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.

May 2010

Not much activity this month. The IT diploma students have finished the controlled assessment and are getting ready to go on their work placements. They have been using their Mahara ePortfolios to create their CVs which will be submitted to employers prior to their placements. I hope to get some feedback from some of the employers about the content and usefulness of CVs presented in this way.

Following the meeting with the creative media diploma tutors and our school contact, I arranged for two members of staff from the school to have access to the learners PDPs as agreed and provided instructions for logging in. I have been checking to see if anybody has looked at the PDPs, and to date they have not even logged in to the course. This is very disappointing as the school liaison was keen to participate and had expressed a special interest in being able to see the learners attendance and punctuality information, rather than waiting for register information to be sent to the school.

They had also agreed that the learners would be able to access a chat room, in the course, on the Learner portal during their IT sessions when at school. This has not happened and Nik, the course tutor, has spent several Thursday afternoons waiting for somebody to join him in the chat room! I spoke to some of the learners to find out why they were not accessing the chat room and they said that their school teachers needed them to spend the time on their Functional Skills. We have a meeting arranged in early June which will be an opportunity to ask why the school contacts did not access the Learner Portal.

New collaborations

Had a meeting today with the Creative Media tutor and a representitive from the secondary school who the College is collaborating with on the diploma delivery. Nik, the tutor, has agreed to run an online chat on a Thursday afternoon when the diploma students are in an IT lesson at the school, so that they can communicate in between their lessons at the College. We are also enabling the school tutors to access the learners' PDPs so that they can be fully informed of the learner progress and crucially, any attendance or punctuality issues will be immediately highlighted. I hope that this will provide more data for the final evaluation, especially around the collaboration of stakeholders.

Interim evaluation report

I have now finished the interim evaluation report. It has been hard to write, as instead of having too much data to analyse (which I had feared would be the case) I haven't had a lot to work with. Feedback from students has mostly come in the form of questionnaires and discussion posts and I have been unable to interview as many tutors as I would have liked. Because the Diploma in IT is delivered solely by the College, there have been no opportunities for collaboration between the different stakeholders, which in turn has limited what I could evaluate.


I hope that in the Spring term things will be different. The learners will be going on work experience and the Mahara ePortfolio will provide opportunities for more sharing of information and feedback between employers, tutors and learners.


Also, next term I will be extending the evaluation to include a group of students, who are studying on the Higher Diploma in Creative Media. These students are 14 and 15 year olds who are based at a local school and they only attend the College once a week, so this presents an ideal opportunity to look at the effects of the support that can be offered by different features of the Learner Portal whilst they are away from the College.

February 2010

Rushing around trying to get data for the interim report and make some sense of the data I have already collected. Trying to find time to speak to tutors and learners has been difficult - everybody is so pushed for time, especially as they are currently in the controlled assessment phase of the delivery. Trying to find a quiet room to film videos, that is free when the tutors are free, is proving difficult and I have had to redo one video because the sound was too poor.

Using the PDP

I do not think that the learners are using the PDP to its full potential and I need to try another tactic to engage them. We have arranged another event for the whole Diploma team and this time I am going to bring my colleague, Angela, who is the eLearning link person for the school of CIT in the hope that she will be able to work with tutors and support them with their use of the Learner Portal.

We have also discussed ways that we can engage the staff and learners and to get them to see the value of its' use, and she has suggested that I post a question on the discussion boards in both courses in video form. As the learners studying for the Higher Diploma have been given devices to record audio for their media projects, they will be able to record their responses to the discussion and upload. Provided I frame the question and also provide a bit of background to the use of the PDP, I hope to get some more valuable feedback. Although they have already contributed to the discussion board, it feels very much like "I've been told I have to do this, so I will do as I am told"!

I do not think they can see the value that the PDP could add to their learning experience and I hope to be able to change this. I am going to provide an example of a PDP with which to inspire them and to allow them to see how it could really help them.