logo to enlarge]

Opportunities for engagement model

A framework model was discussed and developed that outlined 4 scenarios (opportunities)  in which businesses could engage with the business school.  The important dimensions of  ’Commitment’ and ‘Impact’ were identified, as these were suggested as the 2 key areas that would influence business involvement. Through defining 4 opportunities we have an opportunity to provide examples and raise interest; showing was is possible.

 [click the matrix to enlarge]

Moving forward

A draft outline of the event has now been produced and the EPISA team are now gearing up to resourcing and finalizing the event:

• Inviting participants: including key note speaker and presenter
• Visiting the event location
• Resourcing the event
• Producing literature for the event
• Finalizing the process for developing a partnership with interested parties

The TSAP team have discussed this with senior management and this has contributed to a real recognition of the issues within our organisation. Whilst this could be considered as an achievement in itself – it’s also been extrapolated to other areas of the business outside of the School Admin Teams. We have just seen the appointment of a Chief Operating Officer at UCLan;  a Directorate level post with line management for many of the central services. This new post will review how the Services support the Schools and streamline processes, to ensure School Admin Teams do not have to have long and protracted conversations with one or more services to get things done.

The new COO has already adopted the business process review methodology we have been using in TSAP together with picking up a number of the ideas from the JISC research we have been using, e.g. the productive department checklist from the Working with IT project.

This is a real example of what the transformations projects are all about – a relatively small sum of money being used to instigate real change in the business.

 Things to report include…

 UoL RDM @ IDCC8
… or to put it another way, the University was represented at the recent International Data Curation Conference in Amsterdam.  Jonathan Tedds took along our RDM poster to be included in poster presentations there and was happy to report that it was judged by attendees as number 3 amongst approximately 50 posters from around the world – http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/idcc13/posters-and-demonstrations.  The poster features the question “What would you do if you lost your research data tomorrow?” as featured on our website and leaflets.

“RDM User Group” Launch
On 22 January we held a launch event for what may or may not henceforth be called an “RDM User Group”.  In other words we invited researchers from across the University to attend an afternoon of presentations by internal and external speakers to look at the broad RDM context and what is happening here at Leicester.  This is with a view to creating an on-going relationship and communications channel with and between all Departments and corporate functions that have a concern for RDM issues.

We were very pleased with the turnout from the University, and many thanks to Veerle Van den Eyden (UK Data Archive – “Best Practice in Research Data Management for Data Sharing”) and Alex Ball (UKOLN, University of Bath – “Tackling Challenges in Research Data Management”) for making it from long distance across the snowy wastes to Leicester. Importantly I can report that the sandwiches were really good.

RDM Sustainability
Like many other institutions we are currently considering long-term sustainability of RDM improvement efforts, and defining and implementing an RDM Support Service.  As and when progress is made I will post information.

Since then, work has been at a rapid pace. Doing Digital never far from our thoughts and it weaves its way through many of the activities curently on-going.

In our original remit we were planning to focus our project on “Workflow” and its usage and “More On-line Assessment”.  As we enter the “Implemetation” phase of our project, the project team felt a need to review this statement as we chose our “Pilot” Group.

In the pass few months, there have been wide consultation with stakeholder groups. Not purely with a “Doing Digital” focus, but by default looking at IT and related strategy. These meetings had obtained a raft of feedback  and a strong message from users was the need to undersatnd “the big picture”. Success in “Doing Digital” is in a large part dependant on users understanding how things fit together  and the domino effect that their interaction with various bits of the system can have.

Looking back at a previous post, with the help of our mentor David, we stated our outcomes. With the feedback we have received we can review these:

Intended Outcome 1 – Benchmarks – Answers to “How far do staff currently make effective use of IT for University processes?”

- Based on the feedback we can see that use of IT can be far more effective IF the user understands the big picture.

Intended Outcome 2 – Staff relate their own work to bigger University systems and processes.

- The better they can understand this, the more effective they can be.

Intended Outcome 3 – A clear, accepted and evolving account of what Doing Digital means.

- This in some ways has been the hardest bit. “Doing Digital” can apply, by definition, to a wide ranging set of activities. Bu identifying a pilot group we can firm up a methodology that can be applied to the various applications.

Intended Outcome 4 – Proven strategies and methods for getting from baseline to goal.

- This is the outcome we hope to achieve with the identified pilot group.

Intended Outcome 5 – Staff make effective use of IT for University processes.

- As stated in the previous posts. Our ultimate aim.

The pilot group has been identified as the “SIS Stabilisation Project” – this is a project focused on tuning the operations of our new Student Information System to better support core processes, to encourage acceptance by the user community and promote effective interaction with it. An essential element of this, which has been clear from various workshops as referenced above, is the need to understand how the system supports the entire student lifecycle, rather than just the silo within which an individual might operate.  It is hoped that as this is a project that is strategically important to the University it will will have a visibility  that will support the successful achievement of the “Doing Digital” project.

We still have some tidying up to do – particularly writing up the analysis done about quality assurance of source data and change control over models. We also need to produce our final data models for the warehouse staging area.

The bad news is that the message has not got through to all stakeholders that what the institution ‘needs’ is not a report writer, and that the project will be providing something far more valuable – a robust data warehouse that will all end users to safely and accurately produce reports that are consistent and meaningful, and ultimately we will be satisfying the need to report on all institutional KPIs – not just one or two. Clearly we have a communications activity that we need to put our energies into.

Collection of data from our early adopters is due to start in February and a form has been provided for them to record their findings based on a simple cycle of tasks: Updating their timetable each day, checking that they can access each timetabled activity and reporting any errors or difficulties. My Timetable Journal DRAFT A2

In term sof the backend the system is now stable, and daily cloning of the main timetabling system into the new front end is operating smoothly.

The organisation of meetings has hit a slight snag.  Microsoft have announced that in SharePoint 2013 they will not be using meeting spaces, which the project has based its processes around.  The overall ethos of the process and recommendations are still sound, however it does highlight an issue with the reliance on technology.  This has triggered several discussions with the project and the Digital Services Team who are responsible for SharePoint.  These discussions have focuses on the challenges the university has faced migrating from SP 2007 to SP 2010, particularly with solutions that have been developed internally.  While some basic solutions developed will transfer with little issue, any solutions with coding will not migrate.

Therefore the approach is to try to meet the needs of the business with the functionality available on SharePoint out of the box and only if there is a significant and justifiable business need, will bespoke solutions be considered.   The SP Operational group are also considering the value of updating to the latest version of SP each time it is released.  The challenges not updating presents are the University’s policy is to have the latest up to date version of software to ensure students have  access to the most up to date software for employability purposes.

However, if we chose to not to update to the latest version of SharePoint then there could be potential issues with the integration with other MS Office packages such as word and excel.  There are also discussions as to whether there could be separate images for staff and students, however this poses the challenge for people who are both.

The project is now looking into alternative solutions to the meeting workspaces.

Action: Review Project Board Roles

The project recognises that there may need to be some flexibility in the roles and structure of the project board depending on the size and nature of the project.  However, it is clear that the roles should be clarified and agreed to at the start of the project so all involved are aware of their responsibilities.  A template for a Project Board Charter and a Project Team Charter have been created.  This template includes the Terms of Reference for the Project Board , the suggested roles, the position (level, responsibility and area of the business) of the member of staff that should fill that role and their responsibilities.   A similar Project  Team Charter has also been created with the recommendation that the team should represent the Project Board at an operational level.

Action: Change Management, Communications Policies

It was noted when looking at change management and communication strategies that it was not possible to have one without the other and there was also a lot of cross over between the two with benefits realisation and stakeholder mapping.  Therefore a new template was created that takes the project manager through a series of stages that enable them to develop an effective change management and communication policy.

These stages are;

Phase one: Initial Analysis – this stage of the process considers the high level stakeholders and the potential benefits and impact of the project.  It is intended to be an initial consideration of the project deliverables  and the intended benefits.  This stage uses the e3 Benefits grid.

Phase two: Communication Strategy

The initial analysis identifies the stakeholders and the plan of how the project should be communication to them can start to form this is table based and considered; the stakeholder, their required involvement in the project, how the deliverables will affect them, the key messages they need to receive and the method with rough timings.

Phase three: Benefits Mapping

Once the project manager has considered the benefits to the stakeholders, and has identified the high level benefits of the project in the PID, it is time to tie them up with a benefits map.  This is a useful exercise to undertake with the Project Board or key stakeholders in the project to really focus them on the benefits of the project deliverables rather than the project itself.  Benefits mapping as presented by Niki Rogers at the EA workshops is used at this stage.  The intent is to link the deliverables from the project to the interim / immediate benefits through to the end benefits and ultimately the strategic objectives.

Phase four:  Change management strategy

This was influenced by the JISC InfoNet Chanage Manage workshop the project manager attended. Project outputs often impact a range of staff across the institution, requiring their involvement from strategic leadership to operational engagement.   Effective change management can ensure that buy-in is secured from relevant stakeholders to achieve successful delivery and implementation of project outputs.  The impact of the people’s attitudes and behaviour on projects, their deliverables and on-going benefits should not be underestimated.

This document should be used to plan a change management strategy, to be implemented and refined throughout a project’s lifecycle to help achieve successful delivery.

 Successful change management requires an understanding of a project’s stakeholders beyond high level impact or involvement required.  In addition it is important to be aware that people in a group of stakeholders are likely to react differently to a project and it is important to consider the roles within the stakeholder group, for example within the “academics” group there are course leaders, Principle Lecturers, Lecturers, Ad Hoc Lecturers who may need to be considered separately.  You may also find that you need to consider individuals as the project progresses, particularly when if they are a key influencer or have the potential to be a champion.

When analysing stakeholders, a project should consider;

• Who are the influencers and who they influence
• What reaction individuals are likely to have to the change
• What barriers might there be to individuals buying into the change
• How can those barriers be addressed
• What benefits will there be to the individual – not just the benefits to the university
• What activities may be required to secure buy-in
• Identify if there are any groups that are likely to produce a change champion

A table sis used to capture the stakeholder, how they can be influenced, who they influence, what barriers they might perceive to engaging, if any individuals should be targeted and potential activities.

In addition the template includes a table for capturing potential change champions throughout the project.

Phase five: Communication and Change Management Plan

This is the key section of the document and is an amalgamation of the information captured in the phases above.  It is suggested that project managers may wish to embed this in their MS Project plan rather than a separate table.   The table includes timing, activity, key message, target audience and who the task is assigned to.

In addition recommendations are being made as to the layout and content of project sites on the intranet to ensure consistent communication about the project.

Action: Project Close down

New documents have been developed outlining the requirements for owners of project deliverables and their responsibilities.

In addition to the actions above a new process is being introduced for the new round of strategic projects that are just starting.  This is a gate process and outlines requirements the projects have to meet to progress through each gate.

These documents are subject to approval from the board but will be released with the project outputs.

We spent a lot of time in this session talking about ensuring our projects are sustainable, that they have an impact that goes beyond the life of the project and that they become part of what your Institution does in the long term. In fact when I first started this project my biggest concern was how I could turn a relatively small project into real institutional change. I’ve been lucky however in that my work has coincided with two things: the design of a brand new Coventry University, designed to be much more social and the arrival of our new Marketing & Communications Director, who is very keen to make the University a leader in social media. This project is of course about business engagement which is not the same thing as marketing but it’s encouraging to see the University dedicating more resource to supporting social media – this makes me very optimistic that my work will have a life beyond the end of this project.

We also spent a bit of time talking about some of the outcomes we have to deliver as part of our funding agreements with Jisc – both a written and a video case study. I have to admit I haven’t spent much time thinking about either so far which means my key actions from this Action Learning Set are as follows:

• Start working on written case study template as provided by Jisc
• Begin planning video case study, including thinking about other people who could participate

I also want to continue to think about ensuring the sustainability of the project by getting other members of our business development staff involved with using social media to engage with businesses. We also briefly discussed social media policies and whether they need to be tailored to suit specific activities so this will be something I take forwards as we start to use social media in a business context.

JISC EA presentation

Feedback was provided in two ways. Firstly by completion of a short questionnaire asking three questions:

1. What was good about the tool?
2. How can the tool be improved?
3. Did you find any aspects of the tool not working or appear confusing?

Secondly by a face to face meeting that enabled colleagues expand on comments made in the questionnaire.

Overall feedback has been very positive, with all involved believing the eSAM tool provided a range of appropriate functionality for submission, marking, feedback provision and management of assignments. A small number of technical faults were discovered, though a number of these relate to the SITS integration that was not used for the pilot. No major functionality issues identified and all able to use the tool once became familiar with a technology reviewers had not previously used.

A number of enhancements to the tool were suggested, including:

•  A student guide to file conversion
• Any file type option
• The ability to extract information about student groups from Timetabling software when allocating markers
• Formative assessment has ‘feedback only’ option
• Extension detail confidentiality message
• The ability to block Late Approved submissions when  supporting evidence has not been submitted
• Marking scheme same as SITS, no decimals or 9s for summative assessments
• Marker & Faculty Office e-mail alert when mark submission due date imminent
• The error messages to contain an explanation of the fault plus guidance on solution/help

Not only did all concerned provide positive feedback, but also expressed the opinion that both technical development work and staff/student preparation should continue with a view to conducting initial pilot work in 2012/13 and then more extensive use of the eSAM tool in September 2013 onwards.

• Overview and objectives of the project, review of services’ and service requirements
• Breakout groups on defining generic cross service sub processes
• Future Process / Vision

 Some important key points and themes were formulated and presented in the last session:

• Full integration of elements delivered by separate services is possible
• Keeping a Personal feeling in delivery of services is important
• Requirements surrounding confidentiality and visibility of information is complex and needs to be service specific
• Many Services might benefit from the reduction in manual data inputting
• Improved Management Information will further benefit all services

 These key points and themes are the basis for the future requirements. The outputs from the workshops will form the future requirements used to procure the new system.

Applications Process

To date, this group have achieved the following:

• Mapped the orginal process on paper
• Mapped the process digitally
• Agreed on elements for enhancement
• Invited the Admissions Team Leader to review the proposed enhancements
• Remapped the process digitally following further adjustments.

The process has now been modified and has evolved from being a predominantly manual administrative process to a virtually online process.  This has been made possible by incorporating application and interview details for prospective students in the SITS Student Database and then running a report through Microsoft Reporting Services that sends a weekly email to all those involved in student recruitment to allow them to view current application and recruitment data.  It is then possible for those involoved to enter data, via an online portal, to indicate success of application, and associated information, which is captured and imported into the student database automatically.

Following this change, all those administrators and academics involved with interviewing and processing applications for prospective students have undertaken training.

The following documents were used in the training, to provide a simple explanation of the old and new process.

Course outline

Interviewing/Application Process 2013-14

Activities associated with applications and interviewing

Mitigating Circumstances Process

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Exam Board Process

To date, this group have achieved the following:

• Mapped the orginal process on paper
• Mapped the process digitally
• Agreed on elements for enhancement

The work of this action research group can not be concluded at this time, as their proposals involved potential modifications to the database software used to display and record exam board activities and this was not seen as a business critical area for review at this time.   Another contributing factor that has caused the research to be halted is the changing positions and roles of the identified stakeholders due to restructuring activities.

The design requirements phase of Killawhats is complete after a rigorous analysis of the large corpus of design challenge data using a thematic analysis approach. The design data was produced by participants in workshops, focus groups, interviews and surveys by over 100 students. Quality of the work produced was excellent and really helped to focus the requirements for the Killawhats intervention. Some examples of participant’s paper-prototyping sessions are below:

Our findings from the thematic analysis formed the basis of an academic paper and poster we submitted to the CHI2013 conference to be held this April in Paris. Abstract of the paper:

“Interventions that aim to motivate students in halls of residence to engage in more eco-friendly behaviour face a number of unique problems. Specifically, a large portion of university accommodation provides utilities such as electricity, water and gas at fixed cost as part of tenancy contracts. In the absence of financial motivators, energy interventions for special groups such as students require a stronger focus on participatory and experience design to understand the design implications of successful technology-led energy interventions. This work presents the findings of a thematic analysis drawn from a large corpus of qualitative design challenge data including focus groups, questionnaires and interviews. Findings provided design insights for developing ‘cool’ and engaging energy interventions for students.”

The paper is currently under peer review; if you want to read the draft version of the paper in full then please download from here. The main findings of the paper provided us with four main design guidelines with eleven sub-themes, on which to base the Killawhats intervention trials on, see diagram below:

Smart Meters

Our smart meter infrastructure on the Lincoln campus underwent a large refurbishment program throughout December and is due to go live any day now. There are residual issues with smart meter data reporting at the moment but this should be resolved imminently. As soon as we have reliable data from the smart meters we will be moving to the intervention trial stage of the project.

In terms of social media I have a plan of action for both Twitter and LinkedIn, in both instances using the University’s existing official accounts to start to engage more business followers. I’m going to start actually adding content from next week, primarily using Twitter in the first instance and then moving on to LinkedIn as this is part of a larger strategy being developed by our marketing department.

Watch this space for further developments!

Watch this space for feedback from both students and employers!

The time has now come to begin creating detailed guidance and procedures for our archive depositors, both present and future, who wish to give us digital material. During the next three or four months we will be creating:

Revised donation and deposit agreements for archive material. These are the standard agreements signed by anyone that gives us their archive, which will now have to incorporate clauses relating to the ownership and preservation of, and access to, digital materials.

An additional guideline document for depositors with regard to their digital archives, which will include: initial questions and considerations around issues such as size, format, hardware and software; actions to undertake before the material can pass to the archive; and an outline of what the Institute of Education will be able to take.

A step-by-step procedural document for the intake and processing of digital materials by archive staff – in other words, the workflow for taking them into the Archive.

A metadata template to give to depositors incorporating all the fields the archivists need to add digital materials to CALM and e-prints.

Naming convention and version control guidance for depositors.

As a final output, the Archive team hope to write a detailed LibGuide containing all the information required by potential depositors when they give us their paper, hybrid and digital archive collections.

It all sounds like a lot of hard work and no doubt the documents will be revised and altered many times in the weeks and months to come, but it really feels like the JISC Transformations project will result in a fantastic set of guidelines and best practice. We’ll keep you posted.

SLAP – used a similar methodology to TSAP. Of particular interest was the ESIA  approach – eliminate waste, simplify, integrate (reduce hand off/move decision points earlier),automate – which has been used to inform our workshop design. The success of SLAP was that it did not focus on technology alone, instead triangulated technology, process and people. We learned from that and used it to re-engineer our methodology for large-scale IT project developments and also to inform our development of a consistent approach to business process review across the organisation.

Cascade – key points that we have found in our own project:
• Identifying where technology does not add value is as important as identifying where it does
• Technological innovation can be a catalysts for wider change
• Influencing involving and engaging the right people is one of the most important factors to success or failure
• Reducing costs by increasing efficiency can also improve quality of service
• Despite seeming tangential to mainstream teaching and learning, administrative process reviews should not be overlooked as they are significant factors in student satisfaction and retention
• Staff are more open to using technology than ever before but need support to capitalise on this

Service Design – We took special care in our workshops to put students at the centre of everything we did. We have carefully shaped our As Is and To Be phases to take the Service Design principles in to account:
• Identify student journey throughout a service process
• Detail each touch point (front and backstage) known as blueprinting
• Identify fail points, excessive wait times etc
• Prioritise  fail points/ewt to identify where focus should be invested in improvement
• Process enhancement plan, implementation and monitoring

Role Landscape Study
• The vast majority of functions are generic across HEIs e.g. admit student, develop T&L strategy etc
• Enables accurate process mapping for change management projects
• The importance of maintaining a library of business processes that show inter-relationships

JISC Infonet – Process Improvement
The InfoKit on process review has been really useful when working with the School admin staff themselves. Especially in creating the right mind set at the start of the project e.g.
•    Do it once
•    Do it right
•    Do it quickly
•    Keep it simple
•    Trust me
•    I am accountable
The information and data needs tick-list for business analysts has also proved invaluable.

The Working with IT/Embedding Working with IT projects and the JISC InfoNet on change management were also extremely helpful and we’ll talk more about them in a future post.

The key message from the survey results so far is that 85% our student respondents believe themselves to be digitally literate already.  This  in turn presents us with further questions: are they as digitally literate as they think they are or do we still have work to do? If the latter, how do we persuade our students to engage in digital literacy activities to hone these skills, when they think thay already have them?

The Project Board also agreed to delve a bit deeper into the questionaire findings by hosting some focus groups and shortly before Christmas I spoke to colleagues in the Psychology department about organising these. Time will be tight to recruit students (our job) in time to get results (their job) that can feed into other elements of the work.

In the meantime the Delivery Group is planning the DigitISE Day, where we hope to attract students to a series of workshops linking digital literacy with employability skills. The programme includes the following sessions:

• Facebook and LinkedIn for job seeking
• An employer talks
• Managing your online reputation/e-identity
• Online tools
• Researching companies online
• IT training opportunities
• Panel discussion

although we have yet to set a date for this event, complicated by an early Easter straddled by term time and a lack of consensus from academics we have consulted. The decision needs to be made soon to ensure proper marketing and publicity around the day.

So at this point in the project there are a number of plates spinning: completing the survey and disseminating findings to other colleagues; organising focus groups to delve deeper into some of the themes; planning the marketing and publicity for the DigitISE day and identifying and booking speakers that will draw an audience of undergraduates.

Introduction (continued)

Why Mobile Learning?

“Looking at mobile learning in a wider context, we have to recognize that mobile, personal, and wireless devices are now radically transforming societal notions of discourse and knowledge, and are responsible for new forms of art, employment, language, commerce, deprivation, and crime, as well as learning.” (Traxler, 2009)

Although Traxler rightly points out negative products of mobile device use, his key point of ‘transforming societal notions of discourse and knowledge’ reveals why educational institutions must incorporate these notions if they are to remain relevant.

Tangible Benefits

A very useful list of measurable mobile learning benefits is proposed in the infoKit. I mark each benefit we saw in the DUCKLING e-book reader study, and benefits we are seeing in Places tablet PC studies:

1. Personal, private and familiar – the ‘personalness’ reduces the sense of obstacles to learning -DUCKLING, Places
2. Pervasive and ubiquitous - DUCKLING, Places
3. Fitting into the lives of learners – allowing user to make use of even spare 10 minutes – DUCKLING, Places
4. Portable – enabling learning in any place and at any time – DUCKLING, Places
5. Immediacy of communication – Places
6. Bringing learning to those in remote or isolated areas – DUCKLING, Places
7. Location-aware contextualisation – GPS capability
8. Immediate capture of data and learning processes – camera, video, sound recording, text input – Places
9. On-the-move access to tutors and peers- Places
10. Learners can receive reminders and chasers – Places?
11. Bite-sized resources – helpful when learning skills or on-the-job – DUCKLING, Places
12. Abstract and concrete knowledge can be integrated – Places
13. Peer-to-peer network fosters student-centred learning – Places
14. Promotes active learning – Places
15. Enables new learning environments
16. Accessibility – DUCKLING, Places
17. Enables reflection close to the learning event (in both time and place) – Places?
18. Reduces technical barriers to e-learning- DUCKLING, Places

Now that I’m considering the DUCKLING use of simple e-book readers by busy distance masters students, and the Places use (also by busy distance masters students) of the iPad with the bespoke app containing multimedia learning materials, I see that in both, the main use of the device is to serve to the students learning materials created by instructors, and the main intended benefit that they can carry around all of this learning material and study it anytime, anywhere. No communication was possible using the e-book reader, but of course it is possible with the iPad. With the iPad, students are encouraged to use Twitter to keep in touch with their tutor, and to use discussion boards to discuss with tutor and peers. Knowledge creation or capture using the iPad was not exactly designed into the course; however, students are reporting new study strategies they are developing with new apps they discover, such as a mind-mapping tool and Evernote for storing notes in the cloud.

I wrote ‘Places?’ next to those benefits which are possible with the iPad, but for which I have not yet seen evidence from the students.

There are a couple of other examples of mobile learning which deliver obvious benefits but which fall outside of my two projects, which I’d like to note. One is the use of mobiles as a field notebook; for example, students are walking around, observing plants, taking photos, making notes, measuring, comparing, filming live action. They might be storing this data only on their own devices, or they could be saving everything to a central location in the cloud. This corresponds to benefits 7, 8, 12, 14, 15, 17, and 18.

The other notable example is the use of iPhones at University of Leeds medical school (Apple, 2011). 4th and 5th year medical students are loaned iPhones which are loaded with many key medical and pharmaceutical texts, as well as medical apps, so that right in the clinic they may check references, note issues arising, and use many other useful medical apps, with an iPhone which is more hygenic for being on the wards than is a traditional notebook. I would say this use demonstrates every benefit in the list except possibly number 6.

Have you encountered other tangible benefits of mobile use not in the above list? Leave a comment!

Terese Bird, Learning Technologist, University of Leicester

Apple. (2011). Apple (United Kingdom) – Education – Profiles – Leeds School of Medicine changes learning culture with work-based iPhones. Apple Education Case studies. Retrieved January 6, 2013, from http://www.apple.com/uk/education/profiles/leeds-uni/

Traxler, J. (2009). Current State of Mobile Learning. (M. Ally, Ed.)Mobile Learning Transforming the Delivery of Education and Training, 5(2), 9–24. Retrieved from http://www.aupress.ca/books/120155/ebook/01_Mohamed_Ally_2009-Article1.pdf

RDM Update and Review of JISC Tools to support Research Data Management at York

General Project Progress

Use of JISC Tools

•  Online Promotion of Research Expertise: Looks to be a useful tool for promoting research work, particularly to business and community. However, our project is very much focussed on RDM at the moment, so this looks to be outside the scope of our current work.
•  Research Information Management InfoKit: This tool looks at the entire support for research within an organisation. Again, this is something that may be helpful for us to look at, but is outside of our current scope.
•  Strategic ICT Toolkit: We field tested this toolkit last year, which provided a useful reflection on our strategic maturity. We may consider using the toolkit again after the RDM project (and after the renewal of our Information Strategy) to get a comparison of progress in this area.
• Sustaining & Embedding Innovations: This project looks to have some interesting models for embedding innovations. It may be something we will consider when we have more developed RDM services to offer to the University.
• DRAMBORA– This tool audits digital repositories. Again, it looks to be useful but slightly out of the scope of our work given that we are at the early stages of addressing research data management.

The JISC Mobile Learning InfoKit was launched at ALT-C 2011. It was created as a guide for institutions considering the implementation of mobile learning initiatives, especially implementations that are policy-led and sustainable.

This is the first in a series of posts serving as my notebook on this excellent resource, including my thoughts as a result of the 18 months of mobile learning development which have ensued since the launch of the InfoKit, as well as my thoughts as a result of working on the Places project, evaluating mobile learning at the University of Leicester.
I. Overview
“A society which is mobile, which is full of channels for the distribution of a change occurring anywhere, must see to it that its members are educated to personal initiative and adaptability.” (Dewey, 1916)

The key consideration in any mobile learning initiative is the learner. Any institution or individual considering mobile learning should continue to return to questions about benefits to the learner. Gaining feedback from learners is key, as is considering context.

What is mobile learning?

Mobile learning is both a ‘trojan horse’ and a vehicle for exploring the changing nature of learning in a connected age.

Mike Sharples: “the processes (both personal and public) of coming to know through exploration and conversation across multiple contexts amongst people and interactive technologies.” (Sharples, Taylor, & Vavoula, 2005)

Agnes Kukulska-Hulme: “…mobility is the central issue (Winters, 2006). This denotes not just physical mobility but the opportunity to overcome physical constraints by having access to people and digital learning resources, regardless of place and time.” (Kukulska-Hulme, 2010)

MoLeNET: “exploitation of ubiquitous handheld hardware, wireless networking and mobile telephony to facilitate, support, enhance and extend the reach of teaching and learning.” (TribalGroup, 2009)

The one question I have with each one of these defintions is that I wonder if they give enough weight to the older and less sophisticated forms of mobile learning, for example the simple consumption of educational podcasts from an mp3 player. Remember that this was the big new idea which encouraged Duke University to give out iPods to each of its first year students back in 2004 (Joly, 2005) and this was arguably the catalyst for both the proliferation of captured lectures and (not so arguably) the creation of iTunes U. I can say that each of the above definitions does include this form of mobile learning. Yet because mobile learning has so quickly moved to including wireless connectivity with an infinite number of resources and other people, that I think the simple advantage of having learning materials in the palm of one’s hand, for one to spend time on without discussion or interaction, may be regarded as lesser or outdated or even a bad model. I don’t think it is a bad model because it is similar to the simple act of reading a paper book. Indeed, many e-readers sold today are still simple vehicles of e-book delivery and presentation, and do not excel at or even offer interactivity with other materials or people. This is important to consider for our current Places project, because Places studies the use in a University of Leicester programme of tablet PCs which were chosen to essentially serve multimedia learning materials and for which connectivity to other users was an important but secondary consideration when shaping the programme. Also, this project is an outgrowth of a previous project, DUCKLING, in which distance masters students received simple, non-networked ebook readers loaded with instructor-created learning material. It is indeed necessary that mobile learning has moved on to include connectivity to resources and people in the palm of one’s hand, but also I do not want to overlook these other original benefits of mobile learning.

——

Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (p. 434). MacMillan.
Joly, K. (2005). Duke University iPod first-year experience: So, was it worth it? | collegewebeditor.com. College Web Editor website. Retrieved August 19, 2011, from http://collegewebeditor.com/blog/index.php/archives/2005/06/16/duke-university-ipod-first-year-experience-so-was-it-worth-it/
Kukulska-Hulme, A. (2010). Mobile learning as a catalyst for change. Open Learning The Journal of Open and Distance Learning, 25(3), 181–185. Retrieved from http://oro.open.ac.uk/23773/1/Open_Learning_editorial_(Accepted_Manuscript).doc
Sharples, M., Taylor, J., & Vavoula, G. (2005). Towards a Theory of Mobile Learning. Mind, 1(1), 1–9.
TribalGroup. (2009). Mobile Learning Network (MoLeNET). Molenet Project Website. Retrieved October 8, 2012, from http://www.m-learning.org/case-studies/molenet-

Terese Bird, Learning Technologist, University of Leicester

The first webinar is on 8th February and will be give by Fred Motson, School of Law. The title of his talk is: Improving communication with students – texting, tweeting and podcasting.

So far the webinar series has ‘lined up’ 7 internal speakers and 2 external speakers.

The Blended Learning group at the event totalled 12 and 6 of these are members of the Flexilearn Group. This group of staff will now take forward the work started at the first event in 2 change academy meetings which will take place in February/March 2013. The work of the Flexilearn project, through the membership of the Learning Future’s Blended Learning Group, is well represented in this very significant strategic initiative.

Before UCLan restructured its central Services (three years ago) each Faculty had a set of Technicians who did whatever was required for the Schools within their faculty structure. Following the centralisation of Technicians, whilst we have seen significant benefit in the strategic management of resources and space, we have received complaints about the Technicians no longer being available to help School Admin Teams move furniture, set up pcs and help with office moves etc.

The TSAP methodology has been usefully employed in this scenario. Rather than just agreeing to send Technicians to help with office moves we have evaluated the requirements properly, undertaking an As Is and To Be workshop – involving School Admin Teams, Technicians and the university’s Facilities Management Service. Through this we have established that our Technical Services Teams should be focussing their time on technical work requiring high-skill level e.g. managing a lab/workshop and School Admin Teams should be focussing their time on managing but not undertaking the move, which should be assisted by Facilities Management.

Instead of just putting a sticking plaster over the problem, we have gone back to first principles and identified where office move responsibility should really lie – in this case with Facilities Management. Of course it is never quite as simple as that because an office move may well require help from the Telecoms team to move extensions, from Technicians if specialist equipment needs moving etc. As such we have agreed to develop an office move task list (in SharePoint) which will show the person managing the move what support is available and if that section is completed on the form, will automatically create a task for the relevant team to deal with.

This process has raised a number of other questions relating to the core role of a Technician. These are so important to the university that a full-scale project has been implemented to review how technical services are managed, funded and supported across the entire organisation. Another example of small-scale changes generating larger transformation within the organisation

The Project Management Team has overarching control over the project and oversees the work of the various sub-groups. The team consists of the following people:

• Dr Simone Clarke,  Director of Planning and Academic Administration (SAM Project Lead and Co-Chair of the Technical Group)
• Professor Marilyn Andrews, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Education and Student Experience (Academic Lead and Senior User)
• Claire Appleby, Director of Human Resources, Organisational Development and Student Support (Senior User and Chair of the Organisational Development Group)
• Ian Munton, Head of Student Support and Development Services (Senior Supplier and Chair of the Stakeholder Group)
• Luke Bracegirdle, IT Development Director (Senior Supplier and Co-Chair of the Technical Group)
• Kelly Montana-Williams, Planning and Project Officer (SAM Project Manager and Chair of the Student Group)

The Project Management team is also supported by our ITF project mentor, Andy Shenstone of Capita Consulting, and by Brian Hipkin, Vice-Chair of AMOSSHE and Dean of Students, Regent’s College London.

