Dave and I had a meeting with Chas Warren (the new Director of Business) and Sandra Harris regarding the Goldmine system and what has been done to capture employer data.
The system is there, but not being used fully as it is at present only available on one computer! It is on the network and staff involved in collating employer data will soon be able to input data from their own computers!
Sandra and her team have made a start at collating employer data and adding it to the Goldmine system. It basically contains the name of the employer, address and phone number. Additional details and fields can be added but not utilised at present.
We had a discussion regarding the project and outlined what we are hoping to achieve with the pilot from September. I demonstrated the Liferay portal with the different logins for employer, learner, etc and they seemed impressed.
I emailed Chas the questions which I asked Phil Bentley on Tuesday (see last blog entry for details), and included the scoping questionnaire if Chas could add any further comments or views which would help. Dave and I feel we have made some good progress this week with the project and finding out the information stored at the College regarding employers and happy that we now have found some!
Thursday, 19 July 2007
Tuesday, 17 July 2007
Digging for employers!
Today, I met with Phil Bentley who is in charge of Quality and Curriculum and discussed the pilot of the project from September.
Phil is very keen to attend one of the next project management meetings and get involved in supporting us on the project. We discussed the area of employer engagement and who deals with and communicates with them. On the whole Chas Warren who is the new Director of Business is the person who has responsiblity for employers, specifically for marketing the FDs to employers and employer data. Dave and I have a meeting with Chas and Sandra from that area to discuss employer data and we can raise further questions in this area at the meeting tomorrow.
Phil also mentioned that tutors for specific FDs would communicate with employers directly so we can do follow up meetings with tutors for any outstanding questions that need answers!
I left a copy of the last scoping questionnaire and answers already collated. Phil is to go through these and add any additional comments and answers where appropriate.
The final part of the meeting was for a tour through Liferay so that Phil understands what we are trying to achieve as a project and how things will progress for the pilot and beyond.
Phil is very keen to attend one of the next project management meetings and get involved in supporting us on the project. We discussed the area of employer engagement and who deals with and communicates with them. On the whole Chas Warren who is the new Director of Business is the person who has responsiblity for employers, specifically for marketing the FDs to employers and employer data. Dave and I have a meeting with Chas and Sandra from that area to discuss employer data and we can raise further questions in this area at the meeting tomorrow.
Phil also mentioned that tutors for specific FDs would communicate with employers directly so we can do follow up meetings with tutors for any outstanding questions that need answers!
I left a copy of the last scoping questionnaire and answers already collated. Phil is to go through these and add any additional comments and answers where appropriate.
The final part of the meeting was for a tour through Liferay so that Phil understands what we are trying to achieve as a project and how things will progress for the pilot and beyond.
Monday, 16 July 2007
Going underground!
This week we are concentrating on the data mining bit of the project, and particuarly the storage of employer data at the College.
Dave and I met with Brian Hollis, the MIS Manager to find out what information is stored on Eclipse. We discovered that the only information is a an account code, the employer name and a post code if you are lucky! This information is added to the system by one of the finance team when an employer is paying for one of their employees to attend a course. There is no link between the MIS and the finance system, in fact the employer even has a different code on each system (numeric in the finance system and alphanumeric in the MIS).
Brian has pointed us in the direction of the Marketing and Business Development departments who supposedly use a CRM system called Goldmine. We are awaiting confirmation of a meeting later this week.
Brian has left us with a priceless gem - Apparently some employers give their employees the money to be on the course, so the employees pay the money and attend the course in their own time. So in these instances we would never have contact with the employers at all!
Dave and I met with Brian Hollis, the MIS Manager to find out what information is stored on Eclipse. We discovered that the only information is a an account code, the employer name and a post code if you are lucky! This information is added to the system by one of the finance team when an employer is paying for one of their employees to attend a course. There is no link between the MIS and the finance system, in fact the employer even has a different code on each system (numeric in the finance system and alphanumeric in the MIS).
Brian has pointed us in the direction of the Marketing and Business Development departments who supposedly use a CRM system called Goldmine. We are awaiting confirmation of a meeting later this week.
Brian has left us with a priceless gem - Apparently some employers give their employees the money to be on the course, so the employees pay the money and attend the course in their own time. So in these instances we would never have contact with the employers at all!
Thursday, 12 July 2007
Pilot - We almost washed our hands of it
Or another possible title (Pilot - we're cooking on gas!)
