Third meeting of the Steering Group

We held our third Steering Group meeting on 22^nd January, with John Fielden, our HEA consultant also present.

Since the last meeting, we have collected more data through sending out questionnaires to all School Directors of Teaching and Learning and School Teaching and Learning Co-ordinators. We received a good response to these and the data generated provides us with a very informative picture of what is happening (or not happening) at School level with regard to different aspects of e-learning, and what the view ‘closer to the ground’ is. Part of the information gathered has fed into the draft IRD, but the results will be of use to us beyond the IRD.

The IRD has been drafted and a response to section D outlined. The meeting was a chance for the Steering Group to work through the drafts of sections B, C and D and comment on the content. On the whole, we were in agreement with the drafts. There were several suggestions for what else could be included. As usual, many interesting points arose and were debated about our approach to e-learning, how we’ve got to where we are now and where we should be going next. Will the way we’ve done things until now sustain us into the future or is it time to rethink how we approach e-learning? All of which then fed into a discussion of the Pathfinder Project.

Meta-Post: Browser Problems

We've been having a few problems with this blog of late - namely that attempts to access this page in Internet Explorer (specifically, version 6) seemed to bring up a download box. Basically, it is as if the browser were interpreting this address as a file with the extension ".blogspot"... This happened yesterday.

It all seems to be working okay now but we'd really appreciate it if you could leave a comment to let us know whether you are having any problems viewing this page or if it seems to be working okay. If you're using IE6 and you're reading this, please let us know that you've been successful. On the other hand, if you are using Firefox or any other browser, perhaps you could check this blog in IE6 to see if it the page looks different... Or if it comes up at all.

Many thanks in advance,
Guy

Second meeting of the e-benchmarking Steering Group

We held our second meeting of the e-benchmarking Steering Group on 22 November, with John Fielden (HEA consultant) in attendance again. Prior to this all members of the Steering Group had answered as many parts of the IRD as they could and these had been collated in a single document. We considered this at the meeting, together with the summary of responses to the institutional drivers ranking question. We also looked at the proposed questionnaire, designed for distribution to School Directors of Teaching (SDTLs) & Learning and School Learning Technology Co-ordinators (SLTCs). This latter document is intended to collect in missing information, as well as seeing what picture emerges at School level with regard to e-learning.

In the summary of the Steering Group responses to the institutional drivers question, ‘Generally enhancing the quality of teaching and learning’ and ‘Improved flexibility of delivery for on-campus students’ emerged as the top two drivers. It was felt that this was an accurate reflection of what we felt to be the main institutional drivers for e-learning.

Some of the themes which emerged from our discussion of the Steering Group responses to the IRD prompt questions were:

• the relationship between the Teaching and Learning strategy and the e-learning strategy
• the aspirational nature of the e-learning strategy, in contrast to implementation plans

The following points also emerged:

• e-learning is seen as just one aspect of the overall enhancement agenda
• the e-learning push often comes from students and quality management processes are in place to ensure those requests are responded to
• e-learning is monitored and evaluated as part of the overall process of teaching and learning

We agreed to refine the draft questionnaire for the SDTLs / SLTCs and confirmed our action plan, which is on schedule.

The questionnaire was subsequently sent out, with a deadline for completion of 8^th December.

First meeting of the e-benchmarking Steering Group

On 25 October, after forming a Steering Group, we held our first meeting with our HEA consultant; John Fielden. We all received the Institutional Review Document (IRD), in advance of this initial meeting... Support for the exercise was expressed. The Chair emphasised its timeliness, given that we are currently reviewing our Teaching and Learning Strategy. We then agreed, among other points, that:

· The granularity of data collection and analysis for the exercise would be at the level of Faculty/School.

· A way of providing feedback to Faculties and Schools (and those who participate in the exercise) needs to be developed.

After reviewing the IRD, we felt that those present would be able to respond to many of the 'prompt' questions and that a good starting point would be for each member of the Steering Group to provide a response to whichever questions they felt able to answer. This would provide a basis from which to work, enabling us to then identify gaps, omissions and so on. We could then formulate questions to send out to 'the next layer' of respondents.

We concluded the meeting by drawing up a timetable, taking us through to the final meeting with our consultant on 29th March. The most imminent deadlines were the individual completion of the IRD by Steering Group and the collation of those responses by a working group, prior to the next consultation on November 22nd.


Since then…

The working group has:

· collated the responses to the IRD from the Steering Group members

· collected documents that could be appended to the IRD (e.g the e-learning implementation strategy)

· analysed the results to the institutional drivers question in section B

· drawn up a set of questions for School Directors of Teaching and Learning and School Learning Technology Coordinators.

These have now been circulated to the Steering Group ahead of our next meeting on 22 November. The main aim is to review the IRD to date and see where we take it from here...