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...