February 10

Our session with the curriculum teams finally took place on 3rd February – unfortunately I was unable to be there due to a prior commitment but from all reports it went very well.

The team were able to feedback on what they had done so far and we were able to demonstrate some examples of good practice from around the College.

However it did become clear from this session that the controlled assessment phase of the course would impact on the progress of the project. Controlled Assessment is the process used to internally assess coursework on the new Diplomas under exam conditions. It means that the assessor has to supervise the production of assignments, access to resources and time controls. Controlled assessment will continue for the whole of the Spring term so we may need to review some the timing of some of the enhancements we are planning to introduce.

The biggest impact from this has been learners’ reluctance to use Mahara to showcase work as they are concerned about their work being plagiarised as they are preparing for the controlled assessment. Hopefully future opportunities will be more appropriate and effective.

January 10

Well Christmas is over and we’re all back at work, keeping an eye out for the snow. Although the college was open throughout the cold days, attendance was down and we had difficulty scheduling our follow up curriculum event - it seemed Wednesday mornings were the best time for the curriculum team but also the day we usually had lots of snow and staff and students arriving late. Finally we decided to delay until February and the date has been agreed for the 3rd.

December 09

There has been a lot of discussion around how the ES Team can contribute to the project and we finally agreed that the best way forward would be to ask the students. The general feeling from the students was that it was important to them to maintain the face the face contact as they generally were discussing personal issues. They did however like the idea of being able to book an appointment online and we hope to investigate further ways in which this could be done. We had also hoped that they would be able to contribute to the student PDPs but this looks unlikely as the information is confidential and therefore it not be appropriate to record it in the PDP.

As Christmas approaches we got to host a cluster event with Kingston College, College of West Anglia, Kingston University and de Montfort University on 16th. At this event we were able to showcase what had been done in the classroom with eME and our cluster colleagues got the opportunity to talk with the curriculum team involved. In the afternoon we all participated as a group in the Elluminate workshop 'Engaging and responding to learners'. This was quite an interesting experience which prompted lots of discussion around the table although we probably didn’t contribute too much to the overall event.

November 09

Hardware requirements agreed and orders placed, evaluation plan circulated to project team, PDP amended to take into account feedback from the curriculum teams. It has been agreed that the Learning Centre will support curriculum team in the following areas: Work Readiness, CV writing, Communications (with mentor), academic writing and through the use of the diary room for PLTS (March-June).

We had a few issues with the new Flip cameras as the file format was not compatible with Windows Movie Maker meaning that students cannot directly edit any footage they record. To alleviate this it was agreed that a piece of free software (Free Studio Manager) would be deployed to the student network to facilitate file conversion.

Feedback from JISC on the interim report was fed back to the team and it was agreed that the curriculum team will post at least once a month and consider setting up a blog for students. Student blogging was also discussed and it was agreed that would be encouraged to contribute on a monthly basis during tutorials and other staff teaching on the course could also prompt students to add to the blog after any sessions that seemed appropriate.

We also participated in the JISC Innovating e-Learning 2009 conference and a copy of our simulation can be seen here.

October 09

First meeting of a restructured project team took place this month. This new team is more focussed on those involved with the day to day running of the project to ensure that everyone is aware of the priorities and objectives. At the first meeting we reminded everyone of the commitments that they undertook during the July curriculum event, confirmed any additional equipment requirements that they would need in order to carry out the enhancements that they wanted to implement. We plan to meet fortnightly from now on.

We also attended the Programme Meeting in Manchester and had the opportunity to network with other projects and discuss some of the common themes across all projects. We prepared a short video of the project for the event featuring feedback from the course tutor and a learner on the Higher Diploma course. This is available from the project website or can be accessed via this link.

September 09

Well, the summer break is over, the interim report submitted and now we need to prepare for the introduction of the portal to learners. The decision was made that the implementation would be cross college so it’s been all hands on deck to ensure we are ready for when the students return. Design of the home page ran a bit late but we finally managed to go live in time for the 14th.

Courses for both the Advanced and Higher Diplomas are set up and learners have been introduced to the site during their induction.

We also took part in the Student Fair on 23rd and 24th which gave us the opportunity to demonstrate eME to learners from all areas of the College.

