Changes to interview plans

I had originally planned to get our multimedia designer to film my interviews, but on reflection I am going to do them myself using the flip camera. It is a more flexible arrangement as any last minute changes to plans can are easier to arrange and perhaps more importantly tutors and learners being interviewed are more comfortable with just me and a flip. Once the flip is set up and running people tend to forget that it is there and will therefore be more relaxed in front of the camera. Although I thought that the sound in some of my previous interviews was not too good, I think that was due to the rooms used and this time I have booked time in our small training room, which is nice and quiet.

I am also going to speak to learners and tutors from other curriculum areas who have used other tools to get a wider range of feedback and not the IT Diploma learners as I had previously intended to do.

14th June 2010

Today I worked with the the learners from Addey and Stanhope school who are studying on the Creative and Media Diploma. They are planning to upload all of their coursework into their ePortfolios and then submit the work to Edexcel. This is the first time we have tried anything like this and the tutor thinks that it will make a vast difference to the time it will take in submitting all the work, as he will only need to supply web links to the views of their work. I will need to spend another session with them showing them how to create the views, but we are very excited about how this will work. We are also encouraging them to use the CV feature and to use the blog, as they are required to keep a journal in this course. Due to the nature of the course they are creating videos of their work, so this is an ideal vehicle to display what they have done.

I am looking forward to being able to get some positive feedback on the use of Mahara with this group of learners - watch this space!

Preparing for final interviews

I am currently preparing my questions for the interviews with learners and tutors for the final phase of the project, which is proving to be a logistical nightmare. As well as negotiating times to interview the tutors I need to book a room to record them and also to liaise with Henry, our multimedia designer, who is going to record them for me. Although my previous interviews were recorded using a flip camera, and the quality of the video was good, the sound quality was not as good and it was sometimes difficult to hear what was said.

I have arranged to go into both the Higher and Advanced IT Diploma group classes in the next couple of weeks to get volunteers for interviews. I hope that they will volunteer to be interviewed, but if not, the plan is to offer them a store card (value £20) as an incentive, but this is really a last resort. Following the last JISC event, I had received suggestions of incentives that I could offer. One suggestion was to offer printer credits, which with another group would be useful, but these groups of learners do not need to print out their work for either assessment by tutors or final submissions for the course, so not practical in this instance.