Demonstrating effectiveness and impact

Our action planning for the rest of this academic year revolves around three main topics.
Demonstrating effectiveness and impact
Curriculum Liaison
Promoting and developing learning technologies especially to support self study.

Demonstrating effectiveness and impact is difficult because first of all you have to get over the idea that a learning experience shouldn't be measurable - that it should have value for a student but it is not always possible to quantify it. This is quite difficult as as an educator you want to believe in an inherent value but as a manager you have to have evidence Then you have to find a method of measuring - this is not easy in eLearning / Learning Resources as you don't have a ' success rate' as such. Therefore the only way is to have statistics and data recording what you do, which shows an improvement year on year, which can be compared to other institutions and can be verified by an external framework and by peer review.
I think that eventually there will either be a way that it is inspected as part of the curriculum it supports or that it will be seen as essential and therefore not measured at all. In the latter case, eLearning depts, learning resources depts and libraries will not exist as separate entities but be absorbed by the area, staff and students that they support - which may be no bad thing.


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January Induction sessions

In Sept & Oct we do a large number of LRC/IT inductions for students. This academic year we delivered to more than 3000. The sessions are very useful and although time consuming are quite enjoyable to deliver. It is fairly fast paced and we do quite a few each day so the momentum carries you through. In January it is different - not as many, in fact only a few. So it is like starting again each time and remembering what to do.
Got to go - electrical engineers are here.....

Student behaviour meeting

Last term a working group was set up in College to look at student behaviour issues. In general this academic year there had been more than the usual number of incidents of bad behaviour and also it was felt across the College that behaviour in general was of a lower standard. The attitudes of students has been poor and disrespectful to staff both teaching staff and support staff. We had some incidents in the LRC of students behaving inappropriately and disrespectfully. As ever it is a small minority of students but nevertheless it does have an impact and it is important to recognise the issues.
The first meeting was a general meeting with representatives from across the College staff and was an opportunity to raise issues. For the second meeting a working group was set up in order to be more focused - a task and finish group! Some suggestions were put forward of ways to ensure students would be wearing their ID cards on the official college lanyards. This was agreed as an important way of ensuring that students can be recognised as members of the College. Vending machines are an area that was highlighted regarding vandalism Security was also discussed in order to ensure a safe learning environment. The next meeting which was today, staff reported back about incentives that are going to be introduced to incentivise students to wear their ID cards and lanyards. These include marking registers with a lanyard present mark so that students can be entered into a lanyard lotto - free meals from the cafe for a week, spot 'prizes' for lanyards and good behaviour and also linked to merit awards.




-- Post From My iPhone

New Year Resolutions as Word Clouds

I have created two word clouds using Wordle for my New Year Resolutions - one for home/everyday life and another for work.  There is some overlap as quite a lot of my work stuff I enjoy doing anyway and quite a lot of places and resources that I discover or visit are relevant to e-learning/libraries/technologies etc.
The black background with blue and green text is the home one, the white background with brown and blue text is the work one.

Self Assessment Review and other strategic challenges

Last week we had our annual validation meeting with Governors and Principalship / SMT.
The outcome was a successful one although at times it was quite difficult to convince and persuade them that the Learning Resources Dept is an outstanding dept - not because it isn't but because it is very difficult to justify.  In fact the outcome of the meeting is that I have the challenge of ensuring that the department is outstandingly effective and that I can find ways of proving it to be so.
The difficulties arise because, in my opinion, a learning resources dept i.e. library services and e-learning can not be treated nor judged in the same way as either a business support department nor a curriculum department.  We are providing a service, we are interacting with customers, we haven't got exam results to use as a success measure yet we are involved in teaching and learning and it is our aim and indeed mission to ensure that learners have the virtual and physical resources available in order that they can achieve.  We aim to teach them how to use the resources so that they can achieve the qualifications that they want and need.  Not only the qualifications but also the life skills and study skills , and sometimes social skills, that they need in order to succeed in life.

e-book sessions for PGCE students

Today I delivered two sessions for classes of students doings PGCE. Their class is on an evening from 5-9pm. The plan was to show them how to access the e-book collections that we have which are e-brary and dawsonera and then to show them e-journals through especially infotrac. The first group were a bit disinterested at first but got into it - we didn't have much time, only half an hour as they had to go to another presentation. The second class were more enthusiastic and also more bolshie. I've discovered this when doing the sessions with similar classes when showing them the interactive whiteboard voting systems - to start with disinterested and don't want to spend the time finding out about technology but then get more engaged and ask loads of questions. So we looked at dawsonera then ebrary - they liked the part where you can copy and paste and it brings the referencing details with it (timesaving). Looked at infotrac for journal articles etc. Tried to emphasise the point of investing time in searching for quality information - may have had some success.


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Paperwork and my office

The pile of paperwork in my office has reached critical level so I'm spending an hour or so tidying it up, filing it away and hopefully throwing some of it away. It is inevitable that there is still a lot of paper around - lots of processes are still paperbased within the college and external e.g. Invoices, meeting agendas and minutes, leaflets for events. But I have the habit of dumping them in a pile and once the pile gets too big, I sort it out. Not the best method and not as efficient as my electronic methods but it's a system of sorts.

My office is small but quite nice. It is in the middle of the LRC so surrounded by activity and noise but I can close the door if need be. If there are more than 3 people in here it is crowded!












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