The Stakeholder Group consists of various members of University staff from key student-facing services across the institution. The group works alongside the Student Group to agree the questions and answers for SAM, streamline the end user experience and review and test the pilot.

The Student Group will work alongside the Stakeholder group to prioritise questions for SAM and agree the text for the answers. The group is made up of a variety of students from across all three faculties at Keele and it represents the diverse nature of students.

Both the Stakeholder and Student Groups are supported in their work by subject experts, as appropriate, as well as our HEI partners, in particular staff, students, and experts from Staffordshire University.

The Technical Group oversees the technical development of SAM, including the visual environment and the animation. The group consists of staff whose work relates directly with SAM, as well as staff from our Website Design Team and members of our IT department. They ensure that SAM looks and feels as ‘real’ as possible and is able to communicate information in a way which is accessible to all.

The Organisational Development Group reviews what impact SAM has on the staff ‘on the ground’ in the existing physical services at Keele and will undertake business process review in support of the project.

Below is a copy of the presentation, which aims to provide some further background information about the development of, and inspiration for, SAM, the challenges we already face with the project, and how we envisage taking the project forward over the next two years.

SAM ITF Presentation

• What was good about eSAM tool?
• How can eSAM tool be improved?
• Did any aspects of eSAM not work or appear confusing?

A deadline for feedback has been set at 11th January and we all meet again on 16th January to share thoughts about the eSAM tool.

The development team were then able to use this specification to create some realistic designs for the mobile induction which we were then able to bring into usability testing with students. The results of the usability testing will be described in a future post.

Some of the key thoughts which came out of the session were as follows:

• LinkedIn is the best social networking site for developing business relationships. Facebook is seen very much as a non-business site
• Twitter is a good tool for marketing activity, particularly raising awareness and advertising events but it was seen as quite superficial
• It is important to link your printed media to your social media presence and/or your website e.g. via QR codes or Augmented Reality tools such as Aurasma
• Coventry University’s current social media is very student focused and not useful for business contacts
• It is important to develop a clear strategy for social media activity that can be reviewed and updated regularly
• Internal communications are also really important for large organisations – social media aggregation sites such as Yammer can be helpful here
• Social networking is about the individual – it is important to have a balance between “corporate” accounts and real people. People like the personal touch and good personal accounts can reflect well on the organisation as a whole

The session reaffirmed a lot of the thoughts I’d had following my benchmarking exercise – particularly that our social media is too student focused and that we need to be targeting business engagement activity to key social networks such as LinkedIn and Twitter. However it was also thought provoking, offering avenues I hadn’t previously thought about such as managing internal communications and encouraging individual engagement. In addition the group were really keen to stay engaged, offering to get involved in any future focus groups and suggesting we set up a networking group on LinkedIn to keep in touch and share best practice.

Moving into the New Year the focus of the project is very much going to be about actually using social media and seeing how we get on. I have already commissioned some hard copy marketing materials that embed interactive elements such as QR codes and Augmented Reality so these should be ready for us to use sometime in January. In addition, I’m planning to work closely with the University’s Marketing Department to get a business-facing Twitter account and LinkedIn page not only set up but integrated with our new website which will be a huge step forwards. I’m also going to take forward the recommendations of the focus group by getting involved with Yammer and setting up a networking group on LinkedIn to keep discussion going.  In the meantime, my academic colleagues are going to be conducting a survey which follows up from the focus group and targets a bigger sample in order to get a wider sweep of opinions.  Increasingly I think that the key output from the project is going to be a strategy on how the University can use social media to engage with business, something that there seems to be a real appetite for within the University. It’s very exciting to see things start to happen!

This will be my last blog post of 2012 as I’m on holiday for Christmas from this evening. I’ll be back in early January to report on progress on all of the above.

Merry Christmas!!

Introduction
The project started originally with the objective of implementing a Business Intelligence dashboard.
During the early stages of the Dashboard project it soon became clear that although the quality of finance and HR management information was good, on a day-to-day basis the quality of student data was poor. The reasons for this were varied: the University has seen 10 years of very significant student growth and systems have not kept up with this growth; the student record system is primarily for BA/BSc with other programmes being “fitted” into the structure; the University has not worked with its supplier to improve the quality of the student system. It became apparent that the primary focus for student data was ensuring that this was accurate at Year End for the HESA returns. To this end a significant amount of work was being carried out, by the University’s Planning department, in the weeks following year end to correct incorrect data. This took several weeks complete, and as a result student data, during the year, was not believed to be sufficiently accurate. Consequently, individual departments were keeping their own databases of student information which they regarded as being the correct ones. The change to the HE landscape has meant that accurate and timely student data has become vital to the future growth and sustainability of the University.

The concern was that this would lead to a lack of confidence in the Dashboard overall which would place that programme in jeopardy. The Change Board concluded that before driving forward the Dashboard programme it was essential to improve the quality of student data. A new project was established called the “Core Data Set”. This project will determine:
• What is Core data?
• When should it be collected?
• How?
• For whom?
• How will the data be used?

The Core Data Set will also incorporate a project for On-line applications to be used for all non-UCAS applications (approximately one third of students). Assuming that data is accurately collected, validated and reported then the statutory returns will fall out from that same Core data set. The Senior Management Team (SMT) sponsor for the Core Data Set project, as well as for the Dashboard project, is David Leah (Director of Finance).

The methodology used for project management will be a combination of Prince2 and MSP.
Current situation:
PIDs have been agreed for Core Data (incorporating Dashboard) and on-line applications and have been approved by the Scrutiny Panel (Which replaced the Change Board as projects moved into the implementation phase)

Timeline: it is anticipated that this will be a two year project; and that the Dashboard will be implemented at the end of the first year (September 2013) once student data accuracy has started to improve.

Use of JISC resources
1 The P3M3 resources are being used for the PID, Risk assessment and management, stakeholder analysis and benefit tracking.
2 A member of the Change Board has attended the Enterprise Architecture programme offered by the JISC transformation project and is utilising this knowledge at the Change Board meetings.
3 Change Management infokit.

Anticipated benefits of the Core data / Dashboard projects :
i) Student experience. E.g. collaborative provision. One partner has excellent student registration processes and on-programme records but this is not matched by the University which has been a source of student frustration.
Programme directors will have more time to spend with students, thus improving the student experience, rather than on checking data.
ii) Staff experience
Organisation & management of programmes will become a more manageable task, as a result, programme management should improve (reflected in NSS/USS scores)
Currently changes to data can only be carried out by the central Registry team which means that other staff do not feel engaged on the process.
iii) Efficiency gains
Business process improvements – current duplication of data and keeping of local databases will be stopped
Time spent checking data in the Planning office will be significantly reduced.
Processes will be improved for both staff and students.
Dashboard may be used as a quality improvement tool.

In two year’s time what will tell us whether the project has led to improvements overall?
1 NSS/USS scores will have improved
2 The recent staff survey was very positive about the benefits of working for the University. One less positive point was that many areas feel that their workloads are unmanageable. A good benchmark of improvement is that this would be improved.
3 Programme Directors’ workloads would improve as there will be a reduction in data validation/ duplication of data.
4 Programme directors will have more time available for students

Going forward the above finding will also help us follow a standard practice for measuring the costs and help us build a comprehensive finance case for an investment in new software /technology and the benefits of implementing a new system.

Additionally we are in the process of arranging a meeting to review the various flowcharts which make up our “As Is Map of the current processes” and to develop a best practice model for all to use which will be the basis of any automated system. This will take place soon after the New Year.

Our efforts to find better software systems are still on-going. We had a very productive demonstration from Ripley System last month. This prompted us to organise a visits to The Royal College of Anaesthetists and The Royal College of Psychiatrists whom already have this system in place. These visits should take place sometime in January or February 2013. We also organised a demo from Speedwell to take place on the 10th January 2013.

Progress may appear slow on this project, however it is the most strategic project of UCLan’s Transformation Programme with the most significant impact and therefore needs the discussion, input and agreement of senior strategic leaders.

The project has also drafted sections to be added to the current email policy to create a unified communication policy.

The project is using the Personal Advisers system as a pilot to explore the potential benefits of collating the feedback from students throughout the year to enable the university to respond to feedback where appropriate throughout the year and plan for the next academic year further in advance rather than waiting for feedback through traditional methods collected towards the end of the year.  The project is looking to ensure that feedback is anonymised and developing a process to ensure the Personal Advisers can ensure that confidential information and information that is inappropriate to share is not shared.

Bearing the success of e-Ethics in mind, rather than follow our traditional IT development life cycle, we decided to continue to develop our rapid application development (RAD) approach using SharePoint, accompanied by our TSAP methodology for reviewing business processes.

A couple of examples…
One of these requests was for help administering research degrees, and has allowed us to re-develop the first of eight processes, which all together will provide a comprehensive work flow management tool. There are clear and obvious benefits for reviewing this – it will dramatically reduce the amount of resources needed to be spent by administrators and Research Degree Tutors, freeing that time for more worthwhile tasks. Using SharePoint really does mean rapid application too – the prototype was built during the project meeting and conversation arising from the demonstration allowed us to create a working model within two hours of inception. This model will be reviewed by the Research Degree Committees over the next couple of months and then each of the eight processes implemented.

Similarly, 6 of our 16 Schools have been able to use SharePoint document libraries (developed with the same RAD/TSAP approach) to share teaching materials with their colleagues in partner colleges. Previously this sharing was done via email and there was always issues with version control, accessibility, duplication etc. The new facility allows staff at the main campus and partner colleges to access the same set of documentation simultaneously. It also allows them to upload assessments for second marking, to discuss new approaches using discussion boards, and to collaborate (and version control) new teaching material.

Both approaches have built on experience of earlier projects, demonstrating our ability to share our business analysis skills with other colleagues and to get them thinking in a new way, all positive indications of our ability to increase UCLan’s capacity to drive business efficiency

Progress in this quarter has been very good. I have formed a strong central “project team” who are all enthused about the initiative; the team comprises two Course Directors who specialise in process review and Information Technology; a Business Analyst from Academic Services; Head of Learning & Development to help with sustainability; a School Administration Manager and myself as Project Manager. We had our first project meeting on 5th November.

The Process Review Analyst and Facilitator training took place last week with 14 attendees representing all Schools of the university and Academic Services and IT…. it was a painful process to get this set up and get everyone attending but well worth it from the feedback received so far. The workshop, run by ProcessFix, was excellent, it “scared” a few of the attendees in terms of how they were expected to put the training into practice so a lot of reassurance was required to keep them on board.

We have our next Project Team meeting tomorrow and the next meeting of all attendees to the workshop will be in January which will be to form the top level Business Transformation Team and disseminate the idea of the sub Business Process Review teams in each area……

Overall feedback was good, though it also highlighted an area for development that we need to address, namely batch upload of marks and/or feedback files.

They would like the code to see how the tool works, which we should be able to do in the new year once we have got rid of vast majority of bugs.

Phil demonstrated his DIY ebook for delegates from the Open University of China at a session 23rd of November, 2012, at Beyond Distance, University of Leicester

Phil reported it was not very difficult to cut and paste the already written material into iBooks Author; it required about 10 hours to do 101 pages. The difficulty was that once he imported videos and podcasts, the ebook was over 500 MB in size. The problem then was how to transfer this document onto the students’ iPads in remote locations. For some reason even smaller portions of the book could not be transferred through Blackboard. I need to get to the bottom of the technical reasons for that.

In the end the best option was to use iTunes U Course Manager. This is possible to use even though our university is not yet launched our iTunes U channel. Phil created a new course using Safari on his computer; all he needed was his own Apple ID. For the Course Material, he uploaded his new ebook.

Phil emailed me the link so I could test it; I was the first to enrol on his new course. I selected the ebook to download; it took about 10 minutes to download it onto my iPad 1, while I was sitting in my kitchen at 9.30pm, using Virgin broadband. At first I could read everything but not view the multimedia; that was because I had not upgraded to the latest iBooks. So I upgraded, and everything played perfectly. Phil emailed his students with the private link to his course; when I spoke to him a day or two later, Phil reported that roughly one-third to one-half of the students had already enrolled in the course to access the ebook, and no problems had yet been reported. These students are located all around the world.

iBooks Author saves in the formats .ibooks (for the Apple iBooks app), .pdf and text.

If and when I learn whether students experience issues, I will blog about it here.

Terese Bird, Learning Technologist and SCORE Research Fellow, University of Leicester

Warren Buffett,  American businessman

In the online world, the process of reputation building has arguably become quicker, as has the time it takes to ruin it.  Think of those tweets people fast regret but even a few seconds after posting it is often too late to retract, due to retweets and favourites.

At a conference last year, I took part in a digital identity workshop, which highlighted the dangers of putting too much, or too little, out in the public domain.  I use a variety of social media tools, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Blogger, Mendeley and YouTube, and in this post I am going to find out what anyone with internet access can find out about me. To help me with this, I am following a worksheet for an e-reputation course run by Swansea University.

Facebook

My privacy settings are pretty tight on Facebook and I’ve disabled public search.  I had a quick look at 48ers.com to see if I could find any embarrassing Facebook stories relating to the University of Westminster but I’m happy to report there were none!

Google

Simply by typing in my name (in inverted commas), location and job, I get a list of my social network sites, as well as information about things I’ve been involved with professionally e.g. the first London Librarian TeachMeet and my Erasmus trip to Lund University.  Hopefully these would go in my favour if a potential employer googled me.

I repeated the search in Google Images, but all that appeared were the photos I have on my Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, as well as ones I’ve used in my blog.

Twitter

I use the same Twitter account for professional and personal tweets, so in theory anyone can find out that I have a bit of an obsession with Ancient Egypt.  Hopefully, this wouldn’t harm my professional reputation though.

Looking up my Twitter username on TweetReach, I discovered that tweets relating to my username have potentially reached 5,837 accounts in just 6 days, far more than are actually following me.  I was slightly unsure about this result, so I tried searching for the hashtag #infolit (for tweets relating to information literacy).  I just 4 days, nearly 12,000 accounts had been reached, with an account I tweet for (@infolitgroup) in the top five impressions.

Conclusions

So, I’ve found out what information is available about me in the public sphere and I haven’t come across anything damaging.  In fact, some of it could be quite useful in building my professional reputation.  It’s worth bearing in mind that if you are invisible on the web, this could also have negative consequences for your employability (unless you’re planning to be the next James Bond!).  For a start, by not engaging with social media, how do you know what others are saying about you?  Also, Twitter in particular offers a great professional networking platform, to the extent that some people are just as well known by their online username than their real life one (Llord Llama being a prime example).  This is demonstrated by the trend to include your Twitter username on conference badges, so that people who know you better by that name can identify you (as well as encouraging new followers, of course).  Phil Bradley discussed the dangers of not having an online presence in a recent blog posting:

“A potential new employer, if they have any brains at all are going to be looking at your social media footprint as much as anything in your CV. If you were going to employ someone, and two people had equally good CVs, which would you go for – the one with hundreds or thousands of Twitter followers or the one who didn’t have a Twitter account? The one with lots of contacts on LinkedIn, or the one with none?”

From: http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2012/11/personal-reputation-in-a-social-media-world.html

As part of this project, we are planning to offer sessions on the topic of managing your online identity, as this is a key link between digital literacy and employability.

I’m doing this in two ways: firstly, several of my academic colleagues from our marketing department who already research in the area of social media will be running the focus group session on the day, planning the questions and writing up the results. This is brilliant news as they have considerable experience of undertaking this kind of primary research (unlike me) and so I’m really confident that the Focus Group session will be well-designed and enable us to achieve everything we want to achieve with the session.

Secondly, a number of colleagues from the University will be attending the Focus Group session itself as participants which will be really valuable. I’m keen to hear their thoughts and experiences about using social media to interact with business and community partners as well as to engage with external partners.

We have a good mixed invitation list and I’ve already had a good few acceptances already. I’ve also found the perfect venue for the session – one of the University’s research Institutes does a lot of focus group sessions and is equipped with in-built cameras and so on. I now have just over a week and a half to try and confirm a few more attendees… Wish me luck!

Still, there is a lot to write up and consolidate.

Meanwhile interest is picking up with some of the Senior Executive group on developing the dashboard concept, so we may be switching our attention to this in the near future.

The next stage is to test with one or more student groups, and predictably our design students are showing considerable appetite to be involved first! Our student early-adopter group members are to be issued with a daily log that they will complete to report back their successes and failures, likes and dislikes with the service!

Just before the start of term (25-26^th September) we attended the International m-Libraries ‘Information on the Move’ conference in Milton Keynes to find out more about how other libraries have been exploiting mobile technology. There were many interesting talks and presentations at the conference. Although we didn’t see anybody trying to develop exactly the kind of service the AskALF mobile induction will offer, there were a number of speakers who had experience of developing mobile sites and delivering information through mobile devices.

You can view information about the conference here – www.m-libraries.org

Matt Borg from Sheffield Hallam University gave an informative talk on lessons learned from developing a mobile optimized site for the library. In particular an important lesson was re-thinking your site in terms of access through a mobile device and not simply attempting to shrink an existing site. This is certainly something we have taken on-board during the development of the mobile induction. Rather than taking existing content from our webpages and following our usual website layout, we are writing fresh content adapted to both our target audience of Freshers and viewing on a very small screen. Another tip was developing a responsive website rather than a native app for any particular platform. Again, this is also a strategy we have adopted with the mobile induction.

You can view the SHU mobile site at – http://library.shu.ac.uk/m

Some more useful tips on mobile library app and website development came out of a later session given by representatives from Cardiff University Library. As part of the development of the University’s mobile library site, the development had incorporated mobile versions of existing services wherever possible, thus minimising the amount of development work that needed to be done. For example, the live-help IM service that Cardiff uses has a mobile friendly version and this version appears on the mobile site and works well. This was especially interesting for us because we also wish to embed our existing Library3elp IM service into the mobile induction. Another tip was trying to exploit the features of mobile devices such as automatically dialling numbers or receiving library information by SMS text. It is therefore important that as much data as possible in the askALF induction is in machine friendly formats, that is to say, can be interpreted as meaningful data by computers. We will address this in the induction by, for example, upgrading library opening hours information held in our databases into standardised machine-readable times. These can then be used to add additional functionally to the induction such as automatically indicating which libraries are currently open and closed.

You can view the Cardiff mobile site at – htttp://m.cardiff.ac.uk

The business analysis of the more detailed back office processes and associated data is underway and we are hoping to have a full set of information for development by the end of the calendar year. The major problem being encountered by the project is the lack of time available for input into this piece of work, as the support service departments in question are in the middle of organisational restructuring and busy with their day jobs.

Requirements capture beyond xmas will see the formulation of a new processes and detailed requirement specification ready for any potential procurement activities.

Addressing barriers to Business and Community Engagement
This resource is at too high a level and is not really relevant as it looks at how to embed a culture of Business & Community Engagement at an Institution. Our project is addressing a specific area of Coventry’s Business & Community Engagement and builds on an already strong culture of Business & Community Engagement at Coventry University.

Benchmarking
I thought this might be useful for my benchmarking study but none of the tools provided were particularly relevant

Collaborative Online Tools (for BCE)
The technology covered by this resource is already too mainstream, given the pace of technology change over the past few years. I think the University is already using most of these tools and they are not relevant to the aims of this project

Embedding Business and Community Engagement (BCE) infoKit
This resource was simply at too high a level, aimed at big instutional programmes to create a culture of business and community engagement. Coventry University already has this sort of culture and the aim of this project is address technology change and ensure communication with business and community groups keeps pace.

Impact Calculator
I thought this might be  a resource for measuring the results of the project but it concentrates on measuring cost and efficiency savings which is not a particular aim for this project.

Maximising the Impact of BCE Partnerships
This resource was simply too high level for our project which looks at a specific facet of Business and Community Engagement

Online Promotion of Research Expertise
This was a very useful resource and provided invaluable information as I started my benchmarking study. A separate post has been written about this resource.

Walking Thru Time
This is a very specific app based project with a different aim to ours. However some of their experiences may be useful once this project gets to the testing stage

Some tags categories are themselves becoming more categorical – it will be interesting to see how we describe this work to more end users and how we’ll the “get it”

In the meantime … reviewing the kits again we find that the site has had a new re-jig with “topics” to navigate the resources. It is re-assuring to see our “topics” are not too far from those being used.

Finally, getting ready for a review meeting tomorrow and having played around with updating tags via diigo we’ve exceed our access quota for the day. Hmmm!

An initial assessment of SAS was made using the JISC Online Collaborative Tools for BCE project findings with reference to communications tools that could be used to support the development of external engagement and partnerships with commercial, public sector, cultural, social and civic organisations.

What tools will support collaboration with these local, national and international organisations?

The tools assessed during the project that seem to be most relevant for SAS are as follows:

• WordPress: SAS already has a ULCC-hosted WordPress server currently in production and blogs have already been set up for a number of projects and initiatives, including the Women in US Foreign Policy, and the Refugee Law Initiative, as well as this SMART blog. It is a tool that people and organisations are becoming increasingly familiar with. This is a free service, unless there are set-up requirements in advance of the basic template set-up in place. Blogs do require some initial set-up work, which can be daunting to those unfamiliar with blogs, but are quick and simple to use once set-up is completed. As per comments from Northumbria University & The University of Glamorgan – it would need to be creatively used for collaborative purposes.

• Email: This is a familiar tool to anyone working in one of the organisations that SAS will be building and developing relationships with. It tends to be used on a daily basis by organisations. No set-up costs or resources should be required. It has limited large attachment size capacity and relies on local filing arrangements of organisations and individuals to that conversations and communications are stored. Restricted circulation of information to email recipient only.

• File Transfer Protocol (FTP): Excellent for sharing large files. However, limited access to those outside SAS staff, and requires set-up request for each individual to be granted access. We already have an FTP folder set up, so there would be minimal set-up involved. There may be some costs associated with expanding capacity for multiple projects. We have already experienced difficulties with external partners accessing our FTP folder and now only use it internally between staff for transferring large media files.

• We Transfer; Enables easy and quick transfer of large files (up to 2GB) so could be used to support other tools, e.g. email. Free, easily accessible. Option to upgrade to individual channel, annual cost of approx £100p.a. Concerns about security. Similar to email, in that restricted access to receipients only.

• Moodle: The SAS Virtual Learning Environment is Moodle-based, supported by ULCC. Staff and students can easily access this. Limited access can be supported. Already in existence, so there would be no or low set-up costs. Reliable. Concerns over ease of access from external partners, possible impact on security of system for student and teaching users.

Further work on this will need to be completed but it seems from this initial review taking into account the experience and findings from the Online Collaborative Tools for BCE project, that WordPress offers a particularly strong option for the School to consider, with support from other tools, such as email etc. Sharepoint is another tool to consider.

In most institutions different subject areas, different departments and very definitely, individual staff, will have their own views about how best to ‘give’ students the skills they need to be successful in their chosen area of study. Many will instinctively react strongly against the notion that some sort of generic digital literacy skills course can suffice for their students. As with many things this is a bit of a non-argument as in reality most people, to succeed, need generics and specifics with most things they need to know about or learn. The premium approach is to provide a generic base upon which subject specialisms can build and on top which individuals can layer their own specific and personal knowledge of what information technology does for them.

The real key to embedding is getting a shared institutional understanding of what everyone can offer in helping to make an individual a capable and continually evolving user of IT. That everyone includes the institution’s ethos, it includes what the institutional staff (including the most senior) say about and do with technology, it is linked tightly to how technology is used to deliver the curriculum and of course it is intimately tied up which each and every student’s experience of IT inside and outside of the university environment.

For the reasons above projects such as the Digital Literacies in Transition project, led by the University of Greenwich, which is seeking to draw together the views of a whole range of stakeholders to get some shared understanding, are critical. The whole idea of thinking of digital literacy as something that must evolve and develop as students transition from one phase of their life cycle to another is one that is much nearer to a meaningful definition of digital literacy than one which leads to a focus on which software or systems they must know and understand.

The transformations project on Digital Literacy at Westminster is a member of the CAMEL group meeting regularly to discuss the Greenwich led project and see how what the CAMEL institutions can learn from each other and in turn feed into the overall aims of the Greenwich project. A key objective that the transformations project shares with the Digital Literacies in Transition project is the development of a shared institutional understanding of digital literacy. This is needed first so that meaningful ‘face-value’ statements and objectives can be made in relevant strategic plans for the future. These must have universal buy-in and be linked to a clear idea of the way in which the curriculum will be delivered and made use of by students. More than statement however, the idea d digital literacy needs to be inherent, and therefore embedded, in all that staff and students do.

Gunter Saunders

Some initial thoughts about RDM infrastructure @ York

• There is no single enterprise system that can deliver RDM.
• RDM is not something we can get right in one go. It needs to be built incrementally and we need to start that now.
• There are things we already do and we should identify those.
• There are things we don’t do, or don’t do well, and we should identify those too.
• There are lots of projects around the country looking at exactly the same issues as us. We should learn from them and use the things they have created.

Time for a diagram

1. A non-manual means of knowing what research is happening,
2. what that research is producing,
3.  and where those outputs are going.

The Grandly Titled Infrastructure Audit

• PURE – our Research Information System
• York Digital Library – our institutional (non-eprints) multimedia repository which could hold data and/or metadata about data
• White Rose Research Online – our institutional (eprints) repository, shared with Leeds and Sheffield
• Google Drive – could storage offering which comes with our Google education package
• Alfresco – open-source document management system being used and built on by our Biology Department
• YouShare – Cloud-based platform and UMF project in our Computer Science Department
• Institutional server and data centre infrastructure
• Research Grants systems

The Missing ‘Brokerage’ Piece?

Next Steps

In relation to online polling the project has also purchased one unlimited licence for Polleverywhere and there are several staff now interested in trialling this in semester 2 with large cohorts of students in-class.
Together with Federica Oradini (Senior Lecturer, Westminster Exchange) we have devised a simple template for the recording as case studies the academic mobile learning pilots planned to start in semester 2 2012/13. These include 2 pilots on the use of Twitter (and other tools for in-class interaction such as Polleverywhere) and one around situated learning in architecture and the built environment. In addition in semester 2 one Master’s module in Life Sciences will provide all students with a Nexus 7 tablet (a small module with 9 students).

Although planning is at an early stage for this the students concerned will exploit the Nexus both for in-class learning activities (researching topics and online formative tests) and for the building of an online student community for the module. The latter component will link this transformations project nicely with another JISC transformations project around online collaboration and communication.

We have already seen evidence of individuals ‘standing in each other’s shoes’ as the four representatives from the School Offices on each project have had to seek and summarise opinions from all 16 schools. This has shown them how difficult it is to seek consensus as a central service, when trying to satisfy 16 different viewpoints. We have also seen a significant growth in the understanding of Service staff, who (through involvement in business analysis workshops) have begun to understand what life in a School Office is like. David suggested that building sustainable connections between these various levels, identifying what kinds of connections work, identifying what needs to be done institutionally and what can best be done locally, will be very productive.

In relation to intended outcomes, we discussed some additional points to those identified in the bid:

1. Goals: gaining a greater understanding of how School Office staff spend their time, i.e. putting students at the centre of what we do is critical, but we need to be more focussed than this. Using the trigger points for student completion/non-completion will be very valuable in helping staff to guide how they are spending their time with students. Developing a clearly defined roles and responsibilities document for Schools and Services will be key to this.

2. Activities: Developing and testing the TSAP methodology through the delivery of workshops, production of options and delivery of solutions on our chosen processes will be the key to this element. We have identified several interesting things so far:
a) There is merit in automating processes as far as possible, so that, staff can concentrate on student crunch points. This has become evident in the TSAP processes we are tackling, in particular e-Ethics, e-RDSC and the SharePoint projects that reduce the need to keep duplicate sets of documentation for partner colleges.
b) “Giving people a good listening to” (D Baume) is very therapeutic. This has had benefits for the school admin staff, even if we have not been able to solve some of their problems
c) Sharing information through stories is a very valuable way to achieve understanding and empathy

3. Outputs: the blog has proved very useful for the project team. We have discussed progress before writing each entry and this process has assisted us in crystalising our thought processes. Our main aim for outputs has not changed however. A clear methodology for undertaking business efficiency projects is still an extremely worthwhile output, which can be re-used in future. The significant aspiration here however is that we will have undertaken a level of skills transfer which means that processes can be evaluated by those other than business analysts, sharing and expanding our capabilities.

4. Outcomes: We talked in more details about how we measure success in the project, in particular around conducting trend analysis with NSS, USS (UCLan satisfaction survey) and the Post Graduate Taught and Research Surveys, to track performance in the ‘organisation and management’ aspects of each survey. Critically, the qualitative ‘free format comments’ that students provide on these surveys often provide the critical data we need to improve specific processes. A further measure of success (although much more difficult to quantify accurately) will be the reduction in staff time saved by the project, that is then either saved in terms of staff salaries, or indeed the resource is re-invested in other student support areas (as we did with the customer service helpdesk review). One of the key challenges for us (now that we have developed our TSAP process and are testing its validity) will be the identification and measurement of business efficiency benefits.

All in all, a very useful and thought provoking conversation!!

Whilst early days, it would be another important component in helping develop a technology to address administrative, academic and pedagogical aspects of electronic assessment.

As with many interactive systems – the system represents an intervention that can in fact change the way a problem is approached, and as such the ambition of, say, separating content and presentation is misleading. Users, once interacting with a prototype, realise the technical elements of the support offered and move to a mode a in which they are working with the technology to achieve an effect. The big question is how far does that of engagement distract from ensuring quality content. Of course anyone familiar with design will realise that the separation although “done easily” with technology is not one that we always appreciate.

Next step – to follow up the contacts I made and hopefully arrange for them to maybe link up with some students and/or provide feedback on the e-portfolio to date.

How I use my iPad – Nathan Huneke from Manchester Medical School on Vimeo.

Several other uses of iPads emerged from the email discussion:

Imperial College  Business School gave out over 650 iPads to MSc and MBA students as part of a move to seamless learning via paperless delivery. Article here:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2815f872-1e1e-11e2-8e1d-00144feabdc0.html.

700 students who used iPads at Manchester Medical School, not yet written up and published, but here is a qualitative view (the video in this blog is from this Vimeo channel:

http://vimeo.com/album/2002695

From Msc Intl Business at Leeds University Business School, the website now includes a first, mid-semester evaluation of what we have done so far with iPads:

http://ipadsatleeds.wordpress.com

And Networked Learning Technologies in Art and Design:

www.elearningartdesign.org/ipads/

I am sure there are many more. If you are aware of an iPad or other tablet use in Higher Education or Further Education in the UK, please leave a comment and let us know!

Terese Bird, Learning Technologist, University of Leicester

We wanted to test our new TSAP methodology for  reviewing business processes on a system that required academic as well as administrator input, particularly testing out how we managed peer review and feedback.

To cut through bureaucracy and to improve consistency, UCLan had already reduced the number of ethics committees from 16 to 4 and used a rapid application development technique to create an online system that allowed the Chair and reviewers to manage applications via the web – providing a continuous gateway for ethics approval.  We used our TSAP methodology to evaluate the project using feedback from our School representatives. They have commended:
- the move to electronic documentation and the paper-free environment
- the ease of access to application documents
- the portability by virtue of tablet access
- the intuitive design and layout of forms
- and the speed and efficiency of the workflow systems

Looking at metrics alone – introducing this online system has reduced need for staff resource by 50%.

This way of developing IT and business process initiatives is innovative but challenging for us! It works on the basis that we can create rapid applications that are tweaked and improved as the system matures, rather than using traditional waterfall methodologies. The principle being that small improvements made regularly can have as positive an impact as the implementation of large new developments. We are also finding this is easier for staff to manage in terms of their ability to cope with change, resulting in less opposition and a greater desire towards looking for the next improvement.  This project has led to other initiatives being developed using the TSAP method; which are reducing the administrative burden on our school administration colleagues.

Overall the tool was considered: 1. A useful exercise; 2, there were difficulties in the context of a federal institution such as the School (e.g. dividing between central and locally (Institute) managed websites etc); 3. The findings were helpful in pointing us in the right direction by identifying areas to be looked at and prioritised.

Priorities identified:

1. Develop the SAS communications strategy to include social media and the use of online channels to communicate research and research promotion and facilitation expertise.
2. Expand the website development plan to include other online channels, the identification of expertise information as a type of information, and the promotion of online tools and how usage will be developed.
3. Develop features, including information on digital channels to help users understand how to work with SAS, and the use of blogs.
4. Continue to improve metrics, tracking and evaluation, including tracking users’ paths through the website, and identifying returning visitors.
5. Include consideration of expertise information and the development of opportunities to exploit that expertise within the context of social networking.
6. Develop experience and skills in social networking for the purposes of strategic planning and implementation.
7. Review risk assessment and management plan for social networking.

