Thursday, 21 February 2008

Repetitive test

Posted by sbowman at 10:07 AM in /
Comments (0)

Wednesday, 2 May 2007

Final Scoring Meeting

We held our "Final Scoring Meeting" with the P&M consultants on the 16th April. As the team here at Rave had already been through a number of iterations of the scoring process, the process was mercifully brief. It was interesting to note that the consultants were able to bring differing perspectives to our scoring process. Their insights into the "wider picture" around our engagement with e-learning enabled us to see that we had been under-scoring on a few of the criteria, because we were still bringing an internal viewpoint to a wider formalised process. At the end of the meeting there was agreement on the scoring profile, and the next step will be to start work on our internal report on the whole e-benchmarking process, with a set of action points to guide the institution forward in its e-learning offer.
Posted by sbowman at 4:52 PM in e-benchmarking/
Comments (0)

Wednesday, 11 April 2007

Extra P&M Cohort Meeting Rave+Cumbria

 Had a very useful meeting today with "real-world" Bela consultants here in the flesh at Rave, and "virtual" colleagues from Cumbria attending through the wonders of Skype Video (and Bruce's phone!). The meeting took place because neither of our institutions could attend the general Cohort meeting for the P&M methodology at the end of March.

 Much of the discussion at the meeting concerned "Subject-Based E-benchmarking" an area of interest to both institutions as we are mainly arts, design, and media based. There was a general agreement between us that the P&M methodology had been chosen because it offered a robust framework within which we could evaluate the qualitative elements which comprise a lot of practice-based and arts based HE. This appears to be borne out by the observation by the consultants that this particular methodology seemed to finding favour with the smaller practice-based institutions within the general E-benchmarking programme.

<> There was some discussion around VLE-based and non-VLE-based provision of e-learning, and the perception that if an institution has a VLE then that is the focus of its e-learning activities. This was balanced against the fact that the majority of our students have experience of "e-learning" outside of our institutions through the use of social networking sites, IMS, and mobile technologies.

<> Both institutions set a deadline of the end of May to produce final reports on the E-benchmarking process, which will be shared with the wider cohort community.

 Here at Rave we have our "Final Scoring" event next week, and I am (hopefully) attending the "Taking Stock" event in Nottingham on the 19th. 

Posted by sbowman at 3:50 PM in e-benchmarking/
Comments (0)

Friday, 30 March 2007

Preparation for Final Scoring Meeting

As part of the preparation for the meeting we have tidied up our evidence base. On looking at the evidence as noted in the matrix, it became obvious that some of the text was not explicit enough as to the actual evidence that we could supply. For example it may have said "Review of HEFCE, TQEF and other documents produced by the HEI. Interviews with PVC(s) and Director(s) responsible" which was a little unfocused! This has now been amended to "L&T Strategy is mapped to TQEF, E-learning Strategy mapped to L&T Strategy." which gives a much clearer evidence trail. The final meeting is coming up after Easter, and we are pretty much prepared at this stage.

Posted by sbowman at 10:34 AM in e-benchmarking/
Comments (0)

Monday, 12 March 2007

SU Feedback: E-benchmarking Matrix

After consultation with the Student Union, we have now received feedback on the E-benchmarking matrix. The feedback received was positive, with no major areas of difference between where the E-benchmarking team felt that we should appear on the "scoring" of the criteria, and where the student's thought that we should be placed. The SU were keen to continue to be consulted and informed of our e-learning developments both inside and outside of the e-benchmarking process. We have set up our 'Final Scoring' meeting for April, and are currently looking to 'score' the relevance and availability of our matrix evidence.
Posted by sbowman at 12:14 PM in e-benchmarking/
Comments (0)

Friday, 9 February 2007

Test

Test
Posted by sbowman at 10:30 AM in /
Comments (0)

Wednesday, 7 February 2007

York Town Meeting

A town meeting was held on the 25th January in York, for those HEIs interested in entering Phase 2 of the E-benchmarking exercise. I attended the meeting (along with my colleague Remmert de Vroome) as a presenter. We were presenting our experiences of working through the Pick&Mix methodology, along with the University of Teesside and the University of Derby. As a team we presented six sessions at the day for a number of other HEIs who expressed an interest in following the P&M path.

Much of our discussion centered around our reasons for choosing this particular methodology (many of the criteria are qualitative, and yet they are arranged in a quantitative framework [easily understood by SMT!], and that the supplementary criyeria can be chosen according to the interests of the particular institution), and around the quantum of time needed to fulfill the requirements of the exercise.

<>We provided copies of our P&M matrix thus far, and discussed various ways in which criteria might be chosen (for example, choosing a criteria on which the score would be 1 as a 'flag' to inform future developments), and the gathering of evidence to support the scoring process.

The day was seen as a success, both for the HEI delegates, and for us as a small HEI being able to put the exercise into context for our peers. 