July 09

The end of term is rapidly approaching and we need to consolidate our plans for September before the curriculum teams all go off on leave for the summer. During our Admin and Learning days in the week of 10 July we arranged training sessions for the curriculum teams on using Mahara and the PDP and also set up an event for both curriculum and support staff involved in the project.

We used this event to engage staff in the project and help them to see how the different technologies being made available to them could help them to enhance their delivery next year.

The event started with an activity where they created a poster describing the way things are at the moment based on a series of topics/questions. They were in mixed teams so that support and curriculum staff could work together. They then scored each presentation based on its accuracy and the creative flair of the creators.


Bev then provided some data from the baseline evaluation that she carried out with the diploma learners this year and those participating in this year’s mini pilots fed back on what they had been doing.

The second activity involved the same groups looking at the different types of tools, applications or devices and considering how they could be used to enhance delivery. They then added stickers to all the posters of the type of curriculum enhancement that they felt would be appropriate to each of the topics.

In the final session they divided into the two curriculum teams Higher and Advanced Diploma and discussed how they could incorporate some of the ideas into their own schemes of work. We will use the feedback from this event to help plan the implementation of the Portal from September.

Use this link to view the video of the event.

June 09

June has been all about progress chasing the pilots and mini case studies that have been taking place this year. The team looking at the different options on video conferencing fed back to us about what they had done (1:1 tutorials, lecture presentations etc) - see the video clip of Sharon Muncie – Programme Area Leader describing what her team have been doing.




They made a recommendation of the application that they feel most appropriate to use for next term based on some key criteria that we agreed earlier in the year. This is GoToMeeting and we agreed that we would invest in sufficient licenses to enable staff to use this from September. There are still a few technical issues that need to be resolved but the NT team are on the case and we hope to be up and running soon.

We also got reports on the use of 2 different mobile devices from Jane Teh who has been using the Asus Eee-PC and Paul Herbert who has been using HTC Touch PDAs.

The streaming server is up and running internally but we still have to do some work on the server to make this accessible from out side the college – hopefully this will all be sorted by September.

The structure for the Portal has been agreed, we will be using Moodle as the platform and VLE, Mahara as our e-Portfolio and the ULCC PDP built into Moodle as our personal development plan. Although there is still work being done on the portal design we have now got courses set up and staff trained in how to manage them.

Heritage is still a bit behind schedule but we have a block for Moodle provided by IS Oxford who supply Heritage and ULCC will be working to integrate this in August.

May 09

May’s been quite a busy month for us here at Lewisham. Firstly we had the programme meeting at the Lakeside Centre at Aston University - a really fabulous setting and for once the weather was on our side.

It was an interesting day looking at organisational culture and strategies for change, reverse brainstorming, evaluation and measuring change.

May also was important for us as the learners got their first look at the portal through an introduction to Moodle and Mahara. The curriculum team have also set up their own blog (see Moodle Experience link on the right) to record their experiences of using this. Our aim is to let the learners engage with some elements now so that we can use their feedback to improve the portal offering we will be using from September.

We also had a major awareness raising event on 22nd May where we introduced over 100 people across the whole college to the concept of the Learner Portal. As a result of this it looks quite likely that we will be launching Moodle, Mahara and the e-ILP to a much wider audience than anticipated.

April 09

Learners completed their initial questionnaires this month enabling Bev to gather some baseline data so we can now start introducing the learners to some elements of the Learner Portal and identify the best presentation for September. To find out more see Bev’s Evaluation blog – link on the right of the page.

The process of migrating the Diploma course from Blackboard to Mahara is well underway. As anticipated this has not been anywhere near as easy as the documentation makes out. Archive Blackboard and restore in Moodle – Joke! The team tried this but found that Moodle didn’t recognise the structure that had been set up in Blackboard but simply laid out all the materials in a long, long, long list. Some of the links worked, some didn’t. The time it would have taken to sort this out would have been incredible so we had to look for other ways to do this.

After trying various methods we finally came up with the following:
1. Archive Blackboard course
2. Run this zip file through the free application BFree which goes through the Blackboard zip and renames/recreates the content to replicate the folder structure and file names displayed on the Blackboard course.
3. Zip this new folder and import it to the Files area on the Moodle course and then design the course around it linking to the files as needed.

Anyone interested in the tips we have been recording as we progress can find out more by using the link to visit our Moodle course.