As Falmouth share many student support services with the University of Exeter (UoE) in Cornwall there is a need to understand how any new system will interface with the UoE (data and interface requirements). Our plan is to travel to Exeter to see how they work and agree what information will be needed and how the IT systems can talk to each other.

Following on from this the capture of data and detailed process mapping for the managed student support services will be performed and this will allow the formulation of the new IT system requirements (including data and interface requirements with the UoE system).

It will be interesting to see how many of our colleagues have used Moodle quizzes already. I’m expecting they may be a commonly used activity in Moodle, although perhaps not so much in the humanities and social sciences?

We’ve been fortunate to work with a colleague in our pharmacy department who has been keen to use quizzes to help students to refresh their knowledge of introductory level statistics and identify areas of weakness, where we’ve provided links to further resources to help them review the areas they are less familiar with.

We’ve already run a focus group with six of the students and they were certainly very positive about the quizzes, although they didn’t seem to be too sure why they would need to know so much statistics, unless it’s in preparation for an exam. I think all will become clear when they have their face-to-face workshops in a few weeks!

I particularly loved this quote from one of the students:

“… a lot of us probably won’t end up using it [statistics] in life anyway.”

 This is interesting in the light of the Nuffield Foundation £15.5m funding now available for quantitative methods training for social science undergraduates:
“… a strategic response to the critical shortage of quantitatively trained social scientists in the UK, which has led to employers across all sectors unable to recruit people with the skills to apply quantitative methods to evaluating evidence and analysing data.”

We’re expecting staff to attend from the central elearning team and the library, as well as academics from several different departments across faculties which should provide a variety of views and experiences of teaching and using quantitative methods.

Melanie (Project Officer)

Very interesting to see how well the system is being used by Students - I have to admit to being quite inspired.

The idea of the project is that netbooks (running a thin client) are available for students to freely borrow and use within the learning space (library etc.). This complements their traditional open access workstations very nicely and seems to have become well embedded within the way students use the learning spaces.

Thanks to Geoff Kimmons & Phil Poole for explaining the system to me and showing me round.

They have written a book about iBorrow and Learning Spaces which you can download here.

This has created a tension, frustration and a potential nervousness over future activities. It is important that the good work is not undone and that individuals motivation and commitment is maintained at this unsettling time.

Hence, as Project Manager, I decided to take the opportunity to bring all action researchers back together to celebrate what has been achieved so far and provide the researchers with some techniques to deal with the anticipated changes that lie ahead. The occasion will also provide individuals with the time and space to evaluate their involvement in the project and feedback challenges and barriers to success that they envisage at this stage.

An outline of the activity is shown below:

A copy of the evaluation questionnaire is shown below:

Awaiting copy of evaluation form

Social Media take-up is high in general

• 98% of Universities surveyed had a facebook profile
• 100% of Universities surveyed had a twitter profile
• 98% of Universities surveyed have a company profile on LinkedIn
• 97% of Universities surveyed have a YouTube account

The level of engagement and the audience targeted vary hugely from university to university and I need to do some more analysis on this.

Use of Social Media for business engagement appears to be less common

• Only 3% of HEIs surveyed have a dedicated “business” Facebook page
• The proportion using twitter for business engagement via a dedicated account – 22% – is slightly higher but still not even a quarter of the sample
• Only 51% of the sample actively used their LinkedIn company profile to promote their activities, jobs and services

University Social Media Sites have a large audience

• Average Facebook fans: 27, 600
• Average Twitter followers: 9,500
• Average LinkedIn followers: 3,700
• Average Youtube subscribers: 935 (Average video views were much higher – over 460, 000)

Universities are experimenting with a variety of Social Media

In addition to the main four social media services used – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Youtube – the Universities surveyed used a total of 20 other social media and social content-sharing sites. These ranged from photo-sharing site Flickr to Chinese microblogging service Weibo.

So far I feel that my original perceptions of the use of social media in higher education were right – Universities are in general very well engaged with social media but their activities via these media are focussed primarily on student recruitment and engagement with the potential of social media for business and community engagement being overlooked.

This leads me neatly to the key question we want the next stage of the project - focus groups with business – to answer. Is being able to engage with Universities via social media important to them?

Step 1 contains the instruction “Review a copy of your college or university’s strategic plan”. This is indeed one of the first jobs I undertook when I started as Enterprise Architect at Bristol in 2011. I have been doing some benefits maps work since to help understand our overarching strategy better – see my blog post about this at http://enterprisearchitect.blogs.ilrt.org/2012/10/13/what-are-the-benefits-of-benefits-maps/.

Step 2 recommends: “Create a basic view of the functions carried out by the institution”. There is a recommended JISC infoNet Business Classification Scheme to help with this. I am not sure we have done this step explicitly so far, although one of my early pieces of work on Lifecycles looks at IT systems from a stakeholder perspective and more recently I have been working with the Director of Planning who is using the balanced scorecard approach, so I think it would be useful for me to review how far we meet this objective with clarity.

Step 3: “Create a basic view of your IT Architecture showing the applications and services, the interfaces between them and the data transferred”. Well, it takes so few words to describe this step and yet this is a massive step for IT Services in my organisation. We have documented applications and services and are applying ITIL to good effect in terms of using a service catalogue as a central record for all IT systems offered as services within the organisation. However, the interfaces between our systems are absolutely key for us and the focus of this project. I have documented what we’re doing with our Interface Catalog in my other blog: http://enterprisearchitect.blogs.ilrt.org/category/interface-catalogue/ and we’ve now started a data dictionary (a summary overview of which is offered via an Entity Relationship diagram for the data model) in relation to the data entities exchanged/manipulated at the interface level. I will blog soon on how we are agreeing on the data dictionary template as a standard and what data entities need to be documented in the data dictionary and why. This work is one of the main thrusts behind this JISC project.

Step 4: “Identify any ‘bloated’ or redundant applications that consume resource far in excess of their actual value to the organisation and plan to phase them out. In time you will look at the business processes that drive this.” This step is about looking at return on investment and although I wouldn’t say we are managing this step through a formal methodology at the moment, we are looking at benefit in terms of benefits maps and we are also developing extremely useful documentation about the costs of our services (especially in terms of developer FTE’s required to manage the systems that constitute those services or the costs of the  outsourced support costs, in addition to any software licensing costs after upfront investment).

Step 5: “Use the IT architecture conclusions as a starting point for discussions involving management, teaching and administrative colleagues about architecture at enterprise level. ….. to build a roadmap of integrated process and ICT change.” This is a valuable step and at the moment this is happening through benefits work taking place with the Education, Research and Support areas of our organisation. When the three sets of benefits maps come together I think we will have an incredibly useful piece of dialogue around the priorities around IT support for strategic requirements considered holistically at the University.

Step 6: “Identify the likely lifespan and replacement cycle for existing applications.” This is happening as part of our application of the ITIL standard across IT Services.

Step 7: “Consider how a service-oriented approach (SOA) to your data layer could streamline the architecture and reduce the need for interfaces/data retyping. Plan to turn the ‘spaghetti’ into a ‘lasagne’.”. Although there are 3 steps after this one, I will stop at step 7 in this blog post because this is very much the focus of this JISC project. The documentation in our interface catalog is showing us where, say, ten different interfaces are exchanging the same student entities, in which case we could abstract out the common functionality and offer it via a single API, possibly via a Web Service. That way, should we change the structure of a student entity in our master data system, we can manage the propagation of that change through the systems that consume that data far more safely, easily and efficiently than at present. We can do this in turn for every piece of functionality that we see is highly used. We can also consider the need for realtime data updates across our systems and where we might start deploying ESB solutions in earnest. For more information about our interface catalogue please see: http://enterprisearchitect.blogs.ilrt.org/category/interface-catalogue/.

At Royal Holloway we have started to understand the intricate and complex ecosystem of processes and applications that run our services and to investigate ways we can simply and remodel these to work differently with partners outside of our traditional community.  In my time here I have worked on many partnerships and collaborations and there are more on the horizon.

I have learnt so much about Enterprise Architecture and approaches to the Analysis and Design of processes and solutions from working with this community.  I would like to thank everyone I’ve engaged with particularly Sarah Chesney for being a kind and persistent critical friend  despite me having the bare minimum of time to engage, my colleagues in the Yellow Cluster for being so helpful during my first experience of Action Learning Sets, David Rose for his enduring support introducing EA within our community and for first opening my eyes to enterprise architecture via the EA Practice Group, Nikki Rogers at Bristol for blazing a trail and sharing her experience via her blog to inspire others and Andy Stewart, Janette Hillicks and the rest of the team at JISC infoNet for their tireless and enthusiastic curation of the knowledge base, community and network we can all draw upon.

Godswill has already introduced himself and I am confident the college has recruited a talented analyst who will be able to take the project forward to the conclusion of the JISC time frame and beyond.  He will be working with other members of the Analysis and Design team here to work on the specific project aim of a service delivery blueprint and continuing the exploration of how Enterprise Architecture could be used at RHUL.

I wish everyone one the programme all the best with their projects and challenges.  If anyone wishes to stay in touch you can find me at http://about.me/alisonpope

Thanks for all those that provided feedback on what we have done so far and the positive and encouraging comments – they were very much appreciated.

Presentation: UoL_RDMGuidance_JISC20121025
Poster: UoL_RDMPoster2012_landscape

However, the interface is not the only problem. It has been incredibly hard to anticipate what descriptive metadata will be sufficient, effectively as a substitute to traditional archival description. As we are dealing with thousands of records we do not have time to include a “Scope and Content”/description. Though Eprints allows free text searching of documents, what use is that if the title of the document gives no clue as to what it might be? I fully believe that Eprints has the capability to work as respository for born digital archives, but fear that we need to examine closely the descriptive metadata we provide. It reinforces feelings I’ve had for a good while that we, the archival profession need to look critically at our accepted traditional rules for cataloguing and arrangement, as in my opinion, they cannot be applied to born-digital records. I could go on, but I fear this issue really requires a dedicated post…

Despite all the doom and gloom, a couple of weeks ago our Technical Services Librarian, and I (emphasis on the “TS Librarian”, more than the “I”!), managed to link up our two systems, Eprints and Calm, (in a fashion), so that we can update certain fields in one with information from the other – more to come on that later…

The Control device is based on a Dell 1U Server and attached to that are the probes that will pick up environmental data (temperature and humidity) within the racks.  The engineer had some difficulty installing the probes due to using a new version of software that has a few issues and he’ll have to return in a couple of weeks to try again.

We have also had some challenges acquiring a MIB for the Oracle Enterprise M4000 server that we will be connecting to.  Oracle now supply MIBs as part of firmware packages – but the MIB for the current level on that machine is no longer available.  Therefore, we will have to upgrade the firmware to the latest level in order to get access to the correct MIB.  Not an insignificant task as the server hosts the Voyager Library System, which is in use 24 hours-a-day.

Some of the steps taken during the Mitigating Circumstances Process Review are outlined below:

April – Determining the Stakeholders

Stakeholder Analysis

Mapping the process – as is:

Notes from Meeting – March 2012

Notes from meeting – May 2012

Mapping the process – proposed:

Proposals for change – May 2012

The action researchers can be seen proposing the changes to the stakeholders below

Following the meeting, and further research, the proposals were modified:

Mit Circs Proposals – September 2012

A new Mitigating Circumstances Envelope was also developed:

Mit Circs New Envelope

• Technical update - new software features added - filter tab - requests for changes
• A discussion of the UoB aattendance project - supersedes SES attendance functionality
• Update on attendance equipment installations
• Draft user manual was accepted - now live for all users on the University intranet
• SIMIE project update by Yanqing Duan
• New Engagement Monitors introduced to the meeting
• Now that the SES was in a business as usual phase the chair of the BAG/User Group would pass to the new Senior Engagement Adviser
• End of Project report to be submitted to the next Student Information Systems Programme Board

Absolutely delighted to have David Baume on board as our critical friend for the JISC project. Hard to think of someone more appropriate.

Looking forward to his first involvement in a couple of weeks.

David’s blog.

Tim

And it worked well!  Not so much (for me) in terms of the specifics of my individual project but more widely in terms of our FLP. Specifically I came across several people, and hence several institutions, who are developing case studies and resources to contribute to the teaching of research methods. Those of us who are planning contextual and discipline-based cases to illuminate methods, for instance on our quantitative methods initiative, agreed to explore the possibility of sharing our efforts.  Since the creation of cases takes time, such sharing would allow is to move much more quickly in having a rich and diverse set of examples. A potential collaborative teaching development grant application was also considered. Watch this space……

Tim

I presented Mummies, War Zones, and Pompeii: the use of tablet computers in situated and on-the-go learning, and also Embedded E-books and E-readers in  Distance Education. This second presentation is particularly interesting to our Places project, because it shows how the use of iPads in the MSc in Security programme is building on the use of e-readers in Psych and Education  Masters, which was done in the DUCKLING Project. It is great to see how research done in a previous project is being continued and developed, and taking some unexpected turns.

Information assistants carrying iPads at Changi Airport in Singapore

The e-book readers in DUCKLING were pretty basic, the Sony PRS 505, the only model available for purchase in the UK in 2009 which is when DUCKLiNG happened.  We pre-loaded the learning materials, then shipped the devices to students around the world. Because of copyright issues, we could only succeed in including one book on the e-readers, in addition to our instructor-authored learning materials. Time-poor students found the e-readers very helpful to keep up on reading in a convenient, accessible psckage, because they could make use of even 10 minutes during the day. One student felt using the e-reader helped her to focus on assigned reading and achieve better marks in assignments.

In the case of the iPads for MSc In Security, nothing is preloaded; the iPad is simply shipped to the student w instructions to download the free, custom-made app (called ‘SCID’, and it is free in the Apple store). The student downloads the app and has the course information from a single handy source. The student is also given Amazon book vouchers so as to purchase some of the recommended readings for the course.

So far students are very positive about both the app and the iPad, but less positive about e-books on the iPad. One person lives in a country in which Amazon books cannot be purchased. Another person commented thats/he had not yet gotten into the habit of using the iPad for all of the readings.

We need more data to be sure, but in our case, e-books on the iPad don’t seem to be quite as popular as the app, about which students are definitely very positive. Why is this? Is it because we did not pre-install the readings? It does seem clear that in DUCKLING, students liked having the readings pre-installed on the e-book reader. Is it because the iPad is not as easy-on -the-eyes as an e-ink e-reader? We have not asked enough questions yet to make any conclusions at all, but we hope to establish whether the iPad is a successful e-book reader for these distance students.

Finally, we have received word that another distance program at Leicesteer is considering a one-mobile-device-per-student model, but this one may feature not iPads but e-book readers. It would be good if we could get even a bit of data on that one for our Places project as well.

Terese Bird, Learning Technologist, Beyond Distance Research Alliance, University of Leicester

Since April we have been busy researching for a software/management system that fits with our exams processes. To do this we have been in contact with several HEI to see what they are using that could be beneficial to us. We have visited Nottingham and Cambridge universities so far.

In addition to systems research we have been busy with reviewing the organisation structure of the Examinations Section here at the RVC. Analysing the results of these studies has prompted a restructuring of the organisation of the examinations team.

In August 2012 we presented the Examinations Department with the notes and materials resulting from the workshops and meetings and gave them our proposed structure. The examinations staff were given a 30 day consultation period to consider the proposals and respond to them. In order to ensure an objective and transparent period of consultation, all staff were offered the opportunity to have a one to one meeting with the Academic Registrar.

The proposal was accepted by the Examinations Department at the beginning of October 2012. They agreed that the proposal addressed most of the weaknesses previously identified, clarified line management and provided a ladder of grades which would prevent “one deep operations” which would allow the workload to be spread amongst the team.

In the meantime our efforts to find better software systems are still on-going. We are still organising visits and have our second visit to Nottingham Vet School organised for the beginning of November. We already visited Nottingham’s main university campus and this time we are visiting the Veterinary School to look at the ROGO system. We also have other demos organised from Ripley System and Bio Medical Computing to take place at the end of November.

We have also scheduled further workshops with the Examinations staff to discuss the costs and risk analysis of the processes that take place in the Exams Department for the end of November.

I discussed how this architecture is risky for the institution as the combination of the lack of documentation, lack of a standards-based approach to data integration and too many system-to-system joins (“spaghetti” landscape of systems)  results in data model changes often propagating through our network systems in an unmanaged way. This can result in the sudden, unplanned loss of functionality in ‘consumer’ IT systems because the implications of changes made in a source IT system are not easy to appraise. We also suffer in some cases from a lack of agility in terms of our ability to respond quickly and efficiently to new imperatives (such as Government requirements for Key Information Sets or changes in REF requirements and so on). So, for example, in terms of data model change we’ve had a case where the organisational hierarchy was changed and unexpectedly broke a system that happened to be depending on it. As far as agility is concerned, we find that when we are starting to replace a system (or multiple systems) with a new one we usually have to go back to the drawing board each time to try to deduce how many interfaces there are to the current system and which interfaces will have to be put in for the new one. This can be overly time-consuming. All too often we create interfaces that are essentially doing the same task as other interfaces e.g. moving student data objects between systems, or transferring data about organisational units, research publications and so on. Although we began to tackle this duplication problem some years ago when we attempted to replicate key master data in a core system called the Datahub, we have not fully met requirements with this approach: for example the Datahub is not realtime (some data in it can be up to 24 hours old) causing many new system implementations to avoid use of the Datahub and instead to connect direct to source data systems. The consequence of this is that we simply perpetuate the problem of having many point to point integrations.

Now, this is is all rather technical. IT Services would like to make an investment in developing a new, more sophisticated architecture, whereby we have abstracted out key functionality (such as system requests of the type ‘give me all the students from department X’ and so on), developed a service oriented architecture where appropriate and deployed ESB technology wherever realtime data needs are most pressing.  We see the benefits this can bring, such as more reliable management of the knock on effect of system changes (reduction in system downtime), quicker project start up times due to a more agile integration architecture and a more standardised and therefore sustainable system integration architecture longer term. However, how to convince senior management to invest in this rather intangible sounding concept of a more mature data integration architecture is difficult when constrained to use non-technical speak! This is a brief summary of how I attempted to describe the concepts to the portfolio executive this summer:

Using a jigsaw analogy suggested to me by the Head of IT services I explained that we constantly try to fit new systems into our existing systems architecture seamlessly as though they are pieces from the same jigsaw puzzle – quite a challenge:

The more we buy third party products, the more this is a real puzzle. The yellow boxes, by the way, are to do with students/researcher lifecycles – a concept that the portfolio executive were already familiar with and which I have blogged about elsewhere (see my enterprise architecture blog).

Next I discussed how we can think of our IT systems roughly as supporting the three areas of research, education and support services (such as finance and administration). Sticking with the jigsaw analogy, I described how we try to connect systems wherever we need to reuse data from one system in another. For example, where we might want to copy lists of courses stored in our Student Information System over to our timetabling system, or present publications stored in our research information system on the Web via our content management system. The ‘joins’, therefore, are created wherever we need a connection through which we can pass data automatically. This enables us to keep data in sync across systems and avoids any manual reentry of data. It’s the data reuse advantage. I used the diagram below to help discuss this concept:

I described how, as our requirements around information become more sophisticated, so the pressure on our data integration architecture increases. For example, we need integrated views of both research and teaching data to help inform discussions about individual academic performance, also we need cross-linked information about research and teaching on our website etc. If our data integration architecture is not fit for purpose (i.e. if the overall approach to system ‘joins’ is not planned, standardised, organised, documented and well governed) then we will struggle to deliver important benefits.

I used the following diagram to discuss what the future vision for the data architecture would look like:

This diagram is deliberately simplistic and purely illustrative. The blue ring is totally conceptual, but what it allowed me to talk about is the need to decouple systems that consume data from connecting direct to master data systems (i.e. to get away from such a proliferation of point-to-point system integrations). Naturally I’ve only shown a small subset of our systems in these diagrams, but this was enough to explain the concepts I needed to convey. I described how the blue ring could be made up of a combination of technologies, but that we would need to standardise carefully on these, organisation-wide, in order to increase our chances of sustaining the integration architecture over time. I didn’t mention service oriented architecture, but some of the blue ring could be composed of services that abstract out key, commonly used functionality using SOA technology. We didn’t discuss ESB, but some of the blue ring could use ESB technology. We have a data warehouse solution and this could be used to replicate some or even all our master data if we wish to go that route for data reuse too.

Determining the exact composition of the blue ring (ie the exact future data integration architecture for our institution) is not possible for us to do yet because we are still gathering information about the “As Is” (see my blog on the Interface Catalog). When we have fuller data about our current architecture then we will be able to review it and decide by what percentage we wish to reduce groups of point-to-point integrations (replacing them with web service api’s, say) and how we might want to replace Datahub with Datawarehouse technology and so on.

In order to throw more resource at developing the information needed for this analysis, we will be delivering a business case to the portfolio executive, requesting funds to help us. I hope to indicate how we’ve described the business model in that document in a future blog. Meanwhile, it is possible to continue to mature the integration architecture on a project by project basis.

The JISC are hosting an Enterprise Architecture workshop next month at which SOA is on the agenda. I hope to have useful conversations about where other Universities are at in maturing their data integration architectures at that event. One thing I can report is that the Portfolio Executive felt that they did understand the concept of the ‘blue ring’ and the importance of it, and are prepared to accept our forthcoming business case. This feels like an important step forward for our organisation.

The view at Resorts World, Sentosa, Singapore, the site of the MobiLearnAsia 2012 Conference

I was able to present on the Places project, specifically the University of Leicester Criminology MSc in Security, Conflict, and International Development.  I have still not found another use of tablet computers in distance learning like this one. One outcome I am seeing so far, is that it is not clear that sending students an iPad and giving them Amazon vouchers for ebooks is a successful way of giving everyone the ebooks they need. One person lives in a country to whom Amazon does not sell (Sudan) and so this student could not get the ebooks at all. One other comment by a student said that s/he was not yet in the habit of using the iPad for the readings. We will need to tease out the specific issues in upcoming evaluation.

Something else that has become clear to me: instructors and other staff need to know how to simply create learning materials that are optimised for mobile devices. I have begun to create some helpsheets, and post my first offerings here. Let me know if you have any comments!

Using Calibre to create ebooks for ereaders

Using Prezi to create map-based virtual tours

Terese Bird, Learning Technologist

Beyond Distance Research Alliance, University of Leicester

The first to provide a means where students can gain access to their data via their login. This is fundamentally straight-forward as students have AD accounts and My Timetable provides a means to pick up their course codes.

The second is more tricky. At present we do not have student course registration below the level of module codes, so ‘sets’ (seminar groups) are not presently defined within the student records system. This then will need to be a feasibility study to identify the requirements in at least data terms.

The third is the most difficult aspect of individual timetables and relates to course leads and tutors creating and maintaining this lower level information. A stakeholder analysis is required followed by some process modelling and probably some forms design.

Pulling all this together would be the final (integration) step and would involve a data load function to bring information into the student record system, linking this data to Scientia for timetabling purposes and then verifying that a student login will drive display of seminar/set information. Not difficult but there are several potential pitfalls along the way.

Second time around we reduced the scope of the project and looked at a potential ‘app’ approach to provide a ‘step change’, but a literature search showed that off-the-peg app solutions would be of dubious value for money.

Finally, we compared our original spec with the My Timetable product (which fits nicely with our Scientia infrastructure) and found as reasonable fit to much of our functionality shopping basket (although it doesn’t do everything we want).

We are now proceeding rapidly towards a solution so this first part of project looks to have broadly achieved useful objectives and satisfies the principal usability issue.

• JISC TechDis;
• JISC Service Design Findings;
• Learning from UCLAN project;
• The JISC CETIS Archi Tool software; and
• The Coventry Visio Template.

The following provides a summary of these resources and my views on them, in terms of their use in this project so far.

JISC TechDis

I used this resource to look at how the presentation of information can be made easier for the reader. The accessibility of information to the reader –particularly a reader that may have dyslexia for instance- is important in ensuring the SVAP will be as easy as possible to navigate. This resource provides useful information on how to set out documents; structure, styling, etc to the reader. University College Falmouth (UCF) has its brand set up in a style and structure that is consistent with the guidance provided, so as long as we use the UCF style on the SVAP we will fulfil best practice. On the downside, I found the website long winded to navigate, where I had to click through multiple pages to get to the guide information sections.

JISC Service Design Findings

The “Service Design in Higher and Further Education” briefing paper was particularly relevant to the SVAP project. It provides a best practice guide to mapping student facing services and the analysis of how well the service is performing. The idea is to take a student centric view when mapping the service and then break into further detail as required. Although not all the guide is relevant to this project it has provided a very useful guide with regard to the process mapping elements.

UCLAN Project

The UCLAN TISSUE project focuses on delivering better, more integrated student focused support services and has the similar objectives to my project. Through communication with Lucy Neilson and viewing the JISC project blog I was able to gain insight into the outcomes from this project so far. This has been useful to me in reaffirming the approach I have taken to mapping out the processes and also using the key points from the stakeholder workshop held by Lucy.

JISC CETIS Archi Tool

This software provides a set of business process objects and allows the user to produce visual representations of organisations, processes, IT systems, actors, roles etc –you name it. It’s a free open source cross-platform tool for Enterprise Architecture. I used this software in my project quite simply to map out the organisational structure surrounding the student services that I looked at as part of the “As Is” process mapping. In terms of the software capability, I’ve only used a small part of it, though I really like it styling a lot and relatively simple to use –has hints pane to provide information on the objects and their meaning. It’s similar to Microsoft Visio with more predefined objectives and connectors you could say. The only downside I found was the User Guide didn’t have a table of contents for its 100+ pages, so I couldn’t find specific information on its use when I wanted it.

Coventry Visio Template

The plan is to use this template to produce the “To Be” process(es) for my project, as part of my detailed requirements specification. The Coventry Visio Template uses Microsoft Visio as a medium and builds on the objectives that are available in the standard Visio set up. It allows the user to more easily visually describe a business process and attributes surrounding it (e.g. distinguishing manual and IT system process steps via icons and colouring). The template is useful in providing the reader with extra detail on how the process is run other that simply what is done in the process step. As a big user of MS Visio I think the template adds a lot to the picture and I really like this resource.

In principle this could be as simple as running a SQL extract on one or more tables and creating a de-normalised data source for loading into the eventual cube. In practice it means looking at each of the operational systems and trying to understand what the data is in each of the main tables of interest, how it is populated, what the shortcomings are and doing some out-of-the-box thinking about how we are likely to be using it when it is part of the ‘cube’.

Some of the issues raised so far are very much the same as one might ask about a relational database system: a person, isn’t the same as an applicant, and an applicant isn’t the same as an application. So how do we treat these dimensions / entities? What does it mean if there is not a one-to-one relationship (profound/not profound)?

More tricky is the time dimension though. Snapshotting operational databases and saving a slice of the data (that operational systems would overwrite) isn’t ‘it’ (at least not all of ‘it’). We want not only reliable, meaningful and robust trend data, but also want to be able to query ‘state change’ information efficiently down the line so how should we pick up and report changes that happen over time?

As this project is a pilot for other business areas and is not simply about prediction of student numbers we are also  trying to come with some general business rules that relate to building each dimension – and that does look tricky.

Fundamentally when one does reporting based on operational data the constraints drive report content, so if a senior manager or executive wants to know whether admissions for course X or Y are up or down on last year it’s down to running a SQL query on the student records system and attempting to construct a report that is ‘LIKE’ the one that was run at this point in last year’s cycle.

The pitfalls are (or should be) obvious. What does ‘like’ mean? When we talk about a particular milestone in the applications cycle – where is that point actually defined? Is it a clear cut point or is it ‘squidgey’ (fuzzy logic?)? What tolerances can we or should we allow? How does this affect the quality of reporting?

Having now gathered several issues that relate to terminology it is clear that we can only construct a meaningful Executive Reporting System around clear-cut, ‘hard’ definitions and these need to be ‘bought off’ at Executive level and implemented in the form of written norms and standards that are then applied to each of the operational systems that we intend to extract data from.

With all this in mind we have now started to construct what seems destined to become a suite of quality documentation backed by some for of Data Dictionary which will also need linking to the IT Change Management process but we are just at the start of the process and we are unclear as to what this might finally look like.

Contact Enterprise Architect, Nikki Rogers (nikki.rogers@bristol.ac.uk) for more information. You can also see some background information on the About page.

There was overall support for work so far, though meeting chair who is Director of Academic Services felt we need to think about a number of accompanying activities to help facilitate successful adoption. These include:

• Business Process review
• Impact analysis (partially done)
• Environmental impact analysis
• IT impact analysis

An interesting development that moves us outside our area of expertise, but there may be colleagues in Finance and IT Services that can help.

• It has become obvious that the a “topic” or “taks” needs to lead the user through the info kits … so this must be encoded.
• The concept of who, what, why, … are “taken” for a view of resources where these all belong together.
• The impostion of some ordering upon the user experience was seen as valuable, so now they “choose” a topic and then address the who, what, why … factors
• The marking-up of the resources is now a focus – the non-technical members of the team are to try the topic, who, what, why scheme in anger!

I also came out of the session with a couple of potential action points:

1. Write a blog post summarising my review of JISC resources that not only records which ones I used but also the rationale for not using as many as anticipated
2. Think about project deliverables: would, for example, a twitter tip sheet for those new to social media be a useful and sensible deliverable?

I’m particularly keen to think about deliverables which could help people new to social media. I became involved in this project because I already had a knowledge of social media from my personal experiences which could feed into the activities we need to undertake as a University to ensure we’re futureproofing the ways in which we engage with business. However, not everyone trying to undertake this sort of engagement is going to have that pre-existing knowledge which automatically puts them at a disadvantage. I’d definitely like that to be a problem which this project can help to address.

In total 12 focus groups were run and provided a great start to the qualitative data collection phase of Killawhats. Students were given the task of designing an energy visualisation for a specific environment and target user group. Examples were ‘Organisation & Management’, ‘Household & Teenagers’, and ‘University & Academics’. The task was designed to teach students how to run focus groups by practical example and to understand some of the issues in the target area of interest, in this case the design implications around designing effective energy consumption feedback for different environments and user groups.

We also introduced the Killawhats design challenge, slides below, to address the main research thread of Killawhats – to design a technology-led energy intervention for student halls. In the coming weeks our HCI students will be carrying out a range of user-centred design methods including focus groups and interviews. The data from these methods will directly contribute to Killawhats research and provide a large corpus of qualitative data to analyse and code.

Download (PPTX, 3.81MB)

We wrote to the project board to highlight that delaying the decision making till the next meeting could be a potential risk to the project and request they used the time scheduled for the meeting to comment on the documentation and advised that the receipt of no comments or objections would be taken as agreement.

The recommendations for agreement were; the new approach to presenting support services to students – the 6 key points of contact to refer students rather than trying to understand the full support system and the new PA system to be used as a pilot for a system for other services.

A leaflet will be designed to present the support services which can be emailed to all staff and presented to students through the student portal (distribution to be discussed).

The project also highlighted the need for service agreements with students, a practice already in place with some services where the student is sent written conformation after an interaction with a support service that in order to address their issue(s) the support services will undertake the following actions and the student is required to undertake the following actions so students expectations are managed and they are aware of their responsibilities.

As for the system an initial system has been developed to track student interaction with the new personal advisors.  The system tracks the type of issue the students has, if they are referred and to who and if the issue is resolved.  Although we are not in a position to roll this system out across services, a new benefit has been identified from the set-up of an online system to record student interaction with the Personal Advisors.  They are collecting invaluable feedback about all aspects of the university, which can easily be anonymised and reported on throughout the year.

If systems for other services are set up in a similar way we will be able to extract and collate data across the university.   In addition the systems will be able to who students are referred to and if the issue has been resolved, enabling UCLan to see if the correct referral process is in place.

We wrote to the project board to highlight that delaying the decision making till the next meeting could be a potential risk to the project and request they used the time scheduled for the meeting to comment on the documentation and advised that the receipt of no comments or objections would be taken as agreement.

At the last project board the project manager was asked to meet with the member of staff responsible for developing the email policy.  Having discussed this project and the TISSUE project with them, they agreed that there might be benefits to merging the policies for the TISSUE project, the SharePoint for Collaboration project and  the email policy into a single Unified Communications Policy.  The sections to be added to the policy have been developed.

In addition documentation guiding staff on the best practice for management meetings has been developed and the Digital Shift Team are now working with AQaSU to facilitate the Annual Monitoring process on SharePoint.  The approach for other SharePoint development  has been to develop a process for each School and a test School has been selected for which they will develop and refine the process, then will roll it out across the rest of the Schools.

We wrote to the project board to highlight that delaying the decision making till the next meeting could be a potential risk to the project and request they used the time scheduled for the meeting to comment on the documentation and advised that the receipt of no comments or objections would be taken as agreement.

The board were subsequently written to on the 16^th of October to note that no objections had been received and therefore the project will action the recommendations.