Posted by sbowman at 11:10 AM in e-benchmarking/
Comments (0)

Wednesday, 13 December 2006

Consultant Meeting 13th December

Third meeting with Bruce Carter from P&M. We are now some way down the route of evidence gathering for the criteria that we have chosen. The evidence so far is fairly institution-centric, in that it refers to strategies, plans, operational and training documentation, it would be useful to map some of the evidence against external sources in addition. It has been suggested that, now we have a rough idea of our "scoring" for most of the criteria, it would be useful to "score" (on a similar 5 point scale) the robustness of our evidence for each of these criteria, this we will do. Now that we have a reasonable idea of where we might stand in relation to virtually all of the criteria - our next step will be to open out the discussion around the benchmarking exercise to our Student Union and Faculties, to triangulate the view from the centre, the view from the "chalkface" (archaic or what! [the term, not the group!/images/emoticons/cool.gif, and the all important Student experience.Once this has been completed, we can begin to move towards using the benchmarking data to inform an action plan of the next developments that need to take place in order to move e-learning forward within the college.
Posted by sbowman at 12:44 PM in e-benchmarking/
Comments (0)

Tuesday, 5 December 2006

Latest Version P&M Criteria

Received the latest version of the P&M criteria by e-mail today (November 27th). The layout and descriptors are now much clearer. Looking forward to mapping the criteria to our evidence-base here at Rave. We will be meeting with Bruce to look at possible scorings in December.
Posted by sbowman at 10:36 AM in e-benchmarking/
Comments (0)

Wednesday, 22 November 2006

Consultants Meeting - 21st November

We have just had our second meeting with the P&M consultants. Bruce Carter from the P&M team came to the college on 21st November. We had assembled most of the e-learning benchmarking team to meet with him. This included our Learning Technologist, VLE Developer, A selection of Academic Staff, The Head of Registry, and myself. The meeting was called to thrash out which (if any) of the Supplementary Criteria we would be examining as part of the benchmarking process. A lively debate ensued! All of the participants had been sent the criterai beforehand, and a number of colleagues had already mede some inroads into choices. Bruce had suggested that we really wouldn't be advised to go beyond about 8 supplementary criteria, due to the time restraints of the exercise itself, and the amount of time that the college could spare before March.

We had approached the selection by looking at three areas;

1. Criteria we do well
2. Criteria we do
3. Criteria we aspire to do

This linked in with a desire to see the exercise as a developmental opportunity, with the chance to come back at a later date, and use the methodology to gauge how far we had moved against our E-learning and Learning and Teaching Strategies. After a wide-ranging discussion we came to concentrate on two areas of interest, i) The Student Experience, and ii) Future development of E-learning within the College.

Therefore we decided (at this stage) to consider supplementary criteria 55, 62, 63, 68, 70, 92 & 94.

The next week or 10 days will be spent looking at our evidence bases for each of the criteria, with a view to holding a "scoring" meeting during December.

 

Posted by sbowman at 1:34 PM in e-benchmarking/
Comments (1)

Friday, 3 November 2006

Benchmarking methodology - the rationale for our choice?

Ravensbourne is a "creative arts" college, very much enamoured of creativity and free expression amongst its staff and students. This context had an impact, along with the small size of the college, on our decision to choose the Pick&Mix methodology. The use of a methodology which was robust enough to allow us to gain an informed picture of our current provision, along with the ability to choose supplemental criteria which allowed us to concentrate on the area of the student experience, was very compelling. A number of the other criteria, whilst excellent for certain HEIs, were perceived to be too mechanistic in their approach, especially for a small institution. It was heartening to see that our colleagues at Wimbledon School of Art and Design, and Cumbria Institute of the Arts also chose the P&M methodology, obviously great minds think alike!
Posted by sbowman at 4:11 PM in e-benchmarking/
Comments (0)

Friday, 13 October 2006

Start-Up!

Attended the start-up meeting in Manchester. Somewhat dissapointed that there was not more concrete information on the process of benchmarking through our chosen methodology (P&M), and that there was not a (fairly) clear path mapped out for the remainder of the Phase 1 period. As an attendee at the Pilot Phase dissemination meeting, I did not feel that I had learned a great deal from the day, apart from the usual networking opportunities offered by a number of institutions coming together in one location. Some interesting questions were raised concerning the bidding process for the "Pathfinder" funds which will become available at the end of Phase 1, especially in relation to the collaborative nature of the outputs expected from participants during Phase 1. Many institutions were uncomfortable with the concept of collaborating with their peers during the process, to then operate in competition with their peers for the available funds. A number of wuestions were raised around the political and practical problems of getting a weblog up and running, which seemed bizarre, given the centrality of the concept to the original bids for Phase 1! We look forward to our future interactions with the HEA consultants, and hope for a stronger steer towards a succesful outcome for all involved in this phase of the exercise.
Posted by sbowman at 12:34 PM in e-benchmarking/
Comments (2)

Monday, 2 October 2006

HEA E-learning Benchmarking Project

In order to speed the process along I thought that readers may be interested in some of the background documentation that we have created here at Rave. Therefore please find linked our "E-learning Strategy" document, along with our original "bid for the e-learning benchmarking project", both of these documents operate within our "Learning and Teaching Strategy". We are looking forward to meeting others in the P&M group on the 10th!

Posted by sbowman at 3:12 PM in e-benchmarking/
Comments (0)

Monday, 25 September 2006

E-Benchmarking Methodologies

Having attended the briefing, I headed back to college with the news that we had to choose a methodology in 9 working days. When the consultative documentation was published the following week, I sent the link round to my colleagues in the working group. Some of them (but not all) were able to get back to me with possible suggestions as to the methodology that would be best suited to our perception of what e-learning might be, and our particular institutional circumstances. We are a small practice-based arts and communication college, we do not have a huge number of staff, and the criteria of any evaluation exercise will need to be tailored to our particular needs. The methodologies which were chosen were Pick&Mix, ELTI, and OBHE (but not necessarily in that order from all members of the group). After a little negotiation between members we decided on P&M as our first choice. I am delighted (and quietly pleased) that each of the arts-based small institutions (ourselves, Wimbledon, and Cumbria) went for the same methodology, and will be working with the same consultants. My colleagues and I are very much looking to get started on the 10th October in Manchester.
Posted by sbowman at 12:11 PM in e-benchmarking/
Comments (1)