Quali-R

We're up at the JISC Conference in Edinburgh this year, and we have 10 minutes to show the Quali-R project. Come along to Demo Stand 2 at 09.40 on 2009-02-24 to say hello.

We are implementing a demonstrator managing and tracking a small HEI's quality assurance and enhancement actions through standards-based aggregation. We'll be showing how we'll be managing action items extracted from narrative documents, such as external examiner reports, annual course monitoring reports, and course committee discussions. In addition, these actions can be syndicated to iCalendar and RSS clients.

We've kept things simple, so you don't need to be a techie to understand what's going on. We think our project will be of interest to those interested in how institutions can apply existing, standards-based technology to improve the processes associated with quality assurance and enhancement.

You can find out more at the project website.

Who said quality wasn't fun?

We have been discussing the project team's attendance at the JISC Conference in Edinburgh at the end of March 2009 and agreed that we should book four places as intend for the key members of the team to attend. We are also planning to provide a demo at this event.

I updated project members on recent discussions at College Committees. Boards of Studies have just take place and an item on recent developments on the Quali-R project was given by the Quality Team. It was noted that External Examiner Action Plans/ACM Logs were not received by the Board as it would result in returning back to the 'old' system. It was also viewed that once the Quali-R project goes live, this delay in updating on progress with specific actions will be caught up as the Jira system will allow immediate updates on actions to take place (as opposed to having to wait for the next committee meeting). Once the project is 'live' the Summer Boards of Studies will start to take on more of a monitoring role.

We discussed that we are slightly behind schedule on our project plan in some areas but the overall scope is still achievable. This delay is also due to the widened scope of the project to now be across all courses as opposed to starting as a pilot.

We confirmed that it would be more beneficial to hold focus groups after the completion of current revalidation activities, when staff will have greater availability. These focus groups will also coincide with the project going live.

We discussed problems of sustainability in relation to the way courses are described in the current validation. Issues will mainly be in relation to external agencies and the College as a whole being able to track back through the history of a particular course. Future course title changes could pose a problem so we will need a process to close down actions at the end of an academic year (or end of a programme lifecycle) so that any unresolved actions can roll over into the next years action plan. To address some of these things we are interested in some of the possibilities offered by XCRI in formalising course descriptions.

We have encountered a bug on creating Jira projects through the remote API and we are investigating how to work around this. If this fails we will look to create projects for courses manually. The aim is still to have enough to demonstrate to staff in March.

We are also exploring how the FE model of annual monitoring can fit into this framework, due its different reporting formats.

 

 

 

While we were giving an update to the Quali-R project at the Board of Study this morning we took advantage of the fact that there were several student reps there and asked them for their opinion on having RSS feeds emmbedded in Moodle with the actions from the SSLs for their course. The students' response to this was very positive and they noted that this way would be a far more efficient way of communicating the updates rather than doing matters arising. They asked if they would be able to comment on the issues and as far as I'm aware this would be possible to do.

From discussion at the project meetings last Thursday and Friday (13/14 November), I realised that the Quali-R project link from the JISC Institutional Responses to Emergent Technologies page did not work so I have just emailed Steve Boneham (Netskills/Newcastle) the correct link so that this can allow for easy access from the wider community. 

The project team met to discuss the interim report and to review progress against the project plan, and the current budget.

Present: Roger Rees, Cathryn Smith, Elisa Simone, Miles Metcalfe.

We brainstormed the interim report, highlighting successes and reflecting on potential risks and issues. Cathryn took notes of the process to upload onto the wiki.

We reviewed the budget statement against the project budget. There is some work to do reconciling the College's reporting format against the records we have kept, and Miles and Roger agreed to review this prior to their meeting on Monday 2008-11-24 to advance the interim report.

Cathryn and Roger signed expenses claim forms. Participants are reminded that the College's cut-off for expenses claims falls next week.