The recommendations cover a wide range of areas, such as; enhancing the initiation stage of projects to ensure they have a solid project structure including a business case, agreed scope and agreed resources. Only once this stage is complete will the project received sign off from the ISP Review Group to start the project.  The recommendations also included a review and clarification of the roles and responsibilities of project boards including the identification of the owner of the project output and their required role.  In addition cross over with other systems and processes is required to be identified as well as a review of communication of projects and the responsibilities of all staff involved.  There is also a recommendation to introduce principles that outline how the university operates as a whole, the rationale of the principles and the implication of them.  Finally the recommendations include the closure of projects with clearly identified owners and their responsibilities for benefit realisation, maintenance and future development requests.

The project team will now start to look at converting these recommendations to actions.

LJMU has had a Programme Office for a number of years and this has been located in the IT department. Predominately the Programme Office offered project and programme support to IT projects.

It was recognised that this approac with IT projects would benefit other areas of the University and hence the Strategy Support Office was formed. The SSO sits within the Office of the Vice Chancellor. Its main remit is to ensure that the University delivers against the Strategey and it works to continuously monitors and analyse acheivement of this.  Analytical data is then fed back to the Senior Management Team. It is hoped that not only will slippage be proactively identified and actions put in place to adjust performance, but also pockets of good practice can be spread across the organisation maximising the positive effect.

So what about “Doing Digital” ? Well now it has a more “corporate” home. Part of the inital work of the Strategy Support Office has been to identify all strategically important projects and map them against the Strategy. Projects and their contribution to delivery of the strategy will be clearly identified and their associated benefits stated. It is anticipated that this work will clearly define the impact that having digitally literate staff will have on the successful embedding and implementation of digital developments.

What we have been attempting to achieve
By linking this Transformations project to the University Research Computing Management (RCMG) we have been equally cursed and blessed (with apologies to Catatonia). The project has been given impetus and a group of senior researchers to become attached to, whilst also being given a series of deliverables and difficult deadlines.  My last blog post concerned one of these – an RDM brochure/leaflet. For the same deadline of 1 October 2012 (or more precisely “the start of term”) the task was to design and implement from scratch a new RDM website.

The brief
The brief was, importantly, discussed in some detail and agreed with the RCMG. To retain a grasp on the feasible it was agreed that the site would have the following characteristics:

1. At 1 October it would be considered an initial presence – “Phase 1” – a starting point for development, not a finished article.
2. This would exist to prompt ideas of what should be added and changed.
3. The site would rely heavily on existing sites and resources already available on-line rather than try and re-invent wheels.
4. It would have to be developed by a small group of people at “Phase 1”rather than being opened for wide consultation, and potential delay.
5. From 1 October 2012 we would move to “Phase 2”.
6. Phase 2 would include widening involvement and developing ownership of the site by researchers.
7. This would include developing more University specific and discipline specific content.

Our method
Key to progress was forming a small Working Group (5 people) including people from Academic Practice Unit, IT Services, Library, and Research Support Office.  Although this group had plenty of personal research experience (and thus scope for varying perspectives and opinions) from its first meeting retained a very focussed and positive, co-operative approach to meeting the objective and deadline set.

This felt like quite a shift from the norm – of wide/long consultation and consideration of many perspectives. It was accepted that to achieve something that was difficult, and in a short space of time (most of the work being done over a couple of months) there would have to be a very structured/regimented way of working.  It will be interesting to see the effect of this in the longer term.

Progress was also only possible as I was able to dedicate time – a product of this being recognised as important work, and associated with a funded project – to lead on content development, and passing content to other members of the group to comment on/edit.

In addition it was clear that if one person was expected to both generate structure content and actually develop the site in the local CMS, then it would not be possible to progress as hoped. In funding the assistance of someone to do the latter job, IT Services played a big part in helping to make the site a reality.

Initial work I undertook was to review existing web content and University sites, comparing and contrasting structure, content, look and feel etc.  The finished site as a result owes much to content from JISC, DCC, and the UK Data Archive, and to the University of Glasgow, and University of Cambridge in terms of structure and content.

Important decisions included the definition of four major phases of the research cycle around which site structure is organised. After much discussion, including with the PVC Research, we agreed on:

• Create
• Organise
• Keep
• Find & Share

Each phase was associated with a colour and an image which are intended as a logical and consistent themes – to be used also on our RDM brochure etc. (the images will be applied on the site as part of phase 2 development).

Thus, having shortened normal development methods, having very clear aims, and with co-operation from a small group of people (in the Working Group and beyond) who were clear in the need to go live to schedule, the site did so on 30 September 2012.

What happens now
First there is the need for sleep and to re-charge batteries…

With the go-live as a clear milestone rather than end point we have a very long Issue Log to manage and a Resource Log of content suggestions to develop or include.

On 12 October 2012 the RCMG approved the site and the need for Phase 2 development.

From this point there are many issues to address as we look to personalise the site (including representative researchers to introduce each research phase etc.), develop researcher ownership, create University and discipline-specific content, keep up to date with developments etc.  Key to this will be defining the responsibility for this and allowing effort.

To avoid confusion, and beyond normal communications channels we have set up a single contact point for RDM issues – researchdata@le.ac.uk.

We also have plenty of ideas about communicating about the site and RDM in general, and either developing specific training or including RDM issues within existing training.

Thanks to everyone who helped make this possible, either directly and knowingly, or indirectly and unknowingly by providing ideas or resources to link to.
Andrew

One of our own colleagues in Learning and Information Services (LIS) had asked her to pass on information to all the students and academic staff in her School via email. In fact, this request had gone to all 16 School Offices, despite there being a formal staff and (a separate) student e-newsletter for such purposes. This request confirms one of the complaints that came up in the TSAP workshops -  that it appears many staff around UCLan think that School Offices have a role to play as post-boxes. In logical terms, it might make sense to do this – because it is quicker for the individual initiating the email – but what a waste of time for the school office staff, who should be focusing on student support and academic administration.

We had a chat with all the Section Heads in LIS and asked them to clarify with their teams what the School Offices are there for. We’ve also given the School Office staff a standard reply if they get such queries in the future, which includes constructive and helpful ways for staff to deliver their own information to the right audience!

This experience is another example of how tiny requests received from multiple sources mount up and occupy staff time which should be focused on student support. We’ve added it to our TSAP roles and responsibilities document as an action that School Offices should not be doing!

• Leading UK Universities – those that top the Times and Guardian League Tables
• West Midlands Universities
• Post-1992 Universities – former Polytechnics awarded University title in 1992
• Business-facing Universities – those awarded the highest level of HEIF5 funding

This leaves me with a sample of around 70 Universities, plus the data I gathered before I realised I was going to scale the benchmarking down which I think is a reasonable cross-section of activity. Hopefully I should be able to get a blog post up with some results once I’ve finished my analysis so watch this space…

Just off to the HEA Networking Event in Birmingham for all those folk who also were successful in winning an Individual award this year. It will be interesting to see what links we might make.
Tim

The Paperlite build is almost complete and we’ll soon be ready for testing. Academic staff have yet to be trained but we’re hoping the solution will be so user friendly that little support will be required.

Admissions team at UCF have worked hard all summer with the prototype but inevitably there will be some change management once live. We’re all really excited about this new project especially as it links into an online application project due to go live this autumn. All this together should enhance the applicant experience, which can only be a good thing

Hoping my next update won’t be delayed next time, and by then we’ll be looking at ‘go live’ dates *fingers crossed*

Inaugural steering group meeting held with stakeholders to:

1. Agree Terms of Reference
2. Review the PID
3. Review the progress report.
4. Review the initial project plan
5. Identify pilot programme areas
6. Agree supplier engagement and steps for the tender process.

Members of the Steering group include the Director of Finance (senior sponsor), Director of Admissions (project lead), Project Consultant, Assistant Director of Finance Procurement & contracts (VfM and benefits), Student Union president, 4 academic representatives, 2 business operations representatives, corporate communications manager, international recruitment officer, HR advisor, secretary to Director of Finance.

Reporting Relationships were highlighted as follows: The Senior Sponsor is directly accountable to the Vice-Chancellor for the successful delivery of the Project. 

The Steering Group will have oversight and leadership of the Project. The Senior Sponsor will report on behalf of the Steering Group to the University’s Change Programme Scrutiny Panel. In addition to the accountability to the Scrutiny Panel, the Senior Sponsor will also ensure that any major issues of policy are considered and approved by the University’s Senior Management Team and/or the Academic Board and its committees, as appropriate.

The Vice-Chancellor will report the work of the Change Programme and the Scrutiny Panel to both the Senior Management Team and the Governing Body. The Steering Group has been established to provide oversight and leadership of the Online Applications Project. 

The Groups’ terms of references were agreed as follows:

• To provide strategic direction and guidance in the support of the overall Project;
• To ensure the Project is started up appropriately using a set of criteria, including financial, cost and benefit realisation, quality assurance and risk management standards;
• To ensure the successful delivery of the benefits and objectives as set out in the Project’s Project Initiation Document (PID);
• To ensure that the Project is delivered within the agreed budget and that necessary resources are applied effectively in delivery of the goals and objectives of the project;
• To ensure the Project is delivered within the agreed timeframe, actively monitoring and addressing progress against key milestones and targets as set out in the Project Plan;
• To ensure that risk management, change control and quality assurance are being managed effectively and reported transparently;
• To ensure that the all internal stakeholders, including students, are actively engaged in shaping and taking forward the Project in line with its overall goals and objectives;
• To ensure that an effective communication strategy is delivered which maximises engagement with stakeholders across the Change Programme;
• To receive from the Project Lead exception reports which reflect changes against the PID which would be considered to be outside an acceptable level of tolerance;
• To review the outcomes and to sign off satisfactory completion of each phase of the Project as articulated in the PID.

The PID was discussed and approved.

The progress report was received and noted.

The project consultant provided an overview of the project plan and the provisional completion deadline of December 2013.

It was agreed that the pilot areas should be:

•          Foundation Degree in Childhood Studies

•          Foundation Degree in Early Years

•          MSc Cardiology

•          MSc Clinical Reporting

Supplier engagement and invitation to tender

It is anticipated that a number of suppliers will be invited to present their system.  Following that, an invitation to tender will then be sent out.

 A workshop was held with stakeholders to:

1. define a 2 year vision for the Core Data set project
2. Support completion of the PID
3. Provide the foundation for further work to define priorities, work streams, milestones, dependencies and benefits.

The consultant’s report from Capita was used as background information.

From the workshop vision statements were created and refined. Following this potential deliverables were identified. It was concluded that the term ’Core Data Sets’ did not adequately cover the project. Consideration is being given to a more appropriate description.

The aim is to complete the PID for the project by end July, for approval by the Change Board.

When we created the Change Board in August, we anticipated that the Change Programme, and the Board, would naturally move through different phases and for that reason it was established for a year in the first instance.

During the first term, the focus for the Change Board was to understand the issues which most impact on the student experience and then to prioritise subsequent Change Programme activity. Earlier this year the Board took on a different role, overseeing the development of project initiation documents (PID) for each priority area.

Each project, with the exception of one, now has a PID and has been reviewed by the Board, effectively bringing the first phase of the Change Programme to an end.

The Board recognises that its current constitution needs to differ in order to support the next phase of the Change Programme’s work. From this point we will need to look at the programme at a granular level, identifying the key issues and inter-dependencies. As a result, I have decided to transform the Change Board into a smaller Scrutiny Panel which will be able to provide this level of detailed examination cost-effectively.

Recent bulletins have outlined the projects we’ve identified which are likely to have a high impact on enhancing the student experience. You will recall that we had identified what we called the first tranche of projects we were considering taking forward. There has been significant discussion at Change Board and SMT recently about the resources, both staff and financial, required to deliver these wide ranging ambitions. With this in mind, a decision has been taken to take forward the following projects in the coming financial year:

CLIC (which incorporates the upgraded virtual learning environment, CLIC Learn) and the Student Communication Portal

Core Data Set and Online Applications (including the Dashboard project)

Curriculum Management Tool

Individualised Student Timetables

Aspects of Teaching Quality and Academic Support

Change Programme

A major Change Programme is being led, across the University, by the Vice Chancellor. The primary focus of Change Programme is to provide our students with a consistently high quality experience which meets their needs and expectations at every stage of their journey. The Change Programme is successfully using student representatives on the Change Board, on its projects and as ambassadors for the Change Programme. The implementation of a Dashboard is one of the approved projects of the Change Programme.

During the early stages of the Dashboard project it soon became clear that although the quality of finance and HR management information was good, on a day-to-day basis the quality of student data was poor. The reasons for this were varied: the University has seen 10 years of very significant student growth and systems have not kept up with this growth; the student record system is primarily for BA/BSc with other programmes being “fitted” into the structure; the University has not worked with its supplier to improve the quality of the student system. It became apparent that the primary focus for student data was ensuring that this was accurate at Year End for the HESA returns. To this end a significant amount of work was being carried out, by the |University’s Planning department, in the weeks following year end to correct incorrect data. This took several weeks complete, and as a result student data, during the year, was not believed to be sufficiently accurate. Consequently, individual departments were keeping their own databases of student information which they regarded as being the correct ones. The change to the HE landscape has meant that accurate and timely student data has become vital to the future growth and sustainability of the University.

There were different opinions regarding whether it was better to:

i)             Start the Dashboard knowing that Finance and HR data were accurate and that student data was not in order to drive improvements to student data or

ii)            Improve student data before implementing the Dashboard

The concern was that if the first option were pursued this would lead to a lack of confidence in the Dashboard overall which would place that programme in jeopardy. The Change Board concluded that before driving forward the Dashboard programme it was essential to improve the quality of student data. A new project was established called the “Core Data Set”.  This project will determine:

• What is Core data?
• When should it be collected?
• How?
• For whom?
• How will the data be used?

The Core Data Set will also incorporate a project for On-line applications to be used for all non-UCAS applications (approximately one third of students). Assuming that data is accurately collected, validated and reported then the statutory returns will fall out from that same Core data set. The Senior Management Team (SMT) sponsor for the Core Data Set project, as well as for the Dashboard project, is David Leah (Director of Finance).

The methodology used for project management will be a combination of Prince2 and MSP.

Current situation:

A PID has been agreed for on-line applications; a draft PID has been written for the Dashboard project, which needs refining in light of the Core Data Set project. Stakeholders have been identified and a meeting set up to define the PID for the Core Data Set which will be completed by 19 July.

Timeline: it is anticipated that this will be a two year project; and that the Dashboard will be implemented at the end of the first year (September 2013) once student data accuracy has started to improve.

Use of JISC resources

1             The P3M3 resources are being used for the PID, Risk assessment and management, stakeholder analysis and benefit tracking.

2             A member of the Change Board has attended the Enterprise Architecture programme offered by the JISC transformation project and is utilising this knowledge at the Change Board meetings.

3             Change Management infokit.

Anticipated benefits of the Core data / Dashboard projects :

i)             Student experience. E.g. collaborative provision. One partner has excellent student registration processes and on-programme records but this is not matched by the University which has been a source of student frustration.

Programme directors will have more time to spend with students, thus improving the student experience, rather than on checking data.

ii)            Staff experience

Organisation & management of programmes will become a more manageable task, as a result, programme management should improve (reflected in NSS/USS scores)

Currently changes to data can only be carried out by the central Registry team which means that other staff do not feel engaged on the process.

iii)           Efficiency gains

Business process improvements – current duplication of data and keeping of local databases will be stopped

Time spent checking data in the Planning office will be significantly reduced.

Processes will be improved for both staff and students.

Dashboard may be used as a quality improvement tool.

In two year’s time what will tell us whether the project has led to improvements overall?

1             NSS/USS scores will have improved

2             The recent staff survey was very positive about the benefits of working for the University. One less positive point was that many areas feel that their workloads are unmanageable. A good benchmark of improvement is that this would be improved.

3             Programme Directors’ workloads would improve as there will be a reduction in data validation/ duplication of data.

4             Programme directors will have more time available for students

Consultancy Report received

The report highlighted the following:

1   Current data issues

A number of factors have combined recently to make data a much more significant challenge:

•   The University has grown very fast in terms of its size, the complexity of its programmes and in its partnership working with other organisations

•   The external reporting requirements from HESA and others are becoming increasingly onerous and new reporting requirements are introduced at short notice

•   Data quality is causing difficulties within academic programmes, particularly for programme directors and administrators

•   Data quality has, on occasions, begun to negatively impact external reporting requirements

•   The development of the University’s decision-making processes using contemporary MIS techniques such as dashboards is being held back by data quality.

It is nevertheless important to record that the University has an “excellence” rating for its data from external bodies such as HEFCE and Grant Thornton.

This study found a widespread conviction across the University that urgent action was now essential on data quality.  This study found that staff were universally expressing frustrations with data quality. The study encountered no one who believed the data quality issues would be easily addressed.  Most expressed the issues as being complex.  There was a substantial view that action was needed and that it was now urgent.  None of those working to contain the consequences of data quality issues were expressing anything other than a willingness to continue the, at times, heroic efforts that were currently underway.1

2     Data issues identified in workshops & interviews

2.1         Issues Around the Design of DataSets

There is a perception that the excellence achieved in HESA returns is due more to good people and their conscientiousness rather than good systems and processes. Data quality is becoming more important to the capture of income for the University through such areas as recording accurately the students’ socio-economic group, disability, home versus foreign student status, etc.  Accurate data can also affect the public data that students will be using to compare universities and make decisions on their choice of course. The central datasets are not sufficient for programmes and are not trusted.  So local datasets within departments, within programmes and held by individual staff members are duplicating and extending the core student and curriculum datasets in QL. Local datasets have become a substitute for accurate central datasets and also reduce the importance of a reliable core dataset at corporate level.                 Additionally the core data schema (or models) within QL is limiting the university now and needs urgent development. Although Gold data is derived from the QL application, people do not understand it and it is viewed as inaccurate and distrusted.

There appear to be opportunities to improve data capture to make it both easier and more accurate.  Examples suggested would include the methods and processes for exam board decisions to be input into QL.  Also better use of field validation rules and data completeness checks could help. There is a broad understanding that data accuracy as a raw percentage is probably quite high. There is also acknowledgement at programme levels that students are not necessarily well motivated to ensure data is accurate, for example around withdrawals.

2.2         Issues Around Data Management Processes

Data amendments or queries are taking more time to be processed by Registry functions than people expect and need.  There is a perception (not measured) that changes are sometimes delayed or on occasions are not made.  No criticism of Registry staff was made.  There is a perception that the capacity for staying on top of data changes within Registry has not kept pace with growth.  Several people commented that Registry staff appear overworked and cited that as the reason for changes to data taking too long. There are considerable efforts being made from Registry functions and within programme administration to check core data on students and curricula.  Although this effort is substantial it does not lead to confidence in the QL and Gold datasets.  Although not quantified, the cost in people’s time and in management attention of data checking is very significant and rising. When faculty and administrators are creating programme reports the data is not sufficiently up to date and accurate. This leads them to work with their own local datasets.

2.3         Issues Around IT Applications for Capture, Storage & Reporting of Data

The data model within QL no longer contains the full complexity of CCCU programmes.  An example is the recording of student placements. The complexity of students’ pathways seems to overwhelm the QL dataset.  Similarly for partnerships for programme delivery. Some additional functionality is also needed within QL for data quality such as being able to change Gold data once it is found to be innaccurate . The standard reports off QL are not sophisticated enough for most people now.  More needs to be done with the reporting tools available from QL (or with supplementary reporting tools). The BlackBoard VLE is becoming more important.  Integration between Blackboard and QL will become very important. Senior managers, Deans and Programme Managers have a range of decision-making needs that they are not able to pursue with the current datasets and data quality.  This includes the wider use of reporting and dashboards

2.4         Issues Around the Governance of Data Assets

There is a perception that data quality investments and focus are being driven by the needs of external organisations more than the importance of accurate data internally. This study found that concerns were commonly held across the university and at all levels. There is a good level of awareness that data and data quality are significant issues.              

2.5         Analysis of the Issues

A wide range of issues have been identified in the study.  It is important to acknowledge that these are the sorts of issues that are common to most organisations at this time.

Because the issues are shared by most organisations some outline proposals for each of the major areas follow.

3          DEFINING CORE DATASETS

3.1         Develop a Model or Architecture for the Core Datasets of the University

A model could be developed of the data elements needed to meet the needs of the university, its programmes and external stakeholders.  This would be more than the data currently within QL as it would include:

•          All the needs of programmes

•          Extending the data sets to include new areas like attendance & student experience

•          MIS data needs for reporting & dashboards at University & programme levels

Developing the model would need the services of a data or business systems analyst.

The model would be developed for implementation within QL and this would need collaboration with Unit 4.The model would have the specific aim of replacing all the local datasets in all programmes, once implemented. The model would need to identify those data elements critical to the University’s performance like student experience and maximising income.  Data elements would need to include the required levels of accuracy needed for the performance of the University.

Once completed the core data model would be agreed with departments, the Data Integrity Board and SMT and would become a core policy document of the University.  This model will develop over time as the University develops and will need maintenance.

3.2         Progressively Implement the Data Model/Architecture

Once developed the core model would be used to develop plans for developing the core data assets of the university and exploiting those assets.  This is likely to involve a programme of developments that could include improvements to the databases within QL; Development of supplementary datasets to add to those in QL; Improving the data quality of core datasets (including Gold data) and ensuring that new requirements for data elements are managed through the mode.

4          OPTIMISING CAPACITY WITHIN DATA MANAGEMENT FUNCTIONS

4.1         Reviewing the Workloads & Capacities within Registry Data Functions

Business process analysis of the data collection, input, checking and reporting to determine the extent of delays and bottlenecks along with their consequences.  From this the case for further resources would be determined.  This analysis needs to also examine ways in which work can be reduced or eliminated or automated. 

4.2         Identifying Improvements to Data Capture to Reduce the Need for Checking & Corrections

Business analysis along the data life cycle to progressively identify process improvements that will substantially reduce or eliminate the need for the data checking and corrections that occur. This will need to focus on the most costly areas first and, as they are reduced, to move onto other areas and eliminate the problems that generate the need for data checking. 

5          IMPROVING QL

5.1         Creating an IT Strategy for QL

Develop a three to five year strategy for the development of Agresso QL.  This is predicated on the assumption that QL is the best application for the University. To determine this, discussions will be needed with Unit 4 Business Software to understand the capacity of the technical architecture and their willingness to develop their system.  The case for using QL appears strong given:

•          The University’s current investments in QL and in Agresso Financials

•          The recent good track record of working with Unit 4

•          The University’s leadership position within the Agresso user community

•          The core technical platform used by Unit 4 being MS SQL and .Net which is an up-to-date technology and should offer relatively cheap and flexible development

The QL IT strategy will need to develop a plan for the development of the QL application and its core datasets as the key strategic application of the University.  The strategy should include:

•          Implementing the core dataset model/architecture

•          Sorting out known data issues such as the Gold data

•          Addressing known deficiencies with QL’s performance and functionality

•          Developing QL (or identifying additional applications) to address new data and functionality in areas such as attendance and student experience

•          Exploiting the reporting functionality better and its integration with SAS and dashboards

•          Ensuring that a development path is planned for QL and Agresso Financials to integrate with the Blackboard VLE

The QL IT strategy would need to provide a development programme and investment case for SMT approval.

6          GOVERNANCE

6.1         Increasing the Governance Over Core Datasets

An increase in senior management capacity to address the challenges facing the core data will be essential.  Longer term this could be through accountability for data being taken on by a member of SMT.  In the short term, consideration should be given to a temporary senior role to act as a focus for accelerating the investments of time and resource into datasets and data quality. One option would be to appoint an interim Data Quality Programme Manager.

A review could also be usefully conducted to check that the roles of SMT, the Data Integrity Board, Departmental Management Teams and Programme Management roles are sufficient to create a holistic and formalised governance mechanism for data.

6.2         Reporting on Data and Data Quality

Periodic reporting on core datasets, their quality and the development of this asset should be designed.  This needs to align with the leadership and governance structure for data.  And this should include high level reporting for the SMT on a periodic basis.

6.3         University Policy on Data

Many universities have formal policies covering data.  The development of formal policies at CCCU would provide guidance to the University and help position data as a strategic asset.

7          NEXT STEPS

1.         The contents of the report should be circulated to key stakeholders for data for review.

2.         A workshop of the key stakeholders for data should review the study’s findings and its suggested improvements to form a plan of action on data for the University.  This will need to subsequently include resource implications and a business case.

3.         The plan of action on data will need to be agreed formally within the University’s governance.

4.         The plan of action will then need to be operationalised as a dedicated change programme or as a set of actions effected within accountable functions.

Consultancy for improvement of student data quality

Following the agreement of the key lines of enquiry, these have been expanded as follows:

Aim 1: Understand the data quality issues for student data and programme data and gather insights into the systemic and root causes

• What are the issues with data quality in student and programme applications and what is the scale of the opportunities for improvement?
• What functions, processes, applications, technologies, etc appear to be causing these issues and what are the dynamics of their impact on data quality?
• Are there areas where data quality is being achieved but at significant difficulty or cost or risk?
• When these issues don’t occur in student and programme data or in other datasets what appears to be enabling this? What seems to lead to success?

Aim 2: Understand the high level benefits case for addressing data quality issues and capture ideas and proposals for change

• What business and operational objectives would be supported by delivering these data improvements ? And roughly the economic size of the improvements that would result?
• Are there areas of improvements that are critical? And what are the timelines for these?
• What would be the long term vision for student and programme data?
• What improvements have been tried, implemented already or are planned?
• Are there known (or strongly indicated) solutions and how effective would they be?

Aim 3: Understand the implementation context and challenges that would shape solutions and change management

• What is the governance and ownership for the datasets for students and programmes? And what would be their role in proposed improvements?
• How would we describe the capabilities on data quality in the context of making improvements and embedding them (e.g. skills, techniques, technology tools, applications functionality)?
• Would measuring and reporting on data quality for some of these key data sets be helpful?
• Are there any organisational, political or change management areas that improvement initiatives need to pay attention to?

Aim 4: Gather related opportunities or needs for improvements in data

• Are there more general improvements to data assets and their management that are directly or indirectly important to this study?
• Are there areas that this study hasn’t directly addressed but does need to?
• Are there additional questions the study should have asked about?

Consultants have been employed to review existing data documenting “Key Lines of Enquiry” for the sponsors, key stakeholders and interviewees.

The aims of the work are to address the key areas typically needed to transform data quality issues being:

• Current position on data quality and data issues
• Known or suspected causes for data issues
• Context for data issues, particularly relevant business and operational objectives
• Position that needs to be reached on data quality
• Business benefits from improvements
• Known or proposed solutions
• Governance for data
• Data tools and capabilities available or planned
• Measures for data quality
• Barriers and enablers to change

The key lines of enquiry are:

Aim 1: Understand the data quality issues for student data and programme data and gather insights into the systemic and root causes

Aim 2: Understand the high level benefits case for addressing data quality issues and capture ideas and proposals for change

Aim 3: Understand the implementation context and challenges that would shape solutions and change management

Aim 4: Gather related opportunities or needs for improvements in data

SMT and Change board have been asked to consider whether it would be better to:

1)    implement the system knowing that student data was not completely accurate but using the system to drive forward changes to the quality of data with the potential downside that  this might lead to a lack of confidence ion the system itself.

• or

2)    whether to concentrate initially on improving the quality of student data even though this would lead to a delay in the project.

It has been agreed that effort will be put into improving the quality of this data as part of this project.

The Project sponsor and Project Lead have been identified. Work has commenced on the specification for improvement of the quality of student data. This will form part of the overall BI Dashboard project but will be carried out in advance.

A first deliverable to be delivered is a University of Leicester RDM leaflet. Sounds trivial when you write it.  In reality it has been an interesting exercise as it has been produced by a small group including people from IT Services, Library, Academic Practice Unit and Research Support Office.  What exactly to say in such a small document was a challenge.  In the end we decided upon a question – “What would you do if you lost your research data tomorrow?“ - and a challenge – to take a “research data health check”.

Visually we are pleased with the result – its not the easiest thing to make research data management an eye-catching thing. What we did was to define phases of the research cycle (like a number of the University RDM websites) and associate them with an image and a colour.

We are now starting to distribute the leaflets to researchers and research students and looking at how to measure impact.

The University of Leicester RDM leaflet can be found at www.le.ac.uk/researchdata.

2nd October 2013

• active listening / questioning through the use of 'clean questions' http://youtu.be/LLE7l0AEBWY
• using the JISC Working with IT vignettes and case study protocol
• the shape of the SEDA ELT programme given these activities

1. for people to work in partnership to embed learning technologies
2. about changing working practices and how we can support people to do this
3. about linking professional development to other HR processes around changing roles - we will need to know what else is on offer to people so that they can plan their CPD

The full link to the article is available from here

UCLan has a strong practice of delivering teaching and learning material through its virtual learning environment (BlackBoard), adopting a blended learning approach where appropriate. One of the initiatives involved in developing online materials is the sharing of re-useable learning objects, e.g. teaching material that is developed by one course team but may be adapted and used by others. Part of this includes a significant volume of audio/visual media that is made available to students for teaching purposes, but which falls under copyright legislation – which academics need to get/give approval for.

Employing TSAP principles, we discussed the current process for getting approval for filming copyright with academic and administrative staff and identified that the current process was not only laborious but often delayed final content being released to students.

Using feedback from schools, our copyright expert, and our Digital Services Filming Team we were able to identify and implement a much improved and streamlined process which uses existing information held in the help desk system (from when the original request was made to film a lecture).

This has:
- dramatically reduced the steps in the process
- enabled content to reach students much more quickly
- reduced the amount of chasing the Digital Services Team have to do to get the requisite signatures
- and ensured copyright compliance

Simple changes leading to a simple and much improved process!

This is what it looks like:

We’re pleased with our success in bidding for an HEA Individual Teaching Development Grant. This will support a project to engage potential end users – students, prospective students and employers – in our process to design flexible forms of postgraduate provision appropriately aligned to their needs: Implementing Student and Employer Engagement in Developing Flexible Learning (I-SEED-FL).

It also fits neatly with our over-arching Flexible Learning Project here at The University of Bath and alongside our JISC funded FLeXchange project, providing academic staff development for flexible teaching.

All three projects are responding to the anticipated changes in postgraduate student needs - the impact of increased student debt from higher undergraduate fees, demand for work-relevant courses and competition from international providers on the demographic of UK postgraduate students over the next 3-5 years. We propose that students will be increasingly mature, in employment, studying remotely and requiring flexible provision. Aligning learning outcomes to work-related objectives and employer needs will be crucial to remain relevant and this fund this HEA funded project will explore evidence-based approaches applicable across disciplines and institutions.

It’s great to have these three projects complementing each other, enabling us to take an holistic approach to our overall aim of exploring and developing a protocol for the delivery of postgraduate education through flexible delivery modes.

Find out more about I-SEED-FL on this page.

• The collection is completely unsorted comprising the contents of a number of PCs
• The size of the collection makes it impossible for us to  survey it manually
• There is very little descriptive metadata – no meaningful titles; dates have been recorded as the date the collection was copied over to the archives; and there are no details of authors so it is difficult to know what has been created by the depositor and what is third-party content
• There is a huge amount of duplication including exact duplicates, and numerous versions of the same ‘record’ often with very little difference in the content
• All this means we also have very little knowledge about the over-arching content of the archive making it difficult to provide even a collection level description and promote the collection with users.

So where to start? As archivists we know what we need to do to make the collection accessible, and with a paper collection we would physically sort it. But this is much more difficult with an electronic collection and, to be honest, we don’t have the technical knowledge and skills to make it happen. SPRUCE, a current JISC project looking at building the business case for digital preservation, has been working to help practitioners (i.e. archivists, curators and librarians) overcome these problems by holding a series of ‘Mash-Up’ events that bring together information professionals and technical developers  (Rebecca Neilsen has written an excellent post about what the event involves).  I recently attended the London Mash-Up and took a sample of this collection along with me.

By the end of the three days the developers I was working with had created a number of solutions to the problems outlined above. They started by using Apache Tika to extract descriptive metadata from the collection. From here they were able to create word clouds of single words, two worded terms (bi-grams) and three worded terms (tri-grams) (which didn’t work so well); overarching dates of the collection; names of individuals and organisations; and file formats. This enables the archivist to start writing a broad description of the collection and it was good to see that the terms that were pulled out of the collection were what I would’ve expected – but would find it very difficult to do from a blank slate.

Perl scripts were then used to aid the daunting task of appraising the collection. The first approach was to search for keywords in filenames to find all the files of a similar title creating a filepath list which can then be used to manually locate the files and check for absolute duplicates or versions of the same record. This does mean you need to have an idea of where there is potential duplication and what the file titles are but this can be done by a quick survey of part of the collection and then automating the search across the whole of the collection. Probably my favourite solution was using checksums; normally used to see if a file has been changed, we used them to find absolute duplicates. Again, a list of the filepaths is created that the archivist can use to manually destroy files. There is also potential for this stage to be automated but, in the meantime, the creation of these lists certainly beats going through 76.5k files one by one searching for duplicates from memory.

