Quali-R

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.