It's been a seesaw of emotions today as we tried to find possible volunteers for the pilot. At the last meeting we mentioned that the numbers on the Foundation Degrees have been dropping (from 45 at the beginning of the year to 36 now!), and today we discovered that our pet student/employer were going the same way. We had been relying on the MIS data to tell us which students were paid for by their employers and we could only find one. We talked to the FD tutor today to ask if this employer might pilot for us only to find out, to our horror, that the student is likely to fail and be withdrawn!
But then we were told by the tutor not to rely on the data (so I take back everything I said at the last meeting about the state of our data). Our tutor Nick keeps records in an Excel spreadsheet of all of the students whose employer pays for their course. And then, bless him, he named the perfect candidate and his local architect employer, and he's going to see them next week, and he's going to ask them if they would be willing to take part in the pilot. So right now we are hoping for 1 pilot learner, 1 pilot tutor, and 1 pilot employer. We asked Nick to ask the employer if they would accept in principle and to reassure them that it would not be onerous. We told him that the pilot would run for a year and he reminded us that it will be a very short year since the semesters are only 12 weeks each.
Today we also started the data mining operation. We have meetings planned for Monday and Tuesday next week with the MIS data manager and with the Head of Quality & Curriculum who has overall responsibility for HE in FE. We are very hopeful that he will attend the next project meeting with us.
It's been a seesaw of emotions today as we tried to find possible volunteers for the pilot. At the last meeting we mentioned that the numbers on the Foundation Degrees have been dropping (from 45 at the beginning of the year to 36 now!), and today we discovered that our pet student/employer were going the same way. We had been relying on the MIS data to tell us which students were paid for by their employers and we could only find one. We talked to the FD tutor today to ask if this employer might pilot for us only to find out, to our horror, that the student is likely to fail and be withdrawn!
But then we were told by the tutor not to rely on the data (so I take back everything I said at the last meeting about the state of our data). Our tutor Nick keeps records in an Excel spreadsheet of all of the students whose employer pays for their course. And then, bless him, he named the perfect candidate and his local architect employer, and he's going to see them next week, and he's going to ask them if they would be willing to take part in the pilot. So right now we are hoping for 1 pilot learner, 1 pilot tutor, and 1 pilot employer. We asked Nick to ask the employer if they would accept in principle and to reassure them that it would not be onerous. We told him that the pilot would run for a year and he reminded us that it will be a very short year since the semesters are only 12 weeks each.
Today we also started the data mining operation. We have meetings planned for Monday and Tuesday next week with the MIS data manager and with the Head of Quality & Curriculum who has overall responsibility for HE in FE. We are very hopeful that he will attend the next project meeting with us.
Wednesday, 16 May 2007
More answers to questions !!
With the questions sent out to the tutors yesterday regarding information about employers and mentors, I have received a reply from the tutor for the Arts FDs.
The FDs for the Creative Industries specify that all students should have a mentor and there is a Mentor's handbook issued by Surf. The Mentor should be someone related to their area of interest. As regards real employers the courses are part-time, most will have a real employer NOT necessarily related to the creative industries or may well be self-employed.
More replies and information will be disseminated as we get them in!
The FDs for the Creative Industries specify that all students should have a mentor and there is a Mentor's handbook issued by Surf. The Mentor should be someone related to their area of interest. As regards real employers the courses are part-time, most will have a real employer NOT necessarily related to the creative industries or may well be self-employed.
More replies and information will be disseminated as we get them in!
Tuesday, 15 May 2007
Getting answers to questions !
I spent the morning in between supporting tutors with ILT relation problems, trying to find answers to some of the questions posed at the last project meeting which took place on 10th May.
- Contacted all the tutors involved in delivering the Foundation Degrees for Complementary Therapies, Creative Arts, Heritage & Culture, Construction and Computing. I asked for possible answers to whether or not our foundation degrees have real employers and if the students have mentors.
- I received a reply from Ian Smart, the tutor responsible for delivering the Computer HND course and he mentioned that Part time have real employers as they are working in Computing jobs. They can't do F/T because there is a need for a significant several month placement in a good computing position and we can't offer that in Shropshire unless the student can find one or are already working in one. This year all have opted to move to HND for Year 2.
- Contacted the Director of Information and Planning to see where the Foundation Degree course descriptions come from; is it from Staffs Uni or our own institution systems.
- Asked Evelyn Boyd the Team Leader for Shrewsbury College's LRC if the HE students are aware of the My Portal system.
- Evelyn doesn't think the students are aware of any 'portal'. - Emailed to see who is responsible for HE in FE at Shrewsbury and detailed the WBL-Way project and what we are trying to achieve with the Foundation Degree work.