To capture all this work and make it available to others facing similar problems the SPRUCE project team have developed a wiki to record information on the problems, technical developments, solutions and the work of practitioners who used the three days to beging thinking about building a strategic plan for digital preservation at their own organisations. All the information from the London event is available here and anyone specifically interested in the technical work carried out on the collection I took should have a look at Peter Cliff’s description of the solution they adopted.

So after three days we now have a better knowledge of the tools required to begin work on sorting the collection to eventually make it available. We also have a better understanding of what steps we need to take to formalise policies and procedures for the Transformations project. And the best thing is that all this information is freely available to other information professionals facing similar dilemmas.

Whilst in the very early stages of development ‘SAM’ has been central to the thoughts of staff at Keele for some time.  This, though is where the hard work really begins.

Keele students, just like those attending Universities across the country, are busy.  This generation of student balance classroom activities alongside 1-2-1s with staff (personal tutors, lecturers etc), group work with fellow students, individual study and research. They may also be working, perhaps on campus or at the University or perhaps a couple of bus rides away. They may be playing for a sports club, have family commitments or be commuting from distance. 9-5pm is not necessarily an option for them to ’pop in’ and see us smiley Student Services staff - just as we scowl when we can’t get to the bank on the weekday, students may feel the same sense of frustration when considering how to access our services.  For us, the solution is on-line banking.  For them, there is a need for increasingly sophisticated, accessible services that are open…whenever!    That is where the ’SAM’ project comes in.

SAM, a virtual human in the form of an avatar, will ‘talk’ to students in real-time. SAM will offer students a sophisticated range of support and information services, which will ensure an intuitive and effective response to questions or issues raised. Students will be guided by SAM to determine their needs and to provide an appropriate range of solutions at a time and location that works for them.

We are  working with student support professionals and students to identify topics that will be of most relevance to the widest range of students studying in Higher Education in England. We’ll update on our progress made with this shortly.  This two-year project, funded by Keele, JISC, and the Leadership Foundation with HEFCE, will focus on the development of the information and guidance which will allow for a range of different questions and discussions between the SAM and individual students.

We see this blog as being of utmost importance to the success of the project. Various stakeholders will contribute, ensuring that the project is considered, reviewed and reflected from all angles. Colleagues working in Student Services, those with responsibility for the technical development of ‘SAM’ and, most importantly, our students who are central to the project will all be updating the blog regularly to ensure that colleagues across the sector are kept close to the progress that we are making to create what we hope will be a significant aid for Universities to deliver effective, intuitive and innovative student support services.

For this project (and the TISSUE) project there have been a few recommendations come out about communicating unavailability and the use of technology to facilities processes more efficiently. This project could develop individual policies for this project, however there is the risk they would contradict or duplicate each other.  In addition if numerous policies were created the likelihood of staff accessing them and reading them is very small.  Therefore the project is seeking to embed the policies required in a single policy governing communication and collaboration in UCLan – the Unified Corporate Communication Policy.

The next project board on the 9^th of October will provide the direction for the rest of the project.

There were a lot of interesting discussions during the action learning set.  One in particular was useful for this project.  All the projects are making good progress and we discussed in general about how projects progress in higher education and how there are often periods of in activity where it looks like the project is stalling, yet then there are surges of activity where the project suddenly progresses and a lot is achieved.  We discussed what the causes for this were, some of the suggestions were that many projects in HE are not done by dedicated project staff but staff who also have to continue with their day to day jobs and as we are all aware there are periods during the academic cycle that are very busy . Other suggestions where that we perhaps do not consider the bigger picture, or undertaken scoping or feasibility initiatives at the start of the project, so barriers are identified during the project that could have been identified and address at the start.  It was also noted that the recruitment process can be quite slow in the HE sector and often if a project is waiting to recruit staff it came suffer delays.  We didn’t come up with any conclusions as such but it was quite a though provoking discussion and as I say linked very well with Business Upgrade as these are some of the issue the project is looking at.

The TISSUE project is progressing quite well.  We are at a key stage where there are a collection of recommendations made for a way forward, which we will be looking to the project board to make on the 9^th of October. As this was identified by the questioning of the group to be a key requirement to keep the project progressing on track, I was asked how I was going to ensure the project board are aware of the decisions required from them prior to the meeting and my action was to ensure that the decisions were clearly highlighted. Therefore the projects update distributed to the board will have the requested decisions clearly highlighted.

The next action learning set is at UCLan in January to allow us to have a face to face update.

During the TSAP project scoping meeting with school administrative staff we noted that some of the help desk and IT support business processes didn’t work properly because students were referred from the help desk to other services without any named member of staff taking responsibility for their issue. This meant that sometimes issues might have been lost track of or weren’t resolved satisfactorily, forcing students to re-report them or contact their School Offices.

To try and resolve this – which would remove a burden from the School Offices and also improve student experience – we undertook a review of the help desk, using feedback from a number of customer sources:
- the feedback from our TSAP group
- our Student Liaison Officers (student representatives)
- from staff working on the help desk itself
- and also by analysing external benchmarking data

As a result of the feedback, we worked with our Customer Service Team (CST) to completely restructure the help desk service, developing 1st, 2nd and 3rd line support structures to effectively manage the call and email volumes, improving provision to both students and staff.

Our 1st line support can now deal with the ‘straightforward’ high volume queries e.g. password re-sets, requests to borrow equipment, online enrolment queries that can be managed immediately etc – helping students and staff quicker – which leaves 2nd and 3rd line staff free to deal with more complex queries in an account management style. These complex queries now have a named individual who monitors progress and is responsible for ensuring the call is dealt with and closed satisfactorily.

Since implementing these changes, CST have reduced the abandoned call rate from 3.6% to 0.3%, improved customer satisfaction from 88% to 90% and reduced the call waiting time from 14 seconds to 7 seconds.

In keeping with our theme of making regular small improvements CST now also identify repeat queries (where more than one caller contacts the help desk about the same issue) and review those processes. This has for example, significantly improved the way we manage the production and delivery of library cards to students at the beginning of term – in turn reducing the number of queries to School Offices.

The project sponsor is now looking at the requirements that need to be put in place for the new SVAP IT system that will also provide the support to The Compass staff and other agreed services to allow them to manage their processes. When the requirements and services have been consulted on the new arrangements further lower level analysis and requirements gathering will be undertaken in order to develop/configure the IT system.

The case studies I presented on, however, made use of the out-of-class benefits of tablet computers. I describe each in a nutshell:

1) Mummies: University of Leicester Museum Studies masters students take field trips to such destinations as the British Museum. After the trip, students report back, group by group, and discuss as a class. Using cleverly-designed Powerpoint shows on Windows tablets, instructors gave students video interviews with British Museum academics and other learning material. Carrying the tablets around the museum, students viewed and learnt from the material while standing before the actual artefacts, took notes and photos, and created presentation reports in time for a 10am deadline next morning. The project has been felt to be a great success and plans are underway to create material for further, different field trips.

2) War Zones: University of Leicester Criminology students of the online Masters in Security, Conflict and International Development are each sent an iPad and instructed to download the free app (yes, you can download it too! It’s called SCID).  The app serves multimedia learning material which works on the iPad whether or not there is an internet connection, which is key because for their day jobs these students are visiting refugee camps or living in a submarine for weeks at a time. Early feedback is overwhelmingly positive for both iPad and app.

3) Pompeii: In the Porta Stabia project and the Quadriporticus Project (directed by Steven Ellis of University of Cincinnati and Eric Poehler of University of Massachusetts, and in which some of our University of Leicester Archaeology colleagues joined in the research), iPads were taken into the ruins of Pompeii to process photographs of the ruins and overlay archaeological layers. iPads were also used as field notebooks in every way, including receiving data into Filemaker Pro to be later synced with data collected by all iPads. The end result was an efficiency increase of 371% plus other benefits.

These case studies illustrate the power of mobile outside of the classroom, in what I refer to as situated and on-the-go learning. I’m especially interested in this kind of use of mobile devices; please comment if you know of any other great case studies along these lines.

Terese Bird, Learning Technologist and SCORE Research Fellow

Preliminary ideas were summarised. Our ideas so far include …

Kim Thomas in The Guardian, Tuesday 10 July 2012 reported on ‘Innovations in ICT teaching: a Guardian roundtable debate’ in which it was suggested by a contributor that Digital literacy ‘covers a spectrum of skills, from the ability to use simple applications at one end to the ability to write computer programs at the other. Other mid-level skills, such as using HTML to create websites, fall in between’.

I wonder where students like, my daughter currently at university, fall in to the computer literacy spectrum.

WhatsApp (app on my mobile to text message for free), conversation as follows;
>Do you know what an absolute cell reference is in Excel?
>Yes all the cells in the column/row added together isn’t it?
>No
>Do you know what html tags are?
>Isn’t that just the link that takes you to the website
>I think you confusing HTML with URL!
>Are you in the Pub!
>NO!
>Skype you later – bye

OMG my daughter is short of mid-level skills LOL. Is she merely proficient and not literate? A bit harsh making this assumption I suppose, but as she’s currently starting her third year of study on a scholarship at Harvard doing stem cell research so I’m not too worried.

It also illustrates how the primary use for the app i.e. a base level of everyday communication with my daughter using software ‘proficiently’ has been established, but raises questions.  Is there potential for it to be developed to a different purpose? Has it possible educational value? Tibor Koltay, Szent István University, in his article: The media and the literacies: media literacy, information literacy, digital literacy illustrates how awareness of digital technologies, is acquiring crucial importance.

Where employability is concerned, and an uncertain future for many students this importance cannot be overstated and for the first time in my experience IT training at a university, the relevance of digital skills to employability is possibly reflected in student numbers wishing to attend IT training. In the past marketing the IT sessions we provided was seen to be a problem. Classes were not filled and this was often thought to be because students were unaware. Drop in offerings were always under populated. Now we are experiencing a new problem, turning people away. It may be that we are now offering accredited training, or it may be that we are offering accredited training for free, or that Microsoft Office Specialist and Adobe Certified Associate qualifications are seen to be relevant and worthwhile. It may be that students paying large fees see the worth of adding value where they can, whatever the reasons it’s a good problem so far.

www.westminster.ac.uk/traininginfo

A meeting with Newcastle University colleagues arranged for October 10 and plan to organise a workshop for early 2013 to demonstrate the progress we have made with the tool once Phase One pilot completed and evaluated.

Inductions around the University

Individual attendees at the focus groups were asked to talk  about how library inductions operated at their own institutions. This exercise revealed that induction practices varied widely across different libraries. Some librarians only had 8 minutes to talk about their libraries, others had significantly longer and were able to offer tours. Both College and Bodleian librarians were, on the whole, not clear about what information students received in each others inductions. It was clear that there was a desire not to duplicate content or give students irrelevant information but that much better communication and ‘joined up thinking’ was needed between Colleges and the Bodleian Libraries. We felt that this was a particularly important issue and that the development of the mobile induction project will provide a catalyst for improving the way in which information is communicated between College and Bodleian libraries. It was also suggested that a set of ‘minimal requirements’ for inductions could be established to ensure consistency, but which would also allow libraries to incorporate information on unique local services.

Discussions of induction practices also revealed that staff, like students in our previous focus groups, regard physical inductions where students meet library staff as extremely important. It was noted several times that a useful aspect of physical inductions was that students should meet a friendly and helpful member of staff and know exactly who to contact for further assistance.

Another issue identified as a problem with inductions was the amount of staff time they occupy.

Mobile Induction structure

The draft structure for the mobile induction was presented to attendees at each focus group and participants were asked to comment on it.  In the larger focus groups we gave participants a carding exercise in which they were asked to rearrange menu items printed on separate slips into an order they felt was more appropriate. At the end of the sessions, changes to menu arrangements were recorded as were additional categories and suggested changes in wording. After all the groups had been completed, the results were collated and we looked for consensus in the arrangements of the menu items. This led to numerous changes in the finished arrangement of the induction and refinements of wording.

We will now be able to use the finished induction structure as the basis of our final specification.

Another theme that came out of the focus groups was the enthusiasm of librarians for the Mobile Induction project and the belief that it would be a valuable addition to their own inductions. Librarians indicated that they would be very willing to promote the Mobile Induction to their students.

The fayre was held in the Engine Shed with the sustainability stall taking up a nice position near the entrance, just across from the ‘wineless’ cheese and wine society stall and a number of other interesting societies. Sadly the ‘Rock’ society wasn’t of the geological variety. Students from official accommodation could register their interest for both projects and ask questions on what our respective projects are planning to roll out.

Engagement with students is at the core of Killawhats and we look forward to working with the Switch Off team in the future. Any collaborative activities with both projects will be posted up here, so remember to check back, or keep an eye on our tweets for updates.

Derek

At the TSAP workshop, a few Schools reported difficulty in updating their web presence and lack of clarity about which team they should contact for help. With recruitment obviously being of extreme importance – and our students self serving via info from the website – currency of information is key and can help reduce enquiries into the School Office. This was also one of the more typical examples of Schools never being able to work out the ‘right’ person to talk to to resolve an issue, getting the answer ‘I don’t do that/That’s not my job’; being passed from pillar to post.

We tried to find a definitive answer for the Schools and clear up the problem – and found that, even within our own Service, answers weren’t that easy to find.

Because of the way the university is structured, different parts of the university’s web systems are controlled by different teams across different Services. Trying to understand the subtle differences between these teams and their activities, and then explain them to Schools in a way that is easy to understand (we drew up a flow chart that can be used for multiple scenarios) was difficult; especially since it was exacerbated by some internal restructures.

As a result of this, we’re trying to make the communication channels between Services and Schools more open – particularly when communicating change. More importantly, it’s again highlighted that Schools are not seen as “customers” by Services and in the same way we consider how our service delivery affects students – an attitude change that’s being helped by TSAP.

Our four next steps are as follows:

1. Conclude Benchmarking Exercise and Analyse Data Gathered
This will give us a firm idea of how exactly Coventry University compares to all the other UK Universities in the field of social media use, particularly for business interactions, as well as giving us some idea about best practice. This will be complete by October

2. Conduct Focus Group with Core Stakeholders
This will provide us with an initial set of views about how well the University currently interacts with business and some feedback on how businesses would like to communicate with us. This will be conducted in November and analysis from this focus group will be used to develop a more detailed questionnaire.

3. Conduct Questionnaire with Wider Stakeholder Groups
The questionnaire will allow deeper analysis of the University’s current position in this field and how it is currently perceived by it’s industry partners. The questionnaire will also allow us to get some more detailed feedback about how businesses would really like to communicate with us and how they would like to see us communicating. This will take place after the focus groups, allowing us to have the analysis complete by January.

4. Develop Social Media and New Technology Marketing Tools
This will take place in parallel with the focus group and questionnaire exercises and will include the following:

• Developing content to enable integration of Aurasma Technology into relevant business-facing marketing materials
• Integration of Social Media such as Twitter, LinkedIn etc into Coventry University’s new website platform
• Identification of a specific business-facing team to trial the techniques mentioned above as well as look at additional social or technological marketing tools e.g. e-publishing, mobile applications etc

This will hopefully be complete by January so that we can start looking at real-life trials of various technologies with University partners and staff.

I’m really looking forward to getting into the focus group and questionnaire stage of the project as it will be really exciting to have some evidence about what businesses think about the way we currently communicate with them and what they would like to see from us in the future. This will allow us to shape the testing stage of the project – where we actually use different social and technological tools to interact with businesses.

In the session, Jenny asked who would be happy to be called a “Digital Archivist”. Being the only person in the room to raise their hand got me thinking. Now I wouldn’t say my job currently involves enough digital records to warrant a name change, however, I would be happy to be called that at some point. It really made me think about the potential benefits of this shift in title, and about possibilities for people’s reluctance to take it on. Some of my musings included;

• For those of us in a hybrid records situation, could the addition of “digital” give us a bit more clout within our organisations?
• Could it also facilitate a bit more recognition/assumed understanding of what it is we might possibly be doing all day (of which some, at least, will be correct)?
• The digital records environment is forcing us to throw the old rules regarding hierarchy and standards right out of the window, it would seem this can feel disconcerting, and even dangerous to a profession embedded in standards and rules that other people don’t understand (yet often need to in order to effectively access archival material). Is there a relectance to let go of some of that secrecy, including the title that more often not has to be explained?
• Are we “Archivists” for all material types, and therefore need no prefix?
• Does there need to be a division in skills, or should we all be thinking about ensuring proficiency in both the traditional, and “new” skills? After all, even those working with ancient manuscripts create catalogues in digital format, and will quite often be involved in digitisation projects, which presumably they would like to be available well into the future

I’d be interested to hear whether librarians are facing anything similar, and what your job titles mean to you (if anything). And of course whatever the archivists (digital or not) have to say about the matter.

The Business Upgrade project is already having an impact – before the projects is releasing documentation to the Board!  The discussions that took place around the process for the Information Strategy Panel (ISP) projects helped to spark a review of the process.  A revised process for this round of bids was announced and released to Schools and Services.  This revised process was an open call for project requests and the ISP Review Group will look at all the bids and assess which can and will be taken forward.

The document capturing the discussions around the ISP process triggered some interesting discussion at the project board, with the Director of Learning and Information Services (LIS) highlighting that several actions had already been initiated to address some of the issues raised. In particular, LIS are reviewing the current structure of projects and have appointed a communications officer focused on projects.   A key point to note was that while the capturing of discussions around ISP and the ISP process were very useful, the discussions presented a range of viewpoints and therefore did not necessarily present the situation as is.  However, it was clear that there were some consistent issues raised including;

• A lack of clarity with regards to the role and responsibility of ISP, the ISP Review Group and the project selection process.
• More pre-project implementation work is required to determine scope and feasibility of projects.
• Improved engagement and buy-in from across the business is required – projects should not be seen as IT projects delivered by LIS.
• There is an issue with communication of projects.

The project board need to consider these issues and the actions that have already been taken to address them to determine what further action needs to be taken.

Originally we planned on using our usual tried and tested FB app dev approach by developing KillaWhats as a standalone canvas iframe app. This meant when a user adds the app to their Facebook account it appears to the left of their newsfeed  as a link, clicking the link takes you straight to the canvas page of the app:

However as KillaWhats is a community driven project, we felt it would offer greater engagement levels and stronger community presence if the app component was somehow linked from the KillaWhats community ‘Facebook page’ .  This was a feature that previously used to be straight forward to implement and done through the app about/profile page, but app profile pages no longer exist from February 2012 https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2012/02/01/how-to–migrate-your-app-profile-page/

The solution is here: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/dialogs/add_to_page/ and as we are both admin and developers of the KillaWhats Facebook page and app we simply used the quick and dirty direct URL method as below. You must also enable the page tab setting in the Facebook Developer app, also shown below.

What this means is the KillaWhats the app  can be launched from the KillaWhats community page (see below), with discussion and sharing of content all under the one roof = better user experience.

Highbury College via JISC funding is testing three JISC cost modelling tools. The College was assessed by Ofsted as a Grade 1 Provider in 2011 and was at the same time assessed through the PFA as Grade 1 with regards to the financial health and financial management. Currently we use relatively basic cost modelling tools and are keen to test more models that we hope will better inform our decision making and evaluation processes and ultimately improve the value for money the College delivers.

Like most Colleges in the sector we have a number of change management programmes in progress looking at efficiency savings and tangible benefits specifically around IT based projects. For this reason we are interested in evaluating the Impact Calculator. Specially we would like to apply this tool to the following projects:

• New online application & enrolment procedure (including mobile applications
• Implementation of virtual desktops across the College.
• Implementation of e-Forms and workflows to replace paper based forms processing.

Our aim is to use the tool to ‘close the loop’ on evaluating and evidencing the performance information before and after completion of these change initiatives against the costs of implementation.

In addition to this we intend to evaluate the Toolkit for Costing IT Services produced by Oxford University. The College is keen to explore the opportunity to be able to make reasoned judgements on its IT services. As part of the project we will also be applying a structured approach to our IT costs i.e. the TRAC approach to costing by looking at the full overheads and indirect costs and recognising that IT Services are often inter-dependant on each other.

We would like to apply this tool to the following IT Services:

• College VLE (MyCourse)
• Staff & Student Email
• College Helpdesk

The objective of undertaking this task is to give Highbury College better information to inform the College Leadership Team on the costs of running these services as well as to provide accurate figures to benchmark against third party suppliers.

We also hope that the tool will allow us to assess the recurrent costs of providing the services for the College as well as to give a better understanding of the interdependencies of the services.

Finally, the College has begun to investigate and invest in the implementation of thin client computing to replace its current thick client computers. We would also be keen to evaluate the ICT Energy and Carbon Footprint tool which was produced as part of the original project. We aim to use the outputs from the results to inform decisions on future projects.

We are also working with a local Primary School to assist them with this transition.

For this reason we would also like to evaluate the Sustainable Information Technology in Tertiary Education (SUSTE-IT) model. Embedding sustainability in all aspects of College processes and activities is a key objective included within the College’s Strategy.

The review of meeting management has resulted in a document that highlights the most effective use of SharePoint to facilitate meetings.  As with the other Transformations projects, this project has identified some practices that may seem very trivial but actually have a significant impact on the efficiency of the processes reviewed.  In this case, one of the key time-consuming elements of the meeting set up process is identifying availability of attendees.  This is due to some staff not using the standard UCLan online diary.  As a worst case scenario this results in dates being sent back and forth, provisional dates held in diaries and the appointment being individually entered into each recipient’s diary.  While this may seem trivial, when you consider the number of meetings organised at UCLan the time spent organising them can add up to a significant amount.  This is being considered by the project board.

In addition the project is recommending a change in the approach to how the support services are presented to both staff and students. The workshops with key stakeholders identified that while there were an extensive range of specialist services, there were a smaller number of generic services who could offer a triage type service where they could help the student unravel the issues they are experiencing and direct them to the correct support service(s) that would help them.  Although there would be cross over in the services provided, each triage services could be described as providing one of the following;

• General advice and support
• Pastoral support
• Employability and Personal Development
• Course administration
• Academic issues
• Independent advice
• International Students (issues relating to visas)

Therefore staff, to whom a student presents with an issue, will have this summary of support services and only need to identify which category the issue is likely to fall under and direct the student to the initial support service, rather than trying to be aware of all the possible support services available.

One thing I have learnt from both this programme and our Criminology programme also utilitising iPads is that it is pretty time-consuming to create distance learning materials to go on a VLE. This really isn’t very different from the time-consuming process of creating printed learning materials in the old correspondence course model. With this Education course, the lecturer has hopes that developing material for the iPad may even be easier than developing for the VLE. The ‘Criminology iPad’ module is making use of an app developer to create the materials for the course, so that’s an unusual way of producing learning material.

Apple has done much in recent months to make it easier to create learning materials for the iPad. Just the other day I created a Course using the Apple Course Manager, which is not a piece of software but a place on Apple’s website. All you need to create a course is your learning materials, a Mac with Safari, and an Apple ID. You don’t need to belong to an institution that’s in iTunes U. As for the learning materials, I quote the iTunesU Course Guidelines:

“Assignments can include many types of materials that are part of your course, such
as videos, audio files, web links, apps, books, documents, and presentations. You can
add content from the App Store and the iBookstore, and you can even upload your
own original materials.”

A course in iTunes U, comprised of various materials and links. Photo courtesy of fraserspeirs on Flickr

The course I built consisted of 4 pdf documents, 2 mp4 video files, and then I made up a course outline which I posted in the “Posts” section. Creating the course took all of 20 minutes. I then received an email from Apple with the url of my new course, and I emailed it around to a few colleagues. An instructor could email that to the students. A course must be ‘consumed’ using an Apple handheld device — iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch. The student clicks the url of the course, and is told that her enrolment is pending approval. Meanwhile, the instructor receives an email saying a’ new student wants to enrol in your course’, and the instructor grants access by clicking a green tick in the Course Manager page. Once the student has access, she accesses it through the iTunes U app, which quickly downloads the materials to her device. It is surprisingly smooth and simple. I showed this method to my Education colleague, and he may end up going down this route for his programme.

Bad points? Completely proprietary to Apple. Good points? It’s so easy. Does it enable good learning? I hope to find out as part of the Places project.

Terese Bird, Learning Technologist and SCORE Fellow, University of Leicester

In particular, we have been holding staff focus groups to bring together College and Bodleian Libraries staff to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of our current face to face induction programmes, to talk about the content and structure of mobile induction and to think bout how our face to face inductions might changes once Ask ALF is available. The staff focus groups have been incredibly useful and it has been great to find a real enthusiasm both for mobile induction and for working together to improve induction across the libraries. A fuller report of our findings will appear here soon, but in the meantime a big thank you to everyone who participated.

We have also had a technical meeting with representatives from Mobile Oxford, the Bodleian Libraries Web Team and Bodleian Digital Library Systems and Services (BLDSS).       During these discussions it has become clear that our plan to author content using the  Bodleian Libraries MySource Matrix content management system and to feed it into Mobile Oxford would be problematic.     We have therefore decided that Ask ALF will be hosted on MySource Matrix and not Mobile Oxford as originally planned.   However, Mobile Oxford will carry links to Ask ALF and in particular will include a prominent link on the new  “today” screen that users will see then they first visit Mobile Oxford.   Although this is a change from our original plan, I think that hosting Ask ALF on the MySourceMatrix system makes a lot of sense not only from a technical point of view but also in ensuring the long term sustainability of the project – since all the expertise to maintain it will be in the Libraries themselves.    Meanwhile having prominent links from Mobile Oxford will allow us to capitalise on Mobile Oxford’s existing user base and to ensure that students can find Ask ALF as well as other mobile services from one place.

In relation to the EA workshop and ArchiMate, I have decided that the modelling tool would not be appropriate to be used by the members of the BTT due to the lack of their maturity in process flow modelling. However, I have decided to pilot the modelling tool within my own team, Student Systems and Reporting Team, gradually rolling it out over the IT department as both the Head of IT Applications and the IT Director are interested in the tool.

I have booked two places on the JISC Change Management workshop at Coventry University on 25th October, for myself and Academic Services Business Analyst, to establish the appropriateness of this resource to the BTT. I am hoping that it will compliment the external training and the aim is to organise a workshop at Cranfield,  probably in February 2013.

Thats all for now… just to add I have had a really useful conversation with Sarah with regards to the Evidencing Change document and that I find it very useful to have the role of “critical friend” within a project.

Bye for now….. Claire

It was decided that not all the student services will use the system to manage their processes initially, though the system will allow enquires to be raised via a the SVAP for services/processes that are not managed, so covering all student support services via a single access point.

Following on from this meeting a high level requirements document has been drafted for review and sign off to ensure that the scope and service delivery requirements are understood and agreed prior to starting more detailed requirements documentation.

I have been working with the University Research Computing Management Group, and have established a Working Group under this to pull together some of the relevant functions involved in RDM related work.  This includes IT Services, Academic Practice Unit, Library and Research Support Office (with additional liaison with Information Assurance).  Whilst there is no central RDM function this has revealed the various pieces of work, responsibilities etc. each of the above has.  Part of my work therefore has been to start to join things up, for example looking at specifically labelled RDM elements within training/induction events, and considering a strand of an existing research lecture series to focus on RDM within the various colleges here.

Of most pressing concern has been the need to focus on creation of an RDM website and an awareness leaflet/brochure for the start of the new term – 1 October. In terms of the website this has been quite a challenge in relation to the mechanics of establishing, within a short timescale, a living breathing site which will do a job but also meet the necessary corporate branding and style. Without neither a large team or specific funding for this it is quite a challenge balancing the need to do liaison/co-ordination work, set up, attend and generate useful notes from a variety of meetings, source available external resources for the website, develop original Leicester material, agree precise wording for the communications material, and to some extent become a designer (hoping to hand that over to the professionals when mock-ups are agreed).

I imagine similar challenges arise across most if not all of those with Transformations projects. Being successful in the bid was very useful for me as a means to raise the profile of the objectives of this project and link them very closely with the ambitions of the existing Research Computing Management Group – to develop Research Data Management within the University. That has helped to justify some of my time being dedicated to this work, and more than would have otherwise have been possible.  There is still the inevitable issue though of being pulled between this and other priorities and projects. How many of us were actually employed to do the work we want to/feel we should prioritise… and how feasible is it to move towards doing what it seems would prove most useful?

1.  Timetabling staff capability – and the dependency on too few staff with the necessary capabilities and understanding, not to mention the many other demands on their time.  The training in CMIS and Student fitting was fine in and of itself, but it was not clear that the timetabling staff needed training in timetabling, and mentoring others has created additional work for the already limited resource.

2. Infrastructure Data issues – difficulties to identify what courses are running. as many courses are left open in case students return within a proscribed number of years even if not actually running, zero credit modules not having been set up despite needing to timetable them while other modules are set up but are practical and do not need to be timetabled, late changes to module codes and course stage module associations such that the Student Record System if falling out of date, etc.

3. Student Data issues – needing to timetable before the results of resits are known

4. Cohort Data issues – the move to academic year in some faculties, not in others, and partially in at least one.

5. Issues with Course Leaders wanting complex groupings of students on courses and wanting to carry forward groupings from one year to the next.

6. Issues with some courses dates causing complexity of defining who to bring across, eg. end dates for the course stage fall into the new academic year.

In consequence, it has not been possible to implement the automated data feed from the Student Record System to CMIS and we are having to initiate this manually for each course.  We still expect to release the online timetables for at least two Faculties for the start of term. 

Release via the student portal (SharePoint) can only be done once the whole Faculty is completed.

 It should not be underestimated just how complex timetabling is!

The trial of online timetables for CULC went well for the April Semester and the service is now live for the July semester.  While it is possible to send emails with a link to the timetable, students have generally been directed to our Student Portal (SharePoint).  Initially links were added to Moodle also, but CULC felt it was better to focus on one access point.

Feedback has been very positive, though we will be visiting CULC in September to try and measure benefits for the students.  A few changes have been made since to enable us to email links to applicants as well as students, and we are working on the ability to allow the email to be edited.

As well as being the main researcher on Killawhats, I also assist with the teaching of two modules at Lincoln; Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Social Applications Development. We have recently redesigned the HCI module in a way that will directly support the project and at the same time greatly enhance the students learning experiences. This will be realised by facilitating the practical application of students’ newly acquired HCI skills to a real-world problem, in this case the initial design of a novel energy intervention for student accommodation. As the students we teach are essentially our target users for the Killawhats studies, the HCI skillsets they learn will be leveraged  to elicit much of the design requirements for our planned Facebook ‘energy feedback’ application. With our guided support and expertise in the area of qualitative data collection, the students will play a pivotal role in running  focus groups and design workshops. This method empowers end-users and promotes ownership and advocacy of the systems developed – a fully user-centred design approach.

At this point it should be highlighted that Killawhats is a primarily an empirical research project, in that it’s  findings will be geared towards peer-reviewed publication and replication in the wider sustainability community. Hence the project’s strong focus on HCI with supporting quantitative and qualitative research methodologies.

The smart-meter infrastructure at Lincoln is due to be upgraded at the end of this year, opening up the possibility of more granular energy data collection, with the potential for running interesting energy feedback studies. In our Electro-Magnates project, we are currently carrying out our final ‘organisational’ energy study designed for employees powered by an open source energy data collection system which we adapted for our use. The system stores energy data to a local database and also to the Internet of Things platform COSM, with energy data stored at 1 minute intervals and publicly available through an open standards driven API, see diagram below. This is the approach we are planning on adopting for open energy data throughout Killawhats.

As developers of Facebook applications will know and dread – the Facebook application platform is regularly updated, sometimes with sweeping changes that break applications overnight. For Killawhats we keep a close eye on the developer roadmap to track past and future changes to gauge potential impact. One such change we were not aware of was the SSL requirement for secure HTTPS browsing of all Facebook applications, this has not been enforced until very recently. We now have this in place for our development and see it as a positive step. Developers who do not include an HTTPS url for their application canvas on Facebook will find their apps may stop working overnight…..

Over the coming months I will be posting up frequent snippets of the project’s progress. Posts will mainly be around research (HCI) with some development (coding and data collection), so should be a little of something of interest to most

Derek

Reading a Sony PRS-505 E-Reader in 2009. Photo courtesy of Cwluc on Flickr

And so I’m reading through the literature, and am finding the JISC Mobile Learning Infokit very valuable. I will definitely be taking bits from it for re-packaging. It is not old — first published in autumn 2011. I appreciate, for example, having several definitions of mobile learning – ranging from Mike Sharples’ which emphasises processes, to the MoLeNET definition which emphasises the devices.

But what stood out more was the ‘Tangible benefits of mobile learning’ listed in the infokit. The list begins with the usual affordances attributed to mobile devices: ’personal’, ‘pervasive’, ‘portable.’  The last item caught my attention: ‘Reduces technical barriers to e-learning.’ I was thinking that only a few years ago, mobile devices presented their own technical barriers — I remember endlessly struggling to help different colleagues to sync up their Palms to their desktop computers. But in 2012, yes, many mobile devices reduce technical barriers to e-learning. I am thinking of our Criminology distance masters programme in which students around the world are shipped an iPad, and instructed how to download the app which contains multimedia learning materials. I’m reading preliminary feedback from students, and so far the majority are saying they value the fact the app allows them to study even when there is no internet connection.  I am likely to find evidence to the contrary on that note, but so far, I’m seeing evidence of  ’reduces technical barriers to e-learning’.

Now that we have healthy competition in the mobile realm, and products have arrived at a good level of usability, I believe we will see those ‘barriers to e-learning’ continue to fall.

Terese Bird, Learning Technologist and SCORE Research Fellow, University of Leicester

JISC. (2011). Mobile Learning infokit / Home. Retrieved August 22, 2012, from https://mobilelearninginfokit.pbworks.com/w/page/41122430/Home

I have tried different web 2.0 tools for work and current awareness but none of them really compare to Twitter in terms of value.  Put simply, Twitter has transformed how I get my information about my profession, stay aware of current issues, and get updates from publishers and suppliers.  Mailing lists still have their place but Twitter is my go-to information hub now.   Three main ways I think you can get the most of Twitter ‘the information tool’ are:

Follow- see what fellow tweeters, people in your industry and other like-minded types are talking about by following them.  It’s also a good way to get alerts and updates from companies.  Remember this won’t always just be 140 characters about what they people for breakfast but will often contain links back to reports/news articles/opinions/research etc. etc. etc.

Search- you don’t need to find people to follow to see what they are saying, just use Twitter’s search to see what people are saying on particular topics.  Tweeters often categorise/tag their tweets with a subject or subjects preceded by a hashtag (e.g. #education #media #marketing); explore these with some simple searches.

Engage- A huge part of Twitter is the ability to network online, to have direct access to key thinkers, to engage with like-minded people, to interact with your community/industry and to tweet your own thoughts and opinions.  I must confess that when I use Twitter for work I am probably more guilty of being a lurker than an engager; I prefer to use it passively to find information than asking questions or frequently tweeting myself.  However I do follow and am followed by a large number of librarians and I find this a fantastic resource to exploit if I have a quick question or want an opinion from colleagues.

Encouraging students to use Twitter as an information tool

I have had a few conversations with academics from the fashion management courses about Twitter.  They increasingly want their students to exploit Twitter as an information source, particularly as there are many influential people from business and fashion management tweeting.  Creating a Twitter list of such people for the students to follow is a good start.  In fact, they don’t even need to have a Twitter account, or follow those people- all they need to do is click on the list link and before you can say Tweet there is a list of what all those important people are currently tweeting about.

Getting students to search on a topic on Twitter might demonstrate the range of information of available.  I have just tried a simple search on #retail. Of course, with any search, there’s a lot of chaff to wade through and teaching students the importance of checking sources for validity and authority remains strong.  But, with caveats done and even with just a quick scroll down the list, I find data from the Office of National Statistics Twitter feed on retail sales volumes, a tweet from EIU (the Economist Intelligence Unit) linking to a story about the challenges ahead for retail up to Christmas, and a very mouth-watering link to a report on chocolate markets from KPMG. 

Engaging with discussion groups

One opportunity to engage might be to find a particular discussion group in your industry.  Discussion groups (or Tweetchats) are virtual groups which meet on Twitter, usually at a set time, to discuss a particular topic.  The discussion is grouped under a given name with a hashtag and all tweets in the discussion must include the given #name.  For example, in my profession, #uklibchat is a fortnightly discussion group usually held on Tuesdays 6.30-8.30pm GMT.  Topics and questions for discussion are proposed by participants beforehand.   You can search #uklibchat on Twitter to see recent discussions.  Similarly #phdchat is popular amongst researchers with discussions on different themes every Wednesday evening.

If I’ve whetted your appetite for Twitter and you want to find out more you can seek me out on Twitter at @elliemurphylib

Today we had a meeting to share what was planned, knowing that our library service, computing service, e-Learning and academic staff development colleagues (and probably others!) had plans at various stages of development. It’s encouraging that staff development on the use of technologies and related pedagogies for both teaching and research practices are being considered across the university, although it also highlighted the difficulties in communicating and sharing these plans and the potential for duplication of effort – it was more by accident than established process that we made the initial connections!

The meeting achieved our aim of agreeing to at least develop a joint calendar of events and co-ordinated promotion of them, as well as collating details of each one to help identify areas where we may be able to collaborate and share the workload of delivering activities.

The reasons for planning events included:

• To respond to the needs of specific user groups e.g. research students and staff wanting to use social media in research practices
• To develop digital literacies – part of the JISC funded PriDE project
• To develop capability amongst colleagues involved in this JISC Transformations project and our associated FLP
• To provide ‘just-in-time’ training for teaching and learning staff
• To develop practical ‘hands on’ skills
• To help staff gain confidence in exploring new pedagogies and supporting technologies
• Generally raising awareness and prompting discussions of a more strategic nature

It seems that we will be considering several different types of event ranging from 30 minute practical sessions, to plenary seminars and workshops of varying length. A key aspect will be to capture the events with a view to building on the programme in subsequent years, using archive materials as preparation for the next iteration of an event as well as making them available to those who may miss the session first time around.

Coming together helped us to realize the opportunity to slot our events around those of others. Our initial plans were concentrated very much around the plenary type event, followed by focused events for our faculty and departments to explore ideas arising from these. It’s a relief to realize we won’t necessarily need to develop and deliver all of these single-handedly and it was helpful to share connections and networks which may assist us in convening speakers for our events.

I found the recent Innovating Pedagogy report from the Open University very timely in stimulating thoughts around possible topics for the plenary events and we’ll certainly be sharing details of events beyond the confines of the University as we get them off the ground.

Melanie – Project Officer

To this end I have been working on establishing an Interface Catalog, now being contributed to by technical teams at the University, according to a defined standard to suit our purposes. You can read more about this at http://enterprisearchitect.blogs.ilrt.org/2012/07/31/the-value-of-an-interface-catalog/.

To start at the beginning, the context of an archive collection is just as important as the content.  Put simply we can gain a greater understanding of the content of a letter if we know it was written by a Conservative Minister of Education, rather than a Labour Minister, (or a teacher, academic, or member of a pressure group). To provide this context archive cataloguing is hierarchical. You start with the broad and work down to the specific. We follow certain ‘rules’ such as creating different levels of description and not repeating information at lower levels. We’ve already discovered this causes problems when searching the online catalogue as records are detached from the hierarchy in the hitlist. It becomes even more difficult when trying to represent a catalogue using repository software. For example if the search results return records in eprints that are merely there to represent the hierarchy of the catalogue it’s going to be pretty frustrating when there is no record attached to it. It got us thinking about how people search, the relevance of the hierarchy and how we can represent the hierarchy of the catalogue. At the moment we are thinking a static diagram (probably displayed through the browse function) might be the best way to go.

It also dawned on us that we’re going to have to re-look at our descriptive metadata. The details displayed in hitlist results need to provide the searcher with enough information to make a decision as to whether it is relevant to them e.g. author, title, date. That’s when we realised titles like Agenda1 with no author are not going to be helpful in the slightest! It means those archivist ‘rules’ such as not repeating information at lower levels of a catalogue and using the original title given to a file by the creator are less easily applied. It has made clear to us the work that will need to be done on collections by creators before they are passed to us to ensure that we have a good level of meaningful metadata (we’re all guilty of having titles like ‘Doc1’ or ‘FinalFinal’). We will need to work much more closely with our depositors to provide guidance on file naming, organisation and metadata creation meaning the process of archive cataloguing will change significantly. Our aim is to have some procedures in place by the end of the project and our next step will be to use JISC-funded guidance such as Versions toolkit developed by LSE.

Topics covered:

1. ePDU networking
2. PUE measurement through the dashboard
3. Exact rack positioning for the control system
4. Date confirmed as 4 September for the installation

Item (2) is potentially a huge added benefit, as I currently do all the PUE calculations manually by screen-scraping the figures off of CSV output from the power meters.

My principal co-worker on this project is no better off either. Working in Marketing as the lead analyst on admissions he is bombarded from all sides producing reports and looking into blips in admissions. Not only that be he provides support to senior management on clearing! So last week I had some hurried leave (we cannot carry over and leave year finishes 31st August), he’s unable to put anything in the project this week and then he takes some hurried leave!

Meanwhile our Data Warehousing Architect post is still wending its way through HR.

The best laid plans of Mice and Men, etc. etc.

Lead Institution: University College Falmouth

Project Lead: Andrew Climo

Background

The advent of the £9,000 per year student fee has created a sharper focus for ensuring that the courses we run are cost effective, aligned with demand and sustainable. Although decisions can be made using existing operational data, extraction and presentation is a time-consuming and costly activity: A simpler, more responsive reporting service would assist with earlier action, and allow UCF to react to quicker to changing market conditions.

We aim to replace the current manually intensive report writing service with a data warehouse, ‘off the peg’ reports and an executive dashboard that shows course performance and allows users to ‘drill down’ to identify specific areas of weakness.

Aims and objectives

Principal design goals for the JISC element of this project are to:

• Introduce standardised techniques and practices and provide a common terminology for business intelligence
• Re-engineer the development and deployment processes for executive reporting to reduce process lead-times and resources required
• Establish a release management process for the dissemination of sensitive management information
• Eliminate the single point of failure (one person) due to the entire report production process for executive information
• Provide access to suitable query tools: SQL Developer only (and correctly) available to skilled staff, spreadsheet available to others.
• Pave the way for the elimination of Excel for repeatable/periodic executive reporting purposes
• Reduce or eliminate the potential for mis-keying of mission critical data

Identify which reports can be ‘pulled’ by executives without the intervention of senior analysts, thus reducing cost, eliminating wait time and improving the quality of service.

Context

Enterprise Context – The changing nature of student provision towards a more business-centric model

Process Context – The need to move towards evidence-based decision making and early warning of capacity issues

Organisation Context – The need to collapse the business communications process such that senior executives can see the effect of their decision-making on the operational business and can see the relationship between macro-level changes (e.g. to student numbers) and how granular information contributes to it (e.g. at a course or module level)

Location Context – The need to understand where students originate from and how this contributes to numbers on a course by course basis

Data Context – Data originates from a variety of systems and sources, each with their own format, presentation and structure

Application Context – Present arrangements rely on carefully crafted and manually created spreadsheets

Technology Context – N/A

The business case

The development of this resource will benefit not only UCF but the wider JISC community by providing:

• A release management process for the dissemination of sensitive management information
• Reusable project support documentation for migrating from legacy reporting processes and tools to data warehousing/reporting environments
• A definition of an executive reporting environment including application, data and business models, service level specifications and roles and responsibilities documentation

As a project with executive sponsorship but containing considerable technical complexity, it will generate an interesting case study.

Key drivers

• Uncertain market conditions and the £9,000 maximum student fee
• Changing patterns of provision of HE
• UCF’s growth over the past 10 years
• The drive to service Cornwall’s need for high-quality HE courses as a means to generate economic growth in the Duchy
• Changing organisational structures and the urgent need at a senior management level for timely, reliable and relevant business intelligence

JISC resources/technology used

This project will:

• Conduct a detailed process review of the ‘as is’ process for creating the present spreadsheet models and showing process costs and risks for each step. Two types of business process model will be created: IDEF0 and Swimlane Diagrams (both from the JISC Tools and Techniques Library) representing the overall context and detailed interactions between senior analysts, executives and operational departments using the Visio Coventry stencil (JISC EA Toolkit)
• Conduct a stakeholder analysis and identify the key managers involved in capacity planning and course design
• Identify the constraints and initial requirements associated with the use of admissions management reports
• Develop a data and application models for the proposed data warehouse (which will be an OLAP ‘cube’). This will include elements of Enterprise Architecture.
• Risk Response Planning and Risk Monitoring and Control practices (JISC Risk Management Toolkit) will be used to manage the inherently risky nature of developing an OLAP architecture
• Develop the business processes, use-cases, and data (entity) model for the ‘to-be’ service
• Collaboration Diagrams (JISC Process Review Toolkit) to analyse and show the interactions between key stakeholders in the executive reporting cycle
• The integration of JISC toolkit elements into the analysis cycle of reporting including 5 Why’s thinking (JISC Tools and Techniques Library), Ishikawa Diagrams (JISC Risk Management Toolkit), and elements of the JISC Scenario Planning Toolkit (specifically Scenario Building, Option Generation and Testing). This will be put together into an executive briefing and supported by workshop materials
• We envisage the extensive use of business modelling (using Archi / Visio) through the transfer of knowledge to key business users who will also become quality champions within their teams.

Outcomes

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Achievements

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Benefits

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Drawbacks

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Key lessons

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Looking ahead

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Sustainability

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Appendix

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Teresa was very positive about the provision of an induction for mobiles and about our proposed use of Mobile Oxford as a platform and was able to report that the University’s Disability Office had been fully consulted in the creation of Mobile Oxford which is extremely positive news.

Although mobile devices do not suit all readers with disabilities, many students will benefit from being able to view the induction on their own device which is configured to their particular needs. In addition,  all students will benefit from being able to run through the induction at the point at which they need to use the libraries and as often as they want.   Those who prefer not to use mobile technologies, will have the option of using the induction via a desktop or laptop computer.

Teresa has agreed to author some content for readers with disabilites for the mobile induciton and has also suggested making the accessibility database available via Ask ALF which would be very useful for new students seeking information about access arrangements, services and facilities in individual libraries.       Including the Accessibility database would clearly be very beneficial and has been added to the agenda for our next meeting with mobile Oxford.

The next event is to get formal stage boundary sign off and a steer on the high level requirements for the IT system. The student support services and the degree to which their enquiry processes will be managed by the system will form part of this high level requirements gathering exercise.

Troops in Iraq making use of mobile technology.             Photo courtesy of The USO.

The first stage of the project is to examine the literature and learn from mobile-technology-in-learning projects that have gone before us. I am reading the final reports of JISC projects such as iBorrow, in which students could borrow laptops short-term for learning in the library at Canterbury Christ Church University, and also Project Erewhon at University of Oxford, which investigated the uses of geo-spacial and mobile computing in both higher and further education.

Of course, we will be very much informed by our own DUCKLING project which ran from 2008 through 2010, and which studied amongst other innovations the use of ebook readers as a course material delivery device for distance masters students. I was learning technologist on DUCKLING, and saw close-up the difficulties and successes of the approach, from the points of view of both staff and students. I am very much looking forward to similarly evaluating the use of iPads in our criminology and other programmes.

I created a Mendeley group called MobileLearn HE in which I’m gathering reports, journal articles, case studies, and blog posts on this topic. The group is public and I welcome you to join in. Please suggest case studies and papers you know of, on the topic of mobile learning in HE. Or suggest a case study or example via the comments below!

Terese Bird, Learning Technologist and SCORE Research Fellow, University of Leicester

We explored how we might link the pathways within the Primary Care MSc, especially medical education, with the new Professional Standards Framework and particularly whether the cpd pathway could be submitted for accreditation by the HEA.  An important consideration will be the value that students, and prospective students, on this programme place on gaining the status of FHEA. Medical educators are usually clinicians who teach part-time be it within medical schools, in clinical practice or as part of doctors’ speciality training. We need to explore the extent to which association with the HEA is as meaningful in these contexts as it is in HE institutions. More later…….

Liz reminded us of the funding opportunities available from the HEA for staff development, teaching development, travel and international scholarship opportunities.

And great that Liz also agreed to be one of the project’s Critical Friends. As she is based in Bristol we hope to see more of her.

Tim

 JISC Mobile Learning Infokit – This resource provides excellent advice on developing a mobile learning strategy and resources. We used evidence from this document to help us decide to develop the Mobile Induction as a web app rather than a native app confined to a single platform. One of the most useful tools described in this report is the ’10 steps to mobile learning adoption’ which we have used as the basis of planning the stages in development of our Mobile Induction.

Access this resource at: https://mobilelearninginfokit.pbworks.com/w/page/41122430/Home

JISC Change Management Infokit - Although this tool kit is principally designed to help plan and deal with large-scale institutional change, it still contains much useful information about how smaller changes can be embedded in an institution and used to help transform aspects of how things are done. It is our intention that the Mobile Induction will help bring about positive changes in the way inductions are carried out across the University. Particular lessons we have taken from this Infokit are -

• The importance of recognising the different types of cultures we are working with within the University (College, Department, Central University, Student body) and trying to obtain the views of all these stakeholders.
• How we can develop a change strategy to help implement the Mobile Induction and sustain the project into the future.

Access this resource at: http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/change-management/

JISC Sustaining and Embedding Innovations Good Practice Guide – This guide has been helpful in allowing us to clarify the reasons why the Mobile Induction is necessary and beneficial. The section on ‘Resistance to Innovating’ provides advice on ‘unfreezing’ resistance to innovation by using a three step process of first demonstrating why the status quo is unsatisfactory, then showing how the Mobile Induction can help solve some of the problems identified and finally by showing how the Mobile Induction can be applied in a way which allows the best aspects of current inductions to continue.

Access this resource at: https://sustainembed.pbworks.com/w/page/31632855/Welcome

As anticipated most of our social media activity is student-focussed with our facebook and twitter pages primarily interacting with prospective and current students, alumni and to a certain extent the wider community – not unexpected as the University is very much at the heart of life in Coventry. We also have a presence on newer social media sites such as Google+ and Pinterest but no official presence on LinkedIn which is the main social media site for business-to-business networking. In addition we use sites like YouTube and iTunesU for content sharing but the content does seem again to be very student-focussed. Which left me thinking – is there any demand for more business-facing content?

That meant talking to the people who create the University’s social media content… I’m in regular contact with the research marketing team who are already integrating Aurasma virtual reality technology into our research magazine Innovate and are currently doing a survey of our Innovate mailing list to see how they’d like to receive the magazine – in paper form or electronically. Obviously I’m hoping to feed the survey results into this project!  I didn’t know however that we’ve recently appointed a dedicated social media officer who is not only responsible for content but also for contributing to the whole strategic direction of the University’s social marketing. It was really great to talk to him about what I’m trying to do with this project and get a sense of how it might feed into the future direction of the University’s whole marketing strategy. One of the major developments taking place over the next few months is the launch of an entirely new web platform with much more social integration. We will therefore be able to feed the findings of this project into a complete redevelopment of our business-facing webpages. Exciting times ahead!

This will be a case of,

1. Establishing the site to raise researcher awareness of RDM and the University’s developing approach to it,
2. Pulling together/signposting current resources and support available in various parts of the Universtity,
3. Referring (linking) to a host of existing good quality external resources.

The aim therefore is to have an initial early presence, and then to look at a good deal of refinement and development.

We have mapped out what data students currently utilise and are looking at the formulation of room numbering and activity code.

Looking for JISC resources to help with accessibilty design to utilise in terms of size, colouring and usage.

We will be trying to get opinions on a variety of topics from the focus groups including  -

• How different libraries currently conduct inductions and what could be done differently.
• How librarians feel a mobile induction would impact on their physical inductions.
• Getting feedback on the draft structure of the mobile site.

Feedback from staff will help us improve the structure of the mobile induction before we produce our final specification for the software.

We will be reporting back here on the blog with the results from our focus groups.

I was particularly pleased to be able to visit Goldsmith’s College on a recent CILIP visit to find out more about what they have done using their Eprints based institutional repository, Goldsmiths Research Online (GRO).

Goldsmiths have created a slick and sophisticated looking homepage which was customised in house with the help of their IT support. When I got in touch with them they said that what they have achieved was reached through a “collaborative process over time, based on user feedback and required functionalities”*. They also mentioned that they designed it to be “minimal, functional and provide focus on both artworks and written research materials equally”*. This focus on the visual as well as written research is particularly interesting to me, bearing in mind that we may consider using Eprints to store digitised material as well as digitally created. Examples of different material types that can be found in the Goldsmiths Research Online repository include digitised paper documentation, photographed objects, and other more non-standard, object types such as documented performance pieces.

For me, the light box on the home page is particularly effective in indicating that this is a resource that holds more than just text based documents. When I attended the CILIP visit,  Tahani Nadim talked us through modifications made to the front page using the an Eprints Plugin developed by the KULTUR project (KULTUR plugin). I was encouraged to find out that the plugin is potentially something we will able to implement. The plugin randomly selects images from the repository, and the selection changes daily.

While there are a few exceptions, as far as I know most organisations using Eprints repositories use them for their original use – to allow staff and students, or a wider community, to deposit individual works. I think we could encounter some difficulties using Eprints for archives due to the fact that we might be using it for groups of material (digitised images that are linked by subject matter), or digitally created archive collections, not singular items. In terms of using a plugin such as the KULTUR one, this could present some problems;

• It is yet undecided whether we will be using Eprints for digitised material as well as digitally created material. If we do not, the images that display on the home page are likely to be quite dull, in the short term anyway
• If we do use Eprints for digitised material, how do we communicate what is digitally created, and what is digitised?
• The light box feature that allows on screen display of images is great, but I’m concerned that it might be difficult to  indicate that the image was part of a set (whether that be archive collection, or as before, by subject

So, some big questions to tackle…

*Via email with Administrator – Goldsmiths Research Online / Special Collections, 18-23 April 2012

• Thoughts on how the theory in the lecture theatre/seminar room translates into practice where students are undertaking work-experience and work-related activities;
• Opportunities for innovative approaches to Assessment & Feedback
• Support as students make the transition into and out of Higher Education
• Examples of student work and experiences relevant to potential employers

We also agreed that a portfolio should be a living document and above all, owned by the students themselves.

In devising the template, we’ve tried to keep it simple, allowing students to populate it to suit their needs, but without forgetting the need for guidance on how to get the most out of an e-portfolio.

Our next tasks include engaging with employers to ensure it meets their needs and identifying some willing students to test our ideas.

Additionally I have another meeting next week to take forward the training requirements with the firm I have investigated previously and the new recruit into my old job starts on 6th August…. hooray I can start doing one job not two !

•  the SEDA Embedding Learning Technologies Course
• the JISC tools we will use on the course
• the methods we have acquired from previous CPD experiences and projects

•  the use of clean questions from the  Liverpool John Moores University CETL
• Service Based Learning Design
• ways in which people adapt to new working practices using Work-with IT vignettes and the toolkit. we particularly like the questions in the case study protocol and will offer these to particpants so that they can interview each other about changed working parctices.

For PCR, Schools are required to provide a series of documents and reports. Several of these documents will be required during, or produced as a result of the Annual Monitoring process. It was highlighted in the workshop that as the documents collected for the annual monitoring process will be stored on SharePoint, they will be easier to locate when required for PCR. As a result, the project is considering how to store / tag the documents so they can easily be located for PCR. This should help to reduce the workload of staff at the time of PCR as they will not need to spend time locating documents and circulating them.

The SharePoint4Collaboration project has been progressing well so there were no concerns or issues that I was able to raise with the action learning set for this project.

I also attended the JISC InfoNet Change Management workshop. I have put a post on my Course Data Blog if you would like more information. It was very useful!

Further requirements gathering, best practice analysis and the initial stages of developing the “to be” process are the next areas that the project will cover. This will be used to to formulate the SVAP requirements and business process(es) that will sit around it. The proposal will be presented to stakeholders via workshops to capture any issues and/or gaps.

The programmes we had identified from our initial research share the following characteristics:

• Staff enthusiasm and motivation
• Potential market worth exploring further
• Potential scalability

And also meet one or more of the following broad objectives:

• To increase student numbers
• To improve the efficiency of delivery
• To enhance the quality of teaching and learning and the student experience

The challenge we were facing was the differing needs and priorities of the departments within the faculty, thus it was proving difficult to get consensus on the selection of one or two programmes. However, by bringing together the various stakeholder groups, including the relevant individuals with strategic decision-making authority, and our academic colleagues who are contributing to the programmes, we were able to prioritise the programmes we had proposed. We now have a ‘green light’ to proceed to the next stage for two of the programmes, both of which are inter-departmental which will really help us to look at the complexities of working across the faculty. This was also a useful meeting for sharing the details of the project, updating everyone and encouraging others to share the responsibility of participating in and progressing the project.

As well as programmes we have also identified several mini-projects at the unit level, which have been much easier to progress since they don’t have such a broad stakeholder group or require the same level of approval. These have already helped us to begin thinking about staff development needs and following our recent meeting we have been actively encouraged to develop our plans for a series of staff development workshops which fits neatly with our plans for FLeXchange (and a free lunch was also mentioned!).

Melanie – Project Officer

Image credit: add1sun on flickr 

The Business Upgrade project has slowed a little recently, however following the Enterprise Architecture day at UCLan and my attendance at the EA workshop on the 3rd of July, things are moving again.

I attended an Information Strategy Panel Meeting recently to observe. ISP discussed the ISP budget and how it is spent and discuss influencers such as the NSS scores and issues raised by students that need to be addressed. The group question / challenge the decisions based on the student need and to understand how the decisions will affect the student experience. The group are also updated on the progress of strategic ICT projects through a briefing paper. It was highlighted that for some projects there have been challenges pinning down the business requirements which result in the need to develop flexible systems and try to adapt them as required.

The group also discussed the process of communication and dissemination with regards to projects. LIS have recently appointed a projects communication officer to support dissemination of projects and one of the recommendations of the Business Upgrade project is to clarify the communication process for projects at a senior / strategic level.

I also attended the JISC InfoNet Change Management workshop. I have put a post on my Course Data Blog if you would like more information. It was very useful!

From a project management viewpoint everything looks good: We used the Milestone Management Component of the toolkit for the M3 Go/No-Go milestone and the PB agreed to proceed to the next stage (Requirements Definition).

Being ahead in some areas we were in the fortunate position to be able to present a first full draft of the Requirements Spec – which means that the Requirements Stage will be off to a flying start!! The main areas in work are around functional and business process requirements, but quite a bit of retrofitting of the existing Swimlane model to Coventry template standards. In addition we have an IDEF0 model, which provides us with some significant underpinning for lower level processes.

One of the crucial outcomes so far is that we have identified the need for a Standards Expert Group for UCF: This will comprise Strategic Analysts who will settle such questions as “What is the actual definition of ‘Open for Applications’ or ‘Deferred Applicant’”!!

In terms of data we are moving towards the start of data modelling. Creating a data warehouse means looking at the relational data (for example in the student record system) and non-relational data (e.g. from UCAS or HESA) and coming up with a common data model. Once done we need to have further modelling done to define the structure of the data warehouse staging area and what the fully de-normalised DW will look like.

Our next major milestone is M5 (Requirements Definition Completed), so the Board will be meeting for this and also likely at an intermediate workshop to walkthrough the various models produced.

Ask ALF’s content although publically available from Mobile Oxford will be hosted on the Bodleian Libraries, My Source Matrix content management system (CMS)  which is also used to manage our web site. The advantage of this approach is that many librarians across the Bodleian Libraries have the skills and permissions to create and update content in the CMS.    This will ensure that Ask ALF remains sustainable in to the future, as librarians will easily be able to update the content without needing help from the Mobile Oxford team.   What ever content we author in the CMS will simply feed through to Mobile Oxford – neat!

Using the Bodleian Libraries CMS will also bring other advantages. In particular we may be able to re-use some of the content that we create for Ask ALF in other parts of our web sites.

At our meeting we also discussed using the “LibraryData” database to create a look up tool where freshers can look up their College and degree programme and see a list of the libraries that will be most useful to them, with key details for each, such as opening times, contact details and location.

The LibraryData database already includes much of this key information and is available on the web (to see it choose “information” next to any of the libraries listed in the Libraries A-Z).    However, although LibraryData includes some subject information, it does not match degree programmes to libraires.   We really wanted to make this assocation because it can be difficult for new students to work out which libraries are most relevent to their needs.    Alison and Dan have kindly agreed to add this data to the database and to build the necessary web interface in the Content Management System – thank you Alison and Dan!

By creating and partaking in discussions, academics, and students alike, can expand their research and arguments in ways that may not have been possible in the past. With the help of social-media (facebook groups, twitter, forums and blogs) activists in Zimbabwe can now be in continuous discussion with an ICwS fellow who is writing a paper about them.

Check out a very interesting blog on this topic and a video by Alan J Cann, who is Internet Consulting Editor for Annals of Botany, based out of the University of Leicester Department of Biology:

The possibilities of ‘discussion-creation’ given to us by social-media must be fully utilised, and hopefully the benchmarking of SAS social-media is the first step to making that happen.

It’ll be important to engage employers as early as possible into the development of the e-portfolio to ensure that it meets their needs as well as our own and our students’

We need to be reviewing the relevant JISC resources

Many of the blogs, groups and feeds that I found overlapped one another, often leading to stagnation or abandonment. It became clear that those accounts with regularly updated content, especially content which was news-worthy, were the most successful.

One key issue I stumbled-upon during the benchmarking, was how separate projects or centres that are based in an Institute, but are distinct, can be promoted. Institutes seemed to try two opposing ways to deal with this issue

Some Institutes have chosen to have lots of smaller websites and blogs but as I was looking for these it became pretty confusing what was what. There were so many websites and each had lots of different connection to other groups or institutes that it became difficult to determine what the key resource was. It also meant that content would sometimes be sparse as each smaller project would try to fill a whole new website or blog.

Other Institutions seemed to try to combine projects and centres into their own website. This also had its own problems; distinguishing the project from the institute became very difficult and results/reports/information often got lost in other parts of the website.

The benchmarking has helped highlight this issue and it will be an important thing that must be overcome in this project if we are to increase the SAS online experience.

JISC tools used in this initial benchmarking include:

Social Software Guide

Online Collaborative Tools for Business and Community Engagement 

Online Promotion of Research Expertise Self Assessment Tool

This decision has not yet been reached as the ideal process is to be discussed in the TISSUE Project Delivery Group in August. If a decision is made that the single system option needs to be explored, the project team will propose setting up a less complex system to at least establish some elements of the ideal process while the larger development takes place.

The project has also identified some non-technical interventions that should take place to improve the overall process. These will also be presented to the project delivery group in August. These non-technical interventions, focus around ensuring staff have the core information they need to direct a student to the correct starting point to access support.

I also attended the JISC InfoNet Change Management workshop. I have put a post on my Course Data Blog if you would like more information. It was very useful!

A number of needs to develop a School-wide approach have been raised that highlight the need for an organisation-wide assessment and focused strategy in this area, including: the hosting and/or aggregating of existing blogs into a single locally-hosted server; development of, and staff training in, the use of social media and multimedia sharing platforms, and their integration with existing School platforms.

Mobile Oxford was itself developed as part of the JISC funded Erewhon project and is now a well established mobile portal for Oxford University delivering among other things the University directory, podcasts, Weblearn VLE functionality, local public transport and weather information as well as the famous ducklings webcam!

Embedding Ask ALF within Mobile Oxford makes a lot of sense and supports recommendations arising out of the University’s recent Student Digital Experience Workstream Report which encourages mobile development to integrate with Mobile Oxford and in particular for orientation information to be available from a single source.    Working with Mobile Oxford will also allow us to benefit from its excellent geo-location services freeing up our resources to concentrate on content, structure, usability, marketing and take up.

Our conversation with Tim Fernando from Mobile Oxford was very useful and he was enthusiastic about Ask ALF joining Mobile Oxford.

One of the big questions will be how and where to fit Ask ALF into the existing structure of Mobile Oxford.  We were concerned about this before the meeting because there is no more space for icons on the Mobile Oxford front page.  However, Tim explained that the existing icon based layout is soon to be replaced with text based menus which will improve usability.  This immediately solves the problem of squeezing an extra icon on to the front  page – although of  course we wouldn’t want Ask Alf to appear beneath the fold in a text based menu either!

One option is to bundle the existing “Library search” option and Ask ALF together presenting a more generic “Library information” or “Library search & orientation” item in the top level navigation.    Library search and Ask ALF would then branch in the second level navigation.  Creating extra clicks is of course to be avoided for usability reasons and we certainly wouldn’t want to force users to make an extra click to reach the library search which many people are using every day.  However,  “Library search & orientation” could link direct to the library search with a prominent button for Ask ALF immediately beneath the search box.     This would mean one click for “Library search” (as now) and two for Ask ALF.

We will need to ensure that the link to Ask ALF is prominent and that it is clearly signposted so that users know what it is and for whom its intended. Prominence should be relatively easy because Mobile Oxford is planning to implement a single library search box anyway.   There will therefore be plenty of room for a link to Ask ALF.   However, we will have to think carefully about the wording of the link so that it is clear that Ask ALF if providing orientation information for new undergraduates.

The other major issue that we discussed was getting some of the information held in the libraries and induction databases into Mobile Oxford.   This will probably be the trickiest part of the project from a technical point of view though well worth it in order to deliver key information about libraries (contacts, opening hours etc) and the induction timetable.   More about that later…

So what happens now…?