Wednesday, 9 May 2007
Aimhigher report (test for older men)
I know it's taken a long time but I've finally gotten round to reviewing the Aimhigher report and these are my musings:
Progression - It's interesting that this is sought after by employers as much as it is by students - some of the group on our Complementary Therapies FD knew they wanted to progress but did not know what their options were. But how do we serve up this information - should it be generic or specific? My daughter is coming to the end of her National Diploma at a local college and has been looking for some time at her options. She doesn't want generic pleasantries but real specifics. Her question is 'What are my options?'. Can we ever hope to be able to load the portal with all the right information that will suit any individual? If not then what are we going to try and do?
Course and module information - Again this appears to be common to employers and students. I would expect (and our College is about to make it a requirement) that this information will be available on the VLE. This is fine for students who have already enrolled and, from our student interviews, they all want this to be there. But this information also has to be available for prospective students and for employers visiting the portal. So where does the portal get it from? Obviously not from the VLE (which one would you get it from and what about permissions to access the course) so my guess is that it would have to come from the portal. But now we're into the same area as course descriptors as explored by Fleur on her blog.
Case studies - I like the idea of having case studies about the experiences of other employers and it fits neatly with the idea of using this as a marketing tool as our tutors have been suggesting. Which reminds me, we really need to talk to our Marketing department about this!
Ideas for content development - There appeared to be suggestions within the report which could give us ideas for developing content. Perhaps it would be useful to compare to what we already have and to 'divvy them up'.
Clarity of scope/purpose - Something has been nagging away at me for some time and it's not easy to put into words but this report helps. When you look through the various responses you can see how some are very specific (e.g. sector information for the NHS). If we were to take each of these, plus the requirements documented elsewhere, and try to deliver them all we would never end the project. Just look again at Fleur's thoughts about course descriptors. If we have to go through those cogitations for each item then we're in trouble. So how do we decide what's in and what isn't. There is a danger that we will descope things that are too difficult or time-consuming, perhaps settling on something generic and all encompassing, but then the final result could be diluted and sterile.
It comes back to a question that I asked once before but I don't think anybody understood it. I asked how does something get on the portal? (who puts it there?). From my brief look at LifeRay (still hindered by access from college) the screens I saw had some content. Why is it there?, who decides that it should be there?, how did it get there?, who changes it if it needs changing? So how much is the content pre-decided and how much of it magically appears depending on who you are?
Sorry I got a bit carried away - no doubt we can pick this apart at the meeting on Thursday.
Progression - It's interesting that this is sought after by employers as much as it is by students - some of the group on our Complementary Therapies FD knew they wanted to progress but did not know what their options were. But how do we serve up this information - should it be generic or specific? My daughter is coming to the end of her National Diploma at a local college and has been looking for some time at her options. She doesn't want generic pleasantries but real specifics. Her question is 'What are my options?'. Can we ever hope to be able to load the portal with all the right information that will suit any individual? If not then what are we going to try and do?
Course and module information - Again this appears to be common to employers and students. I would expect (and our College is about to make it a requirement) that this information will be available on the VLE. This is fine for students who have already enrolled and, from our student interviews, they all want this to be there. But this information also has to be available for prospective students and for employers visiting the portal. So where does the portal get it from? Obviously not from the VLE (which one would you get it from and what about permissions to access the course) so my guess is that it would have to come from the portal. But now we're into the same area as course descriptors as explored by Fleur on her blog.
Case studies - I like the idea of having case studies about the experiences of other employers and it fits neatly with the idea of using this as a marketing tool as our tutors have been suggesting. Which reminds me, we really need to talk to our Marketing department about this!
Ideas for content development - There appeared to be suggestions within the report which could give us ideas for developing content. Perhaps it would be useful to compare to what we already have and to 'divvy them up'.
Clarity of scope/purpose - Something has been nagging away at me for some time and it's not easy to put into words but this report helps. When you look through the various responses you can see how some are very specific (e.g. sector information for the NHS). If we were to take each of these, plus the requirements documented elsewhere, and try to deliver them all we would never end the project. Just look again at Fleur's thoughts about course descriptors. If we have to go through those cogitations for each item then we're in trouble. So how do we decide what's in and what isn't. There is a danger that we will descope things that are too difficult or time-consuming, perhaps settling on something generic and all encompassing, but then the final result could be diluted and sterile.
It comes back to a question that I asked once before but I don't think anybody understood it. I asked how does something get on the portal? (who puts it there?). From my brief look at LifeRay (still hindered by access from college) the screens I saw had some content. Why is it there?, who decides that it should be there?, how did it get there?, who changes it if it needs changing? So how much is the content pre-decided and how much of it magically appears depending on who you are?
Sorry I got a bit carried away - no doubt we can pick this apart at the meeting on Thursday.
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