It was useful to get a meeting last week with Rob Bristow, Programme Manager for Transformations.  As everything has been done via email so far, it has all seemed a little abstract – to get a face to face meeting is re-assuring, allowing you to ask the question “What exactly do I need to do to make JISC happy?”

This project is really about providing a focus for the development of the University’s approach to RDM, and co-ordinating some of the various parts of the University that already have a stake in aspects of what can to a lesser o greater extent be regarded as “RDM” – given that it is such a broad area is it feasible to expect everything to be in one place?

The main thing to report thus far is that we have successfully managed to tie in this project with the existing University “Research Computing Management Group” – pretty much an essential step here to move the project away from the realms of the theoretical.  As a result the last two meetings of the group have pretty much been dedicated to broad consideration of the development of RDM here.  Within this the much debated, EPSRC demanded “Research Data Roadmap” has been generated and approved, and this particular project has been recognised as providing impetus towards RDM development.

Always happy to receive comments or questions.

Andrew (ab629@le.ac.uk)

Sarah can tell me if I have found the right place as she says she gets a notification when we put a blog up… however, Sarah may faint in shock at the fact I have put one up

Ok… so what has been going on….

It took some time to get names from the schools to start to form a larger group to inform about the intitiative of building a business transformation team across the university; the names were finalised in mid March.

The next step was to arrange a meeting with all these people present…. quite a challenge but that was held on 18th May. Rob Bristow from JISC Transformations attended that meeting and explained to the group JISC’s involvement in the initiative and how the BTT was in fact something JISC Transformations Programme was very interested in at the moment and talked about the resources which were available to support us in our endeavours, such as the Enterprise Architecture and Change Management resources. It was very useful to have Rob attend the meeting, it added “weight” to the initiative. I presented the same presentation which I gave to the Programme Board to get across the concept of the BTT. However, it is a difficult animal to explain; I know what I mean because I have now been to several seminars listening to case studies of where this has been done. Attendees did grasp the idea in the end! However, senior management buy in to allow time to put this in place is a major concern. Also some attendees were not sure they had the authority to invoke change; explaining the BTT structure would give them that authority was difficult.

Since that meeting, a member of the larger group and a very proactive member of the university on process change, accompanied myself to a ProcessFix Masterclass workshop. This was a very productive day and we came away with lots of enthusiasm and ideas of where this company could help us to achieve our goals and where their training fitted in with InfoKit and workshop resource available from JISC.

On 3rd July, I attended the JISC Enterprise Architecture workshop in London, again a very valuable day; I came away understanding who should be trained in ArchiMate and where Enterprise Architecture fitted in with the concept of the BTT. David Rose of The Open Group has contacted me with reference to a training session to be held at Cranfield; I am in discussion with staff at Cranfield to organise this.

I have looked at the JISC InfoNet Change Management InfoKit and do want to organise a workshop on that, probably bespoke to Cranfield, but need to speak to Janette Hillicks to arrange this; it would be good if I could get to attend a public workshop first to ensure it is the appropriate training though…..

What have I got to do now?

• Issue notes from the meeting on 18th May [where does the time go ....];
• issue information about the different roles within the BTT framework to the meeting attendees;
• share the experience of the ProcessFix Masterclass day with BTT meeting attendees;
• identify and form a “smaller group” from the BTT meeting attendees to drive the intiative forward;
• look at the change management JISC workshop resources;
• continue conversations with colleagues about ArchiMate training and the place of EA in the university.

All this needs timetabling and can not just be done by me so the top priority must be to identify the smaller group which will become the driving force to get this initiative embedded in the university…… lots to do!

My main finding was that this is something quite a few other HEIs have recently developed, are currently working on, or are considering.

If you have any examples that you’d like to share with us, please email me.

Obviously a LOT of items were discussed across the various focus groups and prototype meetings we have held and it has been an exercise in itself to take stock of all the information and requests and formulate them into something tangible – and ultimitely workable as a live site.

We believe the chosen platform allows us the greatest flexibility whilst also incorporting much of what the various staff requested. Below is our first visual representation.

 As it stands we have already built in some of the functionality – live RSS feeds and a few other bits – and the next step is to now populate the various sections so that it is a reviewable state.

The plan is then to ask our focus group members to look over it, consider it, and feedback with comments. We’ll then be looking to streamline the site and tweak where needed before moving on to the actual visual design elements prior to our expected launch date of October 2012.

• All important questions and topics for the mobile induction have been covered.
• The finished website is intuitive and easy to navigate.

There are several stages to developing the structure of the induction which will allow inclusion of the views and feedback of different stake holders.

1. Focus groups with first year undergraduates – used to find out what basic topics the induction should cover. First draft of induction structure produced.

2. Meeting with Mobile Induction group – used to examine and revise first draft of induction structure.

3. Focus groups with librarians – used to incorporate views of library staff in the induction design.

4. After initial development of the Mobile Induction it will be tested in focus groups with students – structure and wording will be revised again if necessary.

This week the Mobile Induction group met to discuss the first draft of the site’s structure. We were able to use this meeting to produce a version of the site’s  structure which could be presented to staff focus groups. It was decided that the ‘main menu’ (or landing page) of the induction would consist of headings made up of short lists of tasks or resources that new students would need. For example, ‘Printing, copying and scanning’ and ‘Finding and borrowing items’. Sub-menus reached from each of these headings would contain a list of common questions that new students might have such as, ‘How do I reserve books already out to another reader?’ or ‘How do I connect to WiFi?’

Our next step will be to present the revised structure to focus groups of librarians to get further feedback.

The event was also an opportunity to publicise the plans of the practitioner group to a wider audience and to encourage more people to join the online Flexilearn discussion group and to suggest/offer future events. The event was well attended by over 50 staff from across the University.

A recording of the presentations and subsequent discussions is available at this web link.

My main concern for this set was that parts of my planned project have moved off in ways I had not considered when I was writing the bid.  Sarah, our cluster leader had done her homework and was able to restate the project objectives so this helped to focus my thinking.  I will go away to review the mapping of the original bid objectives to refocus what has been achieved during the project and what is outside the scope of this project.

The actions I have come away with are:

• Delegate some work on the project to other team members – I did assign a team member to each set of records when we did the initial workshop back in January but in most cases, they haven’t been involved due to other priorities or to a need for preparatory work before they could take over.  I will be reviewing each record set work and arranging meetings with them, probably around the evidencing change templates which I think are a good way of focussing activity on the project
• Define the measures for each record set (these might be high level) and then arrange a meeting/telephone call with Sarah to discuss next steps
• Start filling in the case study template and consider building skills around story telling ready for the video case study (maybe find someone else to be in the video!)
• Blog shorter posts and more regularly
• Share draft evidencing change templates on our action learning set cluster

1) Improve the output of the timetable - the current out of the box Scientia timetable format is very boxy, and the feedback we have had from our students is that they find the timetables hard to read and understand.

2) Individual timetables – we started a project back in Nov 2010 with the aim of producing student timetables – however once we looked into the process of how our awards run it became aparent that the administration involved in preparing individual timetables was over and above what we are capabale of supporting. We do need a way to allow students to personalise their award timetable to restrict teh view of data presented to at least to the modules they have chosen.

These are the two objectives of this project and we are now starting to investigate how others have gone about improving their timetable offerings.

MMU have shared with us their approach and their learnings on their W2C project and we are currently studying if we can learn from their technology solution to improve our output and service offering. Will report back next week!

Some initial analysis of how a the SVAP has also been undertaken, though this will be more formally performed after the sign off of the business mapping has occurred. The plan is to have all the processes signed off prior to the start of the next academic year starting in September.

The new Meta-morphosis project has been funded by the JISC Transformations Programme and follows on from two recent pilot projects – the donation of the General Teaching Council’s electronic archive and the JISC-funded Digital Directorate project, which looked at the Institute’s own electronic material. We will be taking the next year to create a standard set of procedures and documentation for the effective accession of new electronic archives, which will allow us to develop our ditial archive repository so that (in time) donors will be able to add new accessions themselves.

Watch this space for further updates!

Alternative visualisations and interactive approaches are being examined

It was felt that at the end of relevant support meetings it should be noted what actions the support staff have agreed to do and what the students need to do. This should be added to the record of support where appropriate.

Accessibility of services
With regards to accessibility of services, the general consensus is that work needs to be done so students are aware when and how they can contact staff. A separate project is looking at how to make staff availability more accessible. There was concern among the group that there is no clear policy on providing information on availability and therefore, staff are not held accountable if they did not provide clear information.

Signposting
It was agreed that it is important that staff are able to signpost students effectively to support services, however it was recognised that while academics are interested in student retention if their role involves teaching, research based staff – like many other “behind the scenes” staff do not come into contact with students on a regular basis and therefore cannot be expected to absorb and retain all the information about student support services. The group identified that there are key hubs that offer a wide range of support along with specialist support services. It was felt that all staff should be sent a brief on the 4 key hubs to send students to so they can confidently refer them.

Single source of information
While the single source of information was recognised to be of benefit, it was felt that there will be instances where students will not want the details of their issues shared, for example a mental health issues or disgruntlement with a member of staff. It was agreed that it would be advantageous for some information to be included; the student should be in agreement as to what is shared. The group suggested that categories could be used to provide minimal information.

All three of these events proved to be experiences that fully reinforced our transformations project’s direction also and enabled us to evaluate our progress thus far.

David’s visit was extremely supportive and very useful. We were also joined by one of our industry partners, Graham Sutherland from the Citizen’s Theatre in Glasgow, who clearly mapped out the potential learning journey of a part time work based student in technical theatre and was also able to identify for David the demand for and benefit of such a pathway.

Having provided a different perspective to our discussions, David’s visit has also enabled us to identify outcomes and develop a clear strategy for evaluation. This will also inform our own internal report which we are hoping to present to the RCS executive team in the early autumn.

The QAA Scotland event was packed with case studies of some excellent practice in work based learning although I found it a little frustrating that the majority of these were based in the public sector where it was clear that employers have a contractual obligation to take students on board in work based delivery. We are very privileged to have such committed partners as the Citizens Theatre and the National Theatre of Scotland working with us to develop our community engagement but other industry employers are less inclined to take the necessary risks involved in being the first to undertake what is for theatre a radical rethink of staff development and educational partnership.

UWS and Abertay University both had an advanced approach to work based learning and I am looking forward to the UWS who have a WBL committee, sharing their policy document.

The JISC iTech award was for our student wiki ‘Paperclip’ developed by Steve Macluskie, also a member of or Transformation project team. It allows student to create their own instruction manuals by sharing their technical processes and their final solutions with other students and eventually with industry colleagues in order to share best practice and encourage a peer based, online learning environment; something which will be invaluable in the WB degree. At the event Steve discovered Open Badges and had these thoughts to share with the Transformations team.

‘I attended the JISC iTech awards in June at the Radisson Hotel, Glasgow where Doug Belshaw gave a presentation on Mozilla’s new Open Badges project.
This immediately struck a chord and seemed to tie up elements of our own JISC Transformations project with a wider agenda by the global Mozilla to recognise skills and achievements gained outside of formal education making it easy for any organization or learning community to issue, earn and display badges across the web.

The idea seemed simple and with such a global backer as The Mozilla Foundation, who are a non-profit organization that promotes openness, innovation and participation on the Internet, it looked like this might be the next big thing and the answer of how to credit and display the production work that individuals within our industry are undertaking on a daily basis.
The flexibility seemed perfect too with Mozilla’s Open Badge Infrastructure meaning any organization or community can issue badges backed by their own seal of approval. Learners and badge earners can then collect badges from different sources and display them across the web—on their resume, web site, social networking profiles, job sites or just about anywhere.
This means that we (RCS) could, as an educational provider, endorsed by Mozilla, create and issue “badges” at just about any scale we choose. They could be issued for attending a half day seminar or completing a 12 week module. Collecting a series of badges could then translate into a year of study for a degree or even the degree itself. The possibilities are so flexible and open that it would be up to us how we constructed the structure itself.

I imagined RCS badges being instantly recognizable, maybe even having the RCS logo, and varying levels of involvement with our programme(s) allowing people to display those badges on their web identity. Imagine Facebook pages with people showing a badge they received from attending an Open Day to a LinkedIn page or Blog Page showing a badge that the individual had a Degree in Management and Technology.

I’ve already spoken to our Learning Technologist about a test case where the Open Badge Infrastructure would be used on the technical theatre student’s Mahara Page showing which elements of the compulsory H&S training they had completed. It would then be very easy for anyone to see those badges for example, “Working at Height” and “Workshop Machinery “ and not only see that they have been completed but also see the content of the course by clicking the badge itself. Furthermore, collecting all badges from the H&S Induction Courses equals passing that part of the Module and gains another badge declaring that achievement.

I genuinely think this has great potential.’

Further reading links

http://openbadges.org/en-US/about.html
http://dougbelshaw.com/conferences/2012/06/08/here-be-dragons-jisc-rsc-scotland-conference-2012-idragon/
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/hack-higher-education/how-will-mozillas-open-badges-project-affect-higher-ed
https://p2pu.org/en/

This is the blog for the University of Leicester JISC Transformations project “University of Leicester RDM Support Service: RDM@UoL”.  In the next few days I will write some information about what the project is about. I will attempt to make it informative, interesting and stimulating… but can’t promise.

Andrew
(Andrew Burnham, Senior IT Research Liaison Manager, University of Leicester – ab629@le.ac.uk)

We identified three phases to the project testing:

1. Service A: Executes on standalone hardware and software
2. Service B: Executes on shared hardware and standalone software
3. Service C: Executes on shared hardware and software

We had a meeting on 12 June 2012 with Concurrent Thinking (CT) and technical managers in UH.  This was to discuss the PID, but also to identify a service that would meet the constraints for the initial phase of testing.  This presented us with some difficulty as we have no services left that are entirely stand-alone!  We therefore went with the closest service to this, which does have some SAN usage, but is otherwise a new server with only one service running on it.

CT left the meeting with a promise to draw up a quotation to allow us to get the hardware ready for the first phase.

In January, the Information Management team held a facilitated workshop to capture baseline data about the six key record sets we had identified in our project bid.  This resulted in ‘As is’ process maps and captured some actions to fill in gaps where our knowledge of the data flow through systems was lacking as well as identifying who within the College is accountable for the overall record and constituent parts.

 Our initial focus was work on our Student records which we retain permanently although currently this is partly in digital form within our SITS student system as well as paper records, sometime files from both the central teams and departmental teams.  As part of a College funded initiative, we mapped the data flow from our admissions portal through the SITS system and also identified where data was duplicated in both digital and paper formats.  This exercise was captured in a ‘Data Managment Plan’, a new process that we have started to use to document data flows and risks.  Carrying out this analysis has enabled the Information Management team to develop the trust of business users and begin to build a business case for introducing document management to increase the content of a student record by linking scanned and born digital documents.  This should reduce the risks of core data being held outside the student record in the longer term, although implementing this functionality across the College will take time and resources to support this.    The plan has now been signed off by the business owners and feedback has been very positive.  This has resulted in project funding for Key Information Sets (KIS) and Higher Education Achievement Record (HEAR) being allocated to a 2 year Information Analyst post within the Information Management team to allow us to support the business in delivering these projects whilst ensuring that records and information management are embedded in the solutions. 

How we evaluate this is our next challenge – we can document qualitative changes such as the introduction of Information Management skills to the project team and at the end of the project in 2014, we will be able to show many back office changes such as how we capture programme and module approval and we could document the time taken to approve a module using a paper based process and compare this to the online approval and multiply this by the number of approvals per year to show a recurrent saving.  We have some experience of this as part of the JISC Impact Calculator pilot in 2010 where we defined the cost or time per unit of change against the resource costs to make the change.  We asked for help from our Finance team who are more used to calculations of this type so we may be going back for more help soon!

Our work on staff data has been progressing well as we analyse the individual fields of the PURE system feed, which will populate a portal to support our preparation for Research Excellence Framework assessment in 2014.   The use of HR data feeds exposes data quality and business processes in a way that was not intended and our challenge here has been to work with HR, Finance and ITS staff to map data flows through both the HR and Finance systems.   We have held several round table meetings to agree potential changes and ensure that we do not affect other processes by implementing these.  Mapping the process for communicating change has also been illuminating as accountable staff often have very different understanding of similar processes.  One outcome of this work has been a better overall understanding of data uses and we are now considering setting up an Institutional Data Governance Committee to sign off changes to reduce risks in this area. 

Committee records management has been progressing well behind the scenes and we are aiming to digitally archive 100% of our core committees (standing committees designated within our Ordnances) by 2012/13.  I’ve been trialling the Evidencing Change template in this area and will be sharing it with the action learning set when we meet on 10th July.

Other areas of records management have not been progressed at the same pace – there is always a limited amount of resource committed to working on this and student and staff records are high priority when matched with technical resources to implement change.

Estates records were a high priority in 2009 -2010 and improved working relationships led to better paper records management and some involvement in development of their project management system to add document management functionality.  The functionality project was put on hold in 2011 and has not yet been revived, so we will be working with Estates over the summer to understand any future development and help them to address the risks in the meantime.

Finance records have always been predominantly paper and work on this project needs to focus on building relationships with Finance staff and understanding the roadmap for development of the Finance system in this context.  Some of the work on staff data has meant work with Finance staff who control the establishment and this will be useful to build our understanding of the many aspects of financial management carried out within the College.

Our final set of records for this project is research administration records.  We have been working with staff within our Research Management Directorate over the last year on a range of projects around research data management and so have started to build our relationships there and will continue to be involved as they begin to specify the functionality of a new pre and post awards system.  One output from our earlier project is a guide to retaining research administration records so one of our frequently asked questions – what documentation should I retain can now be answered with a best practice guide

This entry has not really answered the question of evaluation but has certainly raised several new issues in my mind – I think I need several different levels of evaluation criteria, depending on the stage of change each area is at.  Where we are ready to make changes and have a project in place, this can be documented in one way but where change is not even being considered, a different set of criteria need to be applied – more of that in a later post

None of this will be solved overnight, but what we have learnt from this is the value of bringing key players around the table to talk about issues and working as a multi-disciplinary team to understand each person’s role in the process

In the spirit of “joined up” thinking, we have always kept the “Doing Digital” project aligned with the work of the “Academic Innovation” project. From a practical point of view this has been relatively easy to do as both projects have been reporting into the Development Programme. This is where all major IT projects report into.

Tomorrow, reports outlining both work to date and proposals are being submitted to the Strategy Development Forum. It is felt that this is an appropriate step to both inform and get feedback from a wide range of stakeholders before we move forward.

An initial stab at collating various bits of data has been completed and we are attempting to benchmark where we currently feel we are so that we have something to measure our improvements from. This is usually the bit we struggle with, however I always keep in mind the mantra from Benefits Realisation training that we had ”don’t create  projects trying to find measurements”.  The trainer explained that, particularly for more subjective areas, as long as we could sensibly associate the measurements to the benefits we were trying to quantify and agree them then this should work.  Having long discussions about measures and how “closely” they attributed to the benefit can prove counter productive and very time consuming.

As part of the JISC Transformations Programme the FLeXchange project is hosted by the Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences at The University of Bath. FLeXchange sits within the faculty Flexible Learning Project which is focused on the flexible delivery of postgraduate programmes, with the aim to create, evaluate and disseminate a process protocol for sustainable development of flexible programmes.

FLeXchange will contribute to one aspect of this project, to enhance institutional efficiencies in learning and teaching by engaging and developing staff, in both support and academic roles, to best equip them for the delivery of flexible learning programmes. Through this blog we will be documenting our progress as we facilitate cross-discliplinary collaboration and sharing of best practice in staff development.

The project is running for 12 months from June 2012 and we hope you’ll drop by to see how we’re getting on and please feel free to post comments and give feedback.  We’re very much hoping that our project will be informed by the experience of others as much as by our own findings, benefiting us all.

Read more about the project and who we are on the About FLeXchange page.

We now wish to maximise the positive impact of the University's use of IT to support more sustainable modes of working. As part of this work, we are now in the early stages of conducting a review of our client device strategy. This review includes the current and potential use of thin client infrastructure within our environment to:

• reduce the environmental impact of our desktop services
• reduce the cost of workstation replacement
• provide services to mobile devices
• provide services to remote users
• provide services to unmanaged workstations
• provide applications to non-native platforms 

We have an existing Citrix thin client system which mainly supports NHS-based academics across Wales (‘Pan Wales Client Canopy’, UCISA award for excellence 2004), and an Oracle (Sun) thin client system which is mainly used to provide library catalogue kiosks. We also have a VMWare infrastructure which is not currently used for thin client services. There is a continuing need to enhance the services we provide to staff and students working from hospitals and other NHS environments around Wales and we have an increasing need to work more closely with other public sector organizations across Wales and beyond. 

JISC has funded a number of pieces of work which are directly relevant to this evaluation. We will be using these resources to improve efficiency and cost savings and improve environmental performance.

I have an invitation to attend a JISC  workshop next week on Enterprise Architecture and yesterday was invited to present our project in brief  to the assembled audience. I had never come across EA before and so I watched a short webinar on the topic – it seemed much more technical than I had expected it to be but I’m hoping it will provide a methodology for the change we’d like to see in the project, particularly as there is another project for which I consider this one a feeder. 

There are a number of stakeholders in the work and not all of them will view the idea of linking digital literacy skills with employability as a pressing need for the University.  Having said that, there are a number of concurrent activities which do all shed light on the various facets of what we are about:

• a newly launched investigation of the future of teaching and learning
• a recently endorsed Web 2.0 policy
• a draft social media policy
• a Change Academy project, WIRES,  around undergraduate information and research skills
• a review of the university’s online environment
• the unification of staff and student Google domains to enable better collaboration and sharing

and in the first Project Board meeting at the end of May, our Deputy Vice Chancellor clearly voiced her expectation that this project will produce a draft digital literacy policy to meet the University’s  autumn committee cycle, so there’s plenty to be getting on with.

Data sets are likely to include HESA, HEFCE, UCAS, Census, IMD (Indices of Multiple Deprivation) and Geo-spatial support data, in addition to internally derived data from the student record system.

To develop an e-portfolio template that we can test

Identify and Engage with Employers

Undertake a review of JISC Tools & Resources.

We hope to have completed at least 80% of these tasks by the end of the summer holidays. Wish us luck!

Catherine

• A fit-for-purpose mentoring scheme with the improved systems and digital resources.
• A more efficient mentoring scheme, where the processes are mapped out and streamlined to address any existing problems and weaknesses
• A mentoring scheme with the capacity to handle a greater number of participants, larger amounts of data and higher activity levels. An increase to 50 live mentoring pairs during each future cycle, for example, is quite realistic.
• Outcomes that can be applied to other non-academic mentoring schemes within the University of St Andrews, and that could also be shared with other institutions across the sector.

A major initiative in 2010/11 focused on improving student satisfaction with regard to organisation and management. Our approach to this included a significant investment in a review of our timetable processes and the trialling of an award level electronic timetable. We are continuing towards our goal of producing individual student timetables in 2013/14, and the next phase of the project consolidates the learning from the previous phases.

We have now completed the trial of the ‘out of the box’ timetable solution, provided by our software vendor. Student feedback to date has been positive but through these feedback sessions we have identified issues with the format and presentation of the timetabled information. Specific feedback has included difficulties understanding and interpreting the data in its current format, including difficulties with naming, coding conventions and the colour and size of the displayed text.

UCF specialises in Art, Design, Media and Performance. Just under one third of our students have reported or have been diagnosed with dyspraxia or dyslexic tendencies and as a result teaching methods at UCF have been developed specifically to support our creative students who require a more visual and interactive learning experience. The Accessible Timetables (AcT) project aims to replicate this philosophy through the development of an equally engaging and accessible electronic timetable solution.

The project aims to provide an easy to use interface which will allow all our students to quickly find relevant learning schedules and study resources, when they want and how they want. This new service will enhance their studies and by helping to improve the communication of timetable changes by giving access to live data links, we hope this will minimise the number of missed activities and maximise the student learning contact time. We also anticipate that giving access to staff will enhance their academic planning experience.

To support the development of this solution we will need to revisit and redesign the timetable data collection process, analysing the following elements;

- Activity Naming conventions

- Room Naming Conventions

- Module and Award level names

- Award Group planning process

- Additional learning information gathering process

- Review available technologies

- Timetable output reporting

By enhancing these processes we will transform the timetabling service from a purely administrative function to one that actively supports the on-going Technology Enhanced Learning strategy at UCF.

Through our active participation in the FSD programme we developed our Project Enterprise Architecture Toolkit (PEAT) which we will use to plan and manage project activities.

To support this project we intend to use the following JISC resources;

•  JISC TechDis – to support are development  of timetabling outputs
• JISC Transformations programme and its activities
• JISC EA community via the FSD programme
• JISC CETIS Archi tool for modelling
• JISC Timetabling and resource scheduling paper
• Learning from the JISC STOP project
• Findings from and technology developed in the W2C project
• Coventry University VISIO EA modelling stencil

It should be noted that the process of annual monitoring itself is a well-established process. It is more the methodology of implement the process that this project is reviewing. Therefore it is unlikely that the overarching process will change, but the method through which it is delivered. It was noted that ownership and responsibility for documentation was a key area that needed to be addressed in the sense of who is responsible for creating, providing and hosting documentation.

When the new process is developed, it will require change management to ensure that the process is adhered to. The SharePoint team are also eager to reinforce the message that moving business processes to SharePoint is not implementing SharePoint. There are often comments of “when the process changes to SharePoint”. SharePoint itself was installed / implemented a few years ago, it is being used to facilitate business processes and enable documentation management and collaboration. The business will still need to determine what their requirements are and what the process is.
An aim of this project is to demonstrate the value of developing business led process that SharePoint can facilitate.

The day was opened with an introduction to EA from David Rose, followed by the EA story at the University of Bolton by Patrick O’Reilly. I followed Patrick, outlining where I thought UCLan was with regards to EA. These presentations stimulated a series of discussions looking at what the benefits of EA were and the opportunities it presented. There are currently being reported and will be added to this blog shortly. They include ensuring projects are business led, joining up of projects, re-using systems and processes where possible to reduce costs and increase efficiency as well as the opportunity for greater involvement from the business in steering projects.

After lunch Adam Watson from Leeds Met ran an introduction to Archi session teaching the groups the basics of using the tool. The usual tool for modelling processes at UCLan is Visio and this gave the participants an opportunity to explore Archi as an option. Although Archi uses the Archimate Modelling Language, Adam brought a simplified document that explained the key elements that were likely to be used.

The final session of the day looked at benefits realisation and David Rose introduced the e3 benefits grid. This encouraged the group to consider the effectiveness, efficiency and how a project will enable in the areas of enterprise, education and external to the organisation.

Overall the feedback from the day was very positive. The day simulated lot of thought and discussion among the attendees. The business upgrade project will aim to capture these thought to help inform the development of the ideal process for the management of strategic ICT projects.

• Signposting of students to services – looking at how we tell students about the services available and how they are directed to them.
• Accessibility of services, can the students make contact with the staff services they need to.
• Single source of information to enable services to support students more effectively by providing them with access to information outlining the students’ issues.

Signposting
It was noted in the As Is that one of the fail points was that there may be instances where both staff and students are not aware of the services available and the best one to help with the student’s issue. It was noted that often students are overwhelmed with information during induction and the Student Academic Affairs Service are reviewing the induction period and how students are informed about the services available. It was also noted that there was an issues with staff not always knowing the full extent of the support network available. For the 2012/13 academic year personal advisors will be introduced. All first year, full time UG students will have an identified personal advisor who they will meet with on a regular basis and who will have an extensive knowledge of the support network at UCLan. It was noted however, that not all students will have personal advisors and so this will also need to be considered. There is consideration being given to providing more information and services online.

It was also noted that students might not realise why they are sent to a service, or perhaps are not told that in order to resolve their issue they may need to take several steps i.e. an international student should always be referred to the International Office, they then may need to see other services. If students are not made aware that they will need to see several services they may feel like they are being passed around.

Accessibility
It was noted that not all staff have access to a desk or a phone. There is no policy in place at UCLan that dictates how out of office information should be conveyed. It was noted by a board member that at a previous organisation, staff were required to update their answering machine messages every day with details of their availability. Staff were expected to check their emails every day and respond to students. While the board recognised that there were times when staff had to focus on other activities such as research, students should be aware of what staff are available and how to contact them.

Single Source of Information
It was noted that when a service is approached by a student, they only have the information the student provides at the time to work from. The student may have had a previous issue that they may not think is relevant as so do not share, when actually is could be. In addition the service may be in a public place and so the student may not feel comfortable sharing their issue in that location. If the student has been passed to several services they will have to repeat an issue several times and this can be upsetting for a student. There is also feeling that students feel that in some cases the “university” should have the information services request from students for their individual databases and can be frustrated with having to keep providing this information.

Welcome to the Blog for CARBS – this will be an historical record of progress throughout the project and possibly beyond.

Check back frequently or subscribe through RSS for the latest updates.

Thanks for reading!

Extensive use is to be made of the JISC resources (including toolkit elements, modelling tools and techniques, LTC [Leading Transformational Change] and locally derived products built on JISC/LTC products).

Outputs to be developed will include:

• Example ‘as is’ and ‘to be’ models and associated migration plans for the transformation of executive reporting services from legacy spreadsheets to a data warehouse.
• Model practices for translating business requirements (often expressed in very general terms) into meaningful technical requirements for data warehousing.
• A case study showing how the significant up-skilling issues associated with data warehouse reporting
• Identify which reports can be ‘pulled’ by executives without the intervention of senior analysts, thus reducing cost, eliminating wait time and improving the quality of service.

The development of this resource will benefit not only UCF but the wider JISC community by providing:

• A release management process for the dissemination of sensitive management information
• Reusable project support documentation for migrating from legacy reporting processes and tools to data warehousing/reporting environments
• A definition of an executive reporting environment including application, data and business models, service level specifications and roles and responsibilities documentation

As a project with executive sponsorship but containing considerable technical complexity, it will generate an interesting case study.

Resulting from UCF’s involvement in the LTC programme we have started to develop the means to capture, control, track and deliver detailed project requirements (including transformation into packages of testing and sign off). This will be further developed and delivered as part of our JISC contribution.

The processes, practices and tools developed will be shared to the wider community via the JISC blog. We will also be attending the EA Practice Group to share our experiences and as this will be of particular interest to similar arts-oriented colleges, with Arts University College Bournemouth and Plymouth College of Arts and Design specifically.

The advent of the £9,000 per year student fee has created a sharper focus for ensuring that the courses we run are cost effective, aligned with demand and sustainable. Although decisions can be made using existing operational data, extraction and presentation is a time-consuming and costly activity: A simpler, more responsive reporting service would assist with earlier action, and allow UCF to react to quicker to changing market conditions.

We aim to replace the current manually intensive report writing service with a data warehouse, ‘off the peg’ reports and an executive dashboard that shows course performance and allows users to ‘drill down’ to identify specific areas of weakness.

Key Project Activities

This project will:

• Conduct a detailed process review of the ‘as is’ process for creating the present spreadsheet models and showing process costs and risks for each step. Two types of business process model will be created: IDEF0 and Swimlane Diagrams (both from the JISC Tools and Techniques Library) representing the overall context and detailed interactions between senior analysts, executives and operational departments using the Visio Coventry stencil (JISC EA Toolkit)
• Conduct a stakeholder analysis and identify the key managers involved in capacity planning and course design
• Identify the constraints and initial requirements associated with the use of admissions management reports
• Develop a data and application models for the proposed data warehouse (which will be an OLAP ‘cube’). This will include elements of Enterprise Architecture.
• Risk Response Planning and Risk Monitoring and Control practices (JISC Risk Management Toolkit) will be used to manage the inherently risky nature of developing an OLAP architecture
• Develop the business processes, use-cases, and data (entity) model for the ‘to-be’ service
• Collaboration Diagrams (JISC Process Review Toolkit) to analyse and show the interactions between key stakeholders in the executive reporting cycle
• The integration of JISC toolkit elements into the analysis cycle of reporting including 5 Why’s thinking (JISC Tools and Techniques Library), Ishikawa Diagrams (JISC Risk Management Toolkit), and elements of the JISC Scenario Planning Toolkit (specifically Scenario Building, Option Generation and Testing). This will be put together into an executive briefing and supported by workshop materials
• We envisage the extensive use of business modelling (using Archi / Visio) through the transfer of knowledge to key business users who will also become quality champions within their teams.

Design Goals

Principal design goals for the JISC element of this project are to:

• Introduce standardised techniques and practices and provide a common terminology for business intelligence
• Re-engineer the development and deployment processes for executive reporting to reduce process lead-times and resources required
• Establish a release management process for the dissemination of sensitive management information
• Eliminate the single point of failure (one person) due to the entire report production process for executive information
• Provide access to suitable query tools: SQL Developer only (and correctly) available to skilled staff, spreadsheet available to others.
• Pave the way for the elimination of Excel for repeatable/periodic executive reporting purposes
• Reduce or eliminate the potential for mis-keying of mission critical data

Identify which reports can be ‘pulled’ by executives without the intervention of senior analysts, thus reducing cost, eliminating wait time and improving the quality of service.

http://www.qaa.ac.uk/Scotland/DevelopmentAndEnhancement/Pages/Scottish-HE-WBL-Forum.aspx

I attended the QAA Scotland Work Based Learning Forum on 23 February .For me one of the key presentations was on the Work-based Learning Maturity toolkit and an invite to the institutions present to utilise this. We covered this fairly quickly at one of our introductory meetings but it was useful to have another fairly full explanation of how it works.

During the course of the day I spoke with a number of people from various institutions who appeared to be more focussed on block placement and internship modules within industry as part of degree delivery as opposed to workers undertaking general degree studies using their work context for learning and assessment. This was more obvious in the group I found myself in in the break out workshop in the afternoon and I felt it somewhat clouded the discussion at various points.

Heather Gibson, Development Officer QAA Scotland called for case study examples of WBL practice in Scottish higher education HE.

https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=SCOTTISH-HEI-WBL-FORUM;168c5135.1204

Some of the universities present were at a stage with WBL activities to contribute to this so could be a useful resource.

An update on this is expected at the next WBL Forum meeting on 15th June.

Work conducted by Creative & Cultural Skills ( Sector Skills Council for the Creative Arts) has shown there to be a deficit  of skilled technical Production Arts professionals in the performing arts industries and that a new skills development response is needed that allows people to prepare for the industry through modern apprenticeships and then continue to develop more advanced level of skills and knowledge in the workplace. A work-based degree that uses RPL and flexible entry in recognition of prior experience and learning is needed.

Funding from this project has enabled the Technical Production Arts Team to work with representatives from Industry to start to flesh out what a work-based degree might look like. To help us design the framework, we have been using the JISC’s Work-based Learning Toolkit to help us define design principles and to self-assess the emerging framework.

The framework emerging is a  flexible “Pick and Mix” model that enables participants to choose from a range of modules at different SCQF[1] levels to accumulate credit towards named qualifications. The pathway through the Framework will be determined by job role (e.g. Stage Carpenter, Scenic Artist, Prop Maker, Costume Designer etc) . Work-based learners will be able to choose modules relevant to their professional area and development need with mandatory modules in place to address digital literacy skills, academic skills  and health and safety to ensure participants have the core skills necessary to cope with academic work-based study in a safe way.  An example of the emerging framework is as follows:

CertHE in Technical  Production Arts

To attain a CertHE in Technical Arts participants must choose:

Maximum of 10 Credits from Column A

110 Credits from either Column B or C

*According to the QAA Scotland Qualification Descriptors for CertHE qualifications, a minimum of  90 of the 120 Credits must be at SCQF Level 7 or higher.

To enable academics and industry reps to work collaboratively in the development of this framework, the WBL Toolkit has been used to produce a Design Checklist. This has been based on the PROGRAMME DESIGN criteria specified in the Toolkit:

Design Assessment Checklist (Adapted from WBL Maturity Toolkit)

Meeting Employer/Employee Needs

Qualifications Pathways and Credit

Curriculum Design (Structure)

• Modules to enable WB Learners to develop study skills, academic skills and Digital Literacy Skills.
• Modules to develop specific knowledge and skills related to job role/profession/industry standards.
• Shell modules to enable employers/employees to negotiate content/ learning outcomes and assessment.

Learning Outcomes and Progression

Integration of ICT/e-learning into Programme Design

The checklist will be used by the project team at our next Progress Workshop on 22 May to assess the Framework and determine actions for further development.

So what is Get Ahead all about?

This project comprises several elements:

• Research to establish student attitudes to and take up of technology, the skills required to use it effectively and the relevance of these skills to their employability
• What messages are effective in persuading students of the relevance of the full range of digital literacy skills for employability
• Testing the above with a pilot programme aimed at second year undergraduates to take place in Spring 2013
• Integrating the delivery of such skills through multidisciplinary teams

Raising Awareness

My first opportunity to inform people about the project came about at an AwayDay organised by our Student Services Department to review the progress that has been made on the University’s Glam Edge initiative. Perfect timing for me as one of the key aims of this project is to use e-Portfolios as a tool to improve the current paper-based system that is being used. I was pleased that there was genuine interest in using e-Portfolios, but the myriad of questions asked, quickly reminded that it will certainly be challenging to implement them across the board. Questions ranged from the basic ‘What is an e-Portfolio and how does it differ from a Blackboard module?’ to ‘Will students be able to take it away when they leave?’, ‘How will employers access then?’, ‘Can lecturers view and add comments?’ and so forth….

Project Planning

Having now got my head around the project documentation and requirements (I think!), my next task is to explore the vast array of resources that JISC have available, providing examples of how other institutions have implemented e-portfolio use. The first set of project meetings are planned for next week aswell, so I’m looking forward to getting the ball rolling in earnest.

Intended Outcome 1 – Benchmarks – Answers to “How far do staff currently make effective use of IT for University processes?”
Notes. This refers to all staff who use IT in their work.
In benchmarking, maximum use will be made of existing data, including a recent baselining of practice in technology-enhanced learning practice across the University and views expressed in staff workshops on University systems and processes.

Intended Outcome 2 – Staff relate their own work to bigger University systems and processes.
Note. The rationale for this intended outcome is that the work of the University will be undertaken better when staff have a clear understanding of how their work relates to the work of others with whom they interact.

Intended Outcome 3 – A clear, accepted and evolving account of what Doing Digital means.
Notes: DD is about staff using University systems well. This generic account of DD will need to be fleshed out, and validated by those to whom it refers.
The evolved account of DD will include fundamental concepts like enterprise architecture and workflow, which should inform practice, alongside particular technical skills.
The account of DD will necessarily be dynamic, as systems and processes change over time.
The account of DD may vary between users, as well as having some common features.
The account of DD will necessarily include the capability to continue to develop one’s own digital capabilities.

Intended Outcome 4 – Proven strategies and methods for getting from baseline to goal.
Note: As well as staff development, these strategies and methods will include organisational change initiatives.
Collaboration on these with LJMU HR will be sought.

Intended Outcome 5 – Staff make effective use of IT for University processes.
Note: This, perhaps the ultimate goal of the project, will be achieved through bringing together the other outcomes.
Much the same measures and instruments used in outcome 1 for baselining can also be used to measure the attainment of outcome 5.

Luckily, we’re ahead on that with all the brilliant process mapping work that the project team have been working on over the past few weeks. We’ve highlighted gaps and dead ends, and some very interesting practices from some courses and individuals, but in the whole we’re not too bad on the core admissions processes, mainly thanks to a good Admissions team

I also attended a Jisc meeting at AUCB last week, although this was more about the Creative Arts Assembly and related more to the XCRI data project, it was still good to be with other colleagues discussing best practice and EA mapping. Please see our other blog for further information about that project    http://ucfxcricap.jiscinvolve.org/wp/

That project will be taking me to Brunel University next week where use of SITS will be discussed.

Whilst I’ve been away the project team have held many workshops among themselves, and have now commenced on the prototyping phase. Technical build is ongoing and we have a consultant from Tribal on site next week to assist with some of the tricky bits!

I’ll update you all again by the end of next week hopefully

In an excellent initial meeting a few weeks ago, the team members all met each other to understand better how all our skills will complement each other to achieve the overarching goal of the project. In Enterprise Architecture, one of the steps in applying a TOGAF-based methodology is to express the architecture vision and principles of any endeavour. So, in high level terms, just what is Performance Enhancement considered to be in the context of our project and how do we wish to enhance or change the processes by which it is currently undertaken at Bristol?

Performance Enhancement is not considered to be only related to staff review meetings:

“Performance enhancement should be an ongoing, continuous process that is not only seen as constructive but is in fact expected of leaders and managers by staff.” (http://www.bris.ac.uk/hr/policies/performance/)

Here is a diagram from our HR department that indicates the range of processes constituting performance enhancement (please note that the use of the word ‘tools’ here is not to be confused with the use of the word to mean technology-based tools):

The Performance Enhancement project aims to equip leaders and managers with the skills and confidence to have appropriate and effective conversations throughout the whole range of performance enhancement mechanisms and processes in place. It will also provide leaders, managers and their staff with the information they need to enable better-informed discussions to take place around performance.

This information aspect is where the technology component of our project comes in. For the first time at Bristol we wish to offer good quality and complete (as far as possible) data to those participating in performance enhancement conversations. The information we wish to provide should enable an holistic view of the sorts of activities that a member of academic staff participates in, from data about teaching contact and preparation hours through to research publications and participation in events – even measures of esteem or leadership roles that are not documented in our master data corporate systems, but which are nonetheless relevant to discussions about achievement or progression.  In terms of technical architectures, then, how are we to provide timely and accurate information from both our corporate teaching-related and also research-related systems to be surfaced in a view layer tool to support performance enhancement discussions? Well, our current architecture involves introducing a Web Services component to layer on top of our current timetabling system (in order to extract teaching contact hours in a sustainable way), plus using the Pure research information system (to provide research related information). Over the course of the project (which will run for at least another two years) we hope to be able to introduce new sources of information, perhaps some external. We also need to think carefully about the sorts of data we wish to archive and for how many years we wish to preserve it. For example we might wish to store year-on-year the percentage FTE’s of academics teaching across various courses, but in this scenario we wouldn’t want to record, say, the time of day or room that the academics were teaching in. However, all assumptions are being carefully thought about at this stage, in terms of the more global business intelligence requirements we have at the University (for example, although performance enhancement requirements may not include buildings and rooms data, Estates might wish to have this data archived for their own entirely separate purposes).

I will blog more about our technical integration architecture as it unfolds (implementation will start in earnest in the summer). Meanwhile the project is undertaking a programme of engagement with departments, to talk about the cultural and process aspects of performance enhancement as well as the introduction of our new technical tool to support processes. Feedback from this round of engagement will help us (on the technical side) to develop the view layer part of the tool so that is user-friendly and appropriate to the tone of the project. We intend to use the tool to solicit feedback from a pilot group who have agreed to trial it for staff review discussions in the Autumn.

A review phase of the project (at the end of this year) will include an evaluation of the pilot tool against any viable third party solutions should they become available. If nothing is available externally then we have the option to develop our in-house pilot tool further, make it production grade and to extend its use throughout the University. Either way, the data integration work we’re doing at the middleware layer will be supportive of any view layer tool that is deemed suitable for performance enhancement in the long term.

Currently using Archi Mapping to draw the processes Maps “Map As Is”. I need to draw numerous Maps to cover each part of the processes, since there are too many maps to include on this page, I posted “an overall view at the Exams processes” map to give you an idea.

In addition, I am researching what software’s are available to make the administration of our exams easier, System/ software that can help with marking, question setting, result processing and coursework marking.

Also looking to see if Question Bank is something that could be beneficial to us, as well as finding out what else is out there that other Universities already using and works well for them, so we could adopt their ideas if it’s constructive.

1. Modern HE students are mature and capable of making their own decisions about how to engage with their learning and their learning resources. The degree of flexibility and choice has been advanced considerably by the continued developments in institutional and personal technologies, and the primacy of the face-to-face taught session has been reduced as a result. The responsibilities that come with choice are seen to develop important personal core skills for the student. The consequence is that, from a learning point of view, the monitoring of student progress against learning goals has become more important than the monitoring of attendance at scheduled classes;
2. There is a requirement for HE institutions to monitor and report on student attendance to funding bodies and, for overseas students, to the UK Border Agency. Attendance monitoring is also a valuable component of the student support system that triggers action when lack of attendance indicates a problem. Attendance monitoring, particularly relating to whether a student has withdrawn from the course, is important as the information is used by the SLC to trigger the release of student loans and student fees. The consequence is that, from a management point of view,  there is a requirement for institutions to report on the attendance status of students and this is currently achieved by monitoring attendance at scheduled classes.

Two main aims – first to get more students especially to download and begin making use of the Blackboard Mobile Learn app and second, possibly more significant and important, get some pilots of the ground where a mobile learning approach is integrated into delivery of a largely face to face course.

Dealing with the first aim – we now have 5400 unique student mobile app users which is up from just under 2000 when the project started. Apart from a few all student emails and notices in Blackboard we have not done much to ‘actively’ promote the mobile app to date, so this increase has just happened really. There is a more planned campaign to be launched for the start of the next academic year – or just before – which is being co-ordinated to support the project by the publicity and communications section of Information Systems and Library Services. So, next year |I hope we will see an even more dramatic increase in mobile app usage.

The second is of course the rather tougher, foggier one. However with the help of an academic in Life Sciences, Nicky Howard-Kemp, there are now pilots being developed/planned for the start of the next academic tear in Life Sciences (2 separate pilots), one in Psychology, one in the Business School and another in the School of the Built Environment. Whilst not all of these pilots are fully formed at least 2 will revolve around in class polling. The project is also through the survey conducted late last year beginning to identify a few existing examples of where mobile learning approaches are already being exploited. Nicky is completing a dissertation for a Masters degree in e-learning and is using the Flexilearn project as the basis for her work. In her dissertation Nicky will be looking to review some of the pedagogic models that can underpin mobile learning and connect these in a meaningful way to the aspirations of the University’s Learning and Teaching Strategy. A key output from the Flexilearn project is a staff development resource designed to help staff consider mobile learning within their context and Nicky’s work will underpin this goal.

We are also due to have our first practitioner group meeting on the 8th May and at the moment 16 staff have signed up to attend. These are mostly staff who responded to the survey on mobile learning put out to all staff at the start of the project.

So there is some promising activity happening on the ground. In addition at a more strategic level there is now a communication route for the project through Information Strategy Committee (ISC), to which the project now formally reports, to the senior executive group of the university. In addition through ISC the project’s ‘existence’ has influenced the approval of a web 2.0 policy for the University that means that staff can legitimately use a range of external tools to support mobile learning (e.g. SlideShare and ScreenR). In addition the ISC has supported the need to further support mobile approaches by approving the purchasing of a texting solution that also supports in-class polling at no cost to the student.

1. Staff that recognise that student information management is an essential component of the student support system, as well as being required for effective institutional management;
2. Staff who regard student information management as an administrative task that should not be the responsibility of academics whose primary role is to teach;
3. Staff who largely comply with the student information management requirements but have no confidence in the value it delivers.

The transformation continues…

We have got innovative ideas challenging our modes of service delivery from all over the place. Yet we still have to get on with the business of delivering services to the thousands of students, staff and associates who need them without breaking anything.

The number of collaborations we are reviewing as part of TULIP keeps increasing. I think we are now up to 7 projects as well as the flexible service delivery of our standard service offering.

We’ve had some success:

• As projects are starting to be run and worked on by similar people we have been able to achieve some consistency in how we manage and document work across various collaborations and share designs from previous work.  I’m hoping the TULIP project will allow us to evolve these into design patterns.
• I’m starting to collect processes and service models from across different projects and work streams to get towards that complete picture of our service offering.  I’m also hoping to see where the areas of most commonality are and where the areas of difference are.  At the moment there are more differences than similarities but it’s been great to see people working on projects getting the vision and understanding that what we need is a set of smaller service pieces that can then be composed in different ways for different types of external partner.
• Our Assistant Registrar (Projects) has been diligently  building a high level process map of Registry services.  I’m hoping to be able to build on this for the TULIP blueprint rather than reinventing the wheel.
• Attending the JISC EA workshop as part of the project was a great opportunity to learn from others and to try the Archi modelling tool out.  It was great to attend this with a colleague from our Strategic Development Unit so that the EA approach can be introduced to other parts of the college.  I’m really looking forward to trying to use Archi to map out what services we offer and which ones are quite rigid and which ones more suited to sharing.  It also sounds like these models can be really useful for helping people understand complexity and for planning change.

Challenges I’m currently facing on the project are:

• Trying to find the time to step back and see the TULIP big picture.  It’s very difficult to jump between high level architecture and detailed design and hard to make time for the kind of holistic transformation we are aiming for when there is so much to get done.  All of us involved in trying to think about transformation are also involved in supporting day to day activities so we have to keep switching our hats and think in parallel and that’s tough.
• Knowing where to get started!  There is so much going on and so much material being collected it’s quite daunting deciding how to get started with trying to pull it all together.  I know that once I make a start it will become easier to see where to go next but taking that first step is tricky, especially when the end vision is quite indistinct.
• I need to think critically about the language we use  on TULIP.  We talk about services, capabilities and processes and often uses these interchangeably.  I am not sure these are the same thing but I haven’t found a good way yet of describing the differences between them or understanding the relationships between them.

At the end of January, we held a day workshop facilitated by an external IM consultant to look at all 6 areas of records within this project, Student, Staff, Finance, Estates, Research and Committee records.  Each member of the IM team is taking a lead on one area and we summarised the current situation as we understood it and then tried to map the data flow of each type of record from creation to retention, deletion or archiving.

One main area of focus since then has been around the management of student records.  We currently retain all student paper files permanently and although there have been some electronic student record pilots, most of our schools still create a paper file as well as maintaining the electronic student system (we use SITS).  There are many reasons for this – most academics and some administrators don’t have access to the student system and so when they need to write a reference or answer a query about a student, getting access to the paper file is the easiest way to do this.  Other issues are lack of scanning facilities for those records received in paper format,  lack of trust of the electronic system or comfort in the existing process and lack of drivers to change!

As information managers, we need to  be led by the business in driving these changes.  We have identified a window of opportunity to work with our Students and Education Support Directorate who are driving work around the Higher Education Achievement Report (HEAR).  Alongside this work, the business is also hoping to improve access to the system, address training issues and review the security model so that end users can get an overview of a student record without having to access multiple screens or submit data directly into the system.  Our team will be working alongside these projects to compare ‘As is’ and ‘To be’ processes and to demonstrate at what stage fully electronic records can be trusted and we can cease creating and retaining paper records.

Another area we have been asked to work on by our IT services is to look at staff records.  In preparation for Research Excellence Framework assessment in 2014, we are implementing a new Research Information System fed by the PURE application.  The use of HR data feeds exposes data quality and business processes in a way that was not intended and our challenge here is to work with HR, Finance and ITS staff to map data flows through both the HR and Finance systems.  One thing that we are focusing on is responsibility for fields within the core systems - in many cases, there is  no clear responsibility and in other cases, changes can be made to suit one use which may impact on how another system uses this data. 

None of this will be solved overnight, but what we have learnt from this is the value of bringing key players around the table to talk about this issues and working as a multi-disciplinary team to understand each person’s role in the process.

The Enterprise Architecture workshop arranged by JISC on 29th March was a valuable introduction to this approach and one thing I particularly took from the day was that Enterprise Architecture practitioners may be more effective if not sited in ITS or Business functions.  Our experience of being neutral players, able to understand technical and business requirements and to translate requirements between the parties would back up this recommendation.

Other areas we have started to investigate have included research administration records.  Administrative records are managed by our Research Grants and Contracts team and at present are kept as paper files and sent to records management for retention.  Discussions are underway to scope a new system that will manage pre and post awards and will allow digital or scanned documents to be attached to the project.  Involvement in the planning and design of the system will allow us to ensure that these records will be more widely available which should limit the need for staff to keep their own copies as well as to improve the ability to transfer administrative records to the College Archives to preserve our research memory

Committee records are now only preserved digitally and we are continuing to work with committee administrators to ensure that they submit them in a timely manner and that we can store them with adequate metadata for retrieval and use by College Staff.  We hope to create a new committee system using SharePoint 2010 in the near future which will allow self-service secure storage and access for committee members to allow phasing out of printed copies at a later stage.

Work with our Estates records will be building on two previous projects both funded by JISC - the PEKin Project which delivered a case study on the move from paper to digital estates records and the Transforming Estates Records Management (TERM) project which piloted the Impact Calculator.  Estates are improving their project management system (IMPREST) to allow storage of project documentation and the IM team have been involved in this work.

Our final area of work is that of Finance Records.  This is traditionally paper based and we are in the early stages of documenting the flow of information from external suppliers and staff expenses to payments and the documentation created and its need for retention.  There are many players involved in these processes and the appetite for change is not high.

I’m looking forward to the next action learning set on April 30th to share our experiences with the other members and to use this feedback to plan work over the next few months

The JISC Process Mapping InfoKit was used to educate the project team on process mapping. There were three types of approaches to process mapping that were discussed. There were three teams of seven to eight administrators in each action research group. Each group eventually decided on a preferred approach to documenting their processes, but ideally using flow diagram, on paper.

This was the first iteration of a mapped process using Archimate. These steps were captured by the a group of eight administrators in this action research group.

This process is managed by the administrators following receipt of the student’s application.

Following the process mappings, a process modeller used Archi to digitally map the processes.

Archi, is an open source modeling tool that uses ArchiMate to create architecture diagrams. Archi, was developed by the University of Bolton, as a support, and entry-level tool for Enterprise Architecture.

This is a process that was mapped using Archi:

It was very interesting to see how far some universities had progressed on their EA journey and the approaches they had taken. There appears to be a trend in the creation of a programmes office to lead the EA approach and to ensure that a holistic view of projects is taken. It was also very interesting – and reassuring – to hear how Large, multi-national corporations are engaging in EA and setting clear, measurable targets they aim to use and EA approach to achieve.

One area I began to wonder about following the day is whether an institutions approach to how it will operate as a business should be included in the strategy? At UCLan we identify areas such as student experience, excellent employer, sustainability, research, innovation, learning and teaching, equality, employability and internationalisation as core to achieving our vision of being a “Our vision is that by 2017 the University of Central Lancashire will be recognised as a world-class modern University competing successfully and sustainably in a regional, national and international market.” http://www.uclan.ac.uk/strategy/our_vision.php

Under all these visions we have strategies that outline how we will achieve that vision. This
Is the approach to how we do business an operational or strategic issue? It seems to me that EA is a strategic approach so I wondered if it had made it to any institutions’ strategies and if so at what level? Should an EA approach be included in the vision or the more operational strategies if at all? This is something that it might be interesting to explore at the next EA day.

It was clear from the discussions that a holistic approach to student support is essential as several groups are discussing systems and databases in their area, but these do not appear to be joined up. It is also clear that roles and responsibilities relating to communication are not clear. This is an issue that came up in the Business Upgrade discussions as well. Staff are often unclear if their role in a group, workshop or committee is purely to input into that collective or if they also should be feeding back to others. As a result those working on related projects had not heard of TISSUE. I believe this demonstrates a need for a method to ensure that crossover and relationships between projects are identified.

The fail points identified varied from the way staff manage their communications with regards to being out of office, to the type of person the staff member is and whether they would take a holistic approach to the issue i.e. send them to Financial Services to discuss money troubles or exploring if additional pastoral care is required. It was also noted that there are many associate lecturers who do not have an office, desk or telephone that the student can reach them on. As these staff are ad hoc members of staff, the group suggested that they are less likely to be aware of the range of support services available to students.

One of the key issues discussed was that students may have to repeat themselves several times to different staff / services in order to resolve an issue and they may be uncomfortable with this. They may have elected to approach one member of staff as they feel they can approach them, but may not wish to tell the 3-4 other services which might need to be involved to help them resolve their issue. The group were keen to have a way of keeping a record of the student’s issue so that the next service they are directed to can access their information. The group identified that this would also help when students had been directed to services but did not know why. It was noted that students often turn up for support as they have been sent by another member of staff but do not know what support they are supposed to access from that service – especially generic services such as Student Liaison Officers and The I – a one stop shop for information. They group suggested that it needed to be made clear to students why they were being sent to a service.

A discussion was held around the number of times are student is bounced while their issue or issues are resolved. It may be necessary for the students to visit several different support services to resolve their issue i.e. they may visit The I to ask about help with money issues, The I will direct them to Students Financial Services who would request them completed an application and make an appointment to review their situation. Financial Services may need a financial review which is done through the SU Advice Centre, they then may need to get a job and therefore visit the Bridge. This is before any pastoral care is considered. This number of contact points can also be a risk as often the student may be directed to the next service but not actually go.

The discussion also covered the responsibility of the students and the services. The services agreed that once a student reached them they had a responsibility to ensure that student received the support they required, many said they felt it was important that the loop was closed and this involved them contacting the students to question if their issue had been resolved. There was a discussion around a flagging process that would flag a support service that a student had been directed to them and if that support service then had a responsibility to contact the student if they did not contact the service. The group agreed that it is the students’ choice if they contact a support service and services should not contact students first. There were concerns that this would simply become a performance monitoring tool and that services will be judged on the number of students that were flagged to contact them but did not. The group also discussed the value of knowing how many students were not contacting services when advised as it might give services useful information to inform their approach to encouraging students to visit them.

The group felt that the student had responsibilities as an adult to help resolve their own issues and that a clear outline of what a support service will do and what the student needs to do should be outlined with the student. There were concerns around data protection and getting the students consent to share the information. This will need to be explored.

• the role of the project facilitators
• the role of the action researchers
• the role of the team leader
• the project and project timeline
• the JISC tools and infokits to be used
• the method of communication and recording activities

SIMSE project team members met on 20 March 2012. The project team shared information on university wide IS development and updates on the current project development. Below is an outline of project development and issues discussed in the meeting:

• Draft implementation plan was made ready for discussion.
• The original BAG participants questionnaire was revised based on the initial feedback. The revised questionnaire was sent to BAG members again. Six responses have been received so far.
• · The first SG meeting was scheduled on Monday 26 March. The agenda and documents to be sent were ready.
• Reminder emails were circulated to all faculty managers regarding the use of tracking devices in class rooms. This was to remind students to swipe their ID card when attending lectures.
• The team members had extensive discussion on how best to implement JISC’s Strategic ICT Toolkit for the strategic use of SES. They shared their understanding and views, raised questions, and challenged their current thinking. For examples. what is the wider context of making the best use of SES, should the data be managed by the university’s planning department in the register office? Should the SES outputs be integrated directly with DVC’s student retention dashboard? Would our project benefit from an institutional level ICT maturity audit to know where we are now even it may be beyond the scope of the SIMSE project?
• It was agreed that all six key enablers in the Strategic ICT Toolkit should be considered in the implementation plan. Some of the key enablers, e.g. EA, may needs more attention and in-depth investigation. The revised implementation should be sent for approval by the SG meeting.
• The team had useful discussions on the purpose of the next SG meeting. It was agreed that it was to review and approve the implementation plan. SG members serve as the critical friends to evaluate the progress and outcomes. Two formal meeting were planned, but the SG members will be regularly updated with the project progress and milestones for their feedback.
• Marcus offered to showcase the SES to SG members on Monday morning 26 March.

Taking this approach, the project met with colleagues of the Academic Enhancement Unit (AEU) and looked at ways in which the project could use the institutional VLE (Blackboard) to support learning around project management and the associated techniques. It was felt that this “hands on” approach would help in the analysis of the data we have collated to date and give it some context.

As mentioned in the previous post, it seems that the majority of the work that we are currently involved in can be underpinned by the “Doing Digital” concept. Much of the current work with a system implementation centres as much on “how” people are working with the new capability as much as looking at the service the system can provide. Recognising this as a key factor in any system implementation can only help to improve future IT projects.

• action research principles and research skills
• process mapping skills
• working as a member of a project team
• conducting meetings, chairing and minute taking
• use of the Moodle VLE for recording and sharing project activities internally
• writing and presenting business change proposals
• influencing and negotiating skills
• affecting change – both organisationally and individually

It was decided that administrators could opt in to personal development during the project, depending on their own perception of individual needs.  However, with action research and process mapping skills being imperative, it was decided that a training session would be offered prior to the start of the project.

The document below provides a simple overview of the proposed timeline of key activities.

Administrative Process Review and Enhancement Development Programme

• interfaced CMIS, our timetabling system, with our HR and Payroll system for staff details
• interfaced CMIS with out Student Record System, UNIVERSE, an in-house developed system, from which we are passing data about courses, modules, module/cohorts, students and student/module/cohorts across for CU London Campus.
• trained timetabling staff to use ‘student fitting’ functionality in order to enable students to be put into specific sub groups so that they only see the events relevant to them.
• reviewed the processes for ad hoc room bookings and prepared a draft business case for automating this process.

We are currently looking at the format of the online timetable and reviewing the processes for cancelling and rescheduling events.

We have also been liaising with Faculties to determine whether we can capture student’s preferred option choices in advance , though this may only be possible in some areas where this information is already gathered.

A particular complexity is the need to understand when students can be released for online enrolment and module selection, as this currently happens after Exam Boards in August for re-sits.

We hope to have a trial in Coventry University London Campus in April, when their new semester starts, followed by a trial for some Faculties in Coventry University in May.

Twenty five faculty administrators (referred to as Action Researchers from now on) were asked to choose which process (from the three chosen during the scoping session) they would like to review as a team. They were also asked to indicate if they were interested in becoming the “leader” for the chosen action research team.

Three groups of 8/9 action researchers were formed and two leaders volunteered. The administration manager volunteered to lead the group without a volunteer leader until such time as another leader came forward.

It was decided to set up a Moodle occurrence for the project so that all action researchers could contribute to publishing information for their own group and to view the progress of all groups in the action research project. This was set up by the Project Manager and all action researchers were given the status of ‘teacher’ to provide full access rights.

Initial documentation was imcorporated into the Moodle environment including: the bid proposal; link to the JISC infokits; group membership; action research guidelines; the project process and contact information for project leaders and action researchers.

 At the start of the project, work was undertaken  using the JISC’s BCE Toolks and work-based learning maturity toolkit with industry partners to identify ideas for improving business and community engagement and key design principles that would inform the development of a new, flexible work-based learning programme in technical arts that would be wholly delivered in the workplace in collaboration with key industry partners including the National Theatre for Scotland and The Citizens Theatre, Glasgow.

 The group met again on the 15 March 2012  to review progress to date and it was very encouraging to see a number of key developments are already being progressed.

 Business Community Engagement

 The ideas that had emerged at our workshop in December had been prioritised in discussion with Industry partners. A number of developments are now being progressed to enhance engagement with relevant creative arts companies in Scotland including:

• Creation of an Industry Database in conjunction with the Conservatoire’s Short Course Team.

• An Online “Showcase” for Technical Production Arts Students from 2012-13 using social networking  that will enable students to showcase their work to employers and other interested stakeholders. This will replace a physical showcase event that used to take place annually, as it was felt that students would be able to reach wider audiences with their work and it would also help the Conservatoire keep in touch with its Alumni as they became employees and employers of the future.

• Annual Industry Consultation event  kicking off in July 2012 which will be used to explore different education and training needs in the industry and to ensure that full-time and short course provision is better aligned with industry needs

• Improvements to the short courses/summer school planning to make it more strategic and to enable enhanced engagement with Schools to explore opportunities for  summer schools/short courses aimed at enhancing business/community engagement.

• Actions  to credit rate short course programmes and summer schools  to the Scottish Credit  and Qualifications Framework (SCQF) www.scqf.co.uk  so that participants could if they wish accumulate credit  and use them towards named qualifications offered in future work-based programmes. Staff have already attended “credit rating” workshop offered by SCQF and have identified 4-5 programmes that would be credit rated as a priority.

• Paper to Senior Management setting out the value of credit rating short course and summer school provision.

Work-based Learning

 The principles for work-based learning programmes that emerged from the December workshop using the WBL Maturity Toolkit have been used to develop a outline “pick and mix” WBL structure which would offer Industry a very flexible framework to enable staff to train and professionally develop in the workplace. The structure  would enable the Conservatoire to work collaboratively with the National Theatre of Scotland and the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow ( and possibly other industry stakeholders such as the Association of British Theatre Technicians http://www.abtt.org.uk/ , The Federation of Scottish Theatre http://www.scottishtheatres.com/  and PLASA https://www.plasa.org/ )  to design and deliver the programme. The flexibility would offer employers and their employees opportunities to accumulate credit for recognised credit rated CPD provision,  embark on work-based modules designed and validated by the Conservatoire in the context of an individual employee’s  work and job role.

 The model was discussed with employers and members of the Conservatoire’s Technical Production Arts team  at the progress meeting on the 15 March and there was support for it. Further work is now being undertaken to engage other third parties in the model, to explore the potential for credit rating their provision so that employees completing their training could accumulate credit towards named qualifications including a CertHE, Dip HE and Ordinary Degree. In addition further work is now being undertaken to produce short summaries explaining module content and to create “employee illustrations” which will indicate to employers how different “types” of employees might access and progress through the programme in the future. These will be considered at the next progress meeting on the 22 May 2012.

We’ve had a rapid review session with Gabby, Rachel, Peter, Andrew and myself and we’re uncovering some interesting processes that will be a challenge to develop into a system workflow, the main one being adhoc oddities that seem to follow a rather unconventional path – i’ll divulge more in the action learning sets!

By examining the KPI’s we will try to understand them and the drivers behind them, in order to rate them in the following ways: