Gloucestershire e-Benchmarking Project
Reports and comments relating to the University of Gloucestershire's participation in Phase 1 of the Higher Education Academy's e-Benchmarking Exercise.
24 March 2007
Scoring meeting at the University of Gloucestershire 9th March 2007
Since our last meeting with Prof. Paul Bacsich we have been conducting interviews with each of the four Faculty representatives to collect and discuss their individual slice scoring. They have all been using the same additional criteria and we were surprised at how close most of the scoring was across the campuses, but there were some particular instances whee the scores differed significantly. This highlights areas which will need attention in the future to improve e-learning across the institution.
On the 9th March Paul Bascsich kindly attended again. (Once more we used our Centre for Active Learning (CeAL) building as the venue. This building has just won a Civic Award and as it is used primarily for e-learning, seemed to be a fitting venue for these meetings).
We had modified the original scoring sheets provided by Paul, to include all four slice scores, commentaries and evidence and places to note our final overall scores for each of the criteria.
Most of the meeting was taken up by working through the criteria one by one, with representatives from each campus on hand to make any last minute adjustments to their scores. The discussions were vigorous at times, and again highlighted the differences that exist between our different faculties, but we were, with Paul's help, able to agree on an overall score for all criteria by the end of the meeting.
We are still collating some extra evidence and we believe this process may continue. We have already seen the benefit of this exercise internally, where it has brought to our attention areas that we will address in the future. Sometimes we have scored better than we might have guessed and sometimes not as well, but overall we are happy the the e-learning benchmarking has produced a realistic snapshot of where our institution lies, in terms of e-Learning at the moment.
Dave Harden.
Learning Technology Co-ordinator.
Posted by Dave Harden at 15:11
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16 February 2007
e-Learning Benchmarking Team meeting 6th February
Despite the weather preventing Prof. Paul Bacsich and others from attending, we did hold a very useful meeting in the CeAL Building at Francis Close Hall.
Paul attended in a "virtual" sense first by web conferencing, but the audio part of that suffered from Net congestion, no doubt caused by many other also staying at home today and working online! (This was the day we had the snow!).
We then continued without Paul for a while, discussing the fine detail of one faculty's scoring alongside our institution-wide scoring and were pleased to find most criteria matched up very well.
The criteria that needed some clarification were then discussed by Phil Gravestock and myself over the phone with Paul Bacsich and this was also an extremely useful exercise, which sorted out all the issues we had problems with.
Some were of particular note:
Criterion 20-Quality Enhancement
Paul advised us that although the scoring sheets mention TQEF activities, this should be treated merely as an example and in fact any relevant quality enhancement activities could be cited.
Additional Criterion 7-Decisions (Projects)
This is about how well decisions are made, rather than what any decisions were about. In other words, are decisions about e-learning clear and well documented? Is there a committee structure in place that makes decisions about e-learning and minutes of this available? (Basically should refer to the IT Infrastructure.)
Additional Criterion 19-Decisions (Programmes)
Again this should be about the process of decision-making, but this time related to the design of the taught e-learning itself and pedagogy.
Additional Criterion 63-Leverage
It was agreed that this criterion could be spilt into two sub-criteria if desired; IT hardware ownership and ICT Skills. Then the two could be aggregated into an overall criteria score. It should also address the issue of how well we act upon this knowledge once we have it.
Additional Criterion 73-Sustainability
This should be focussed on where e-learning contributes to eco-sustainability in the "save-the-planet" sense. It could be re-named "Eco-sustainability". This is not about whether or not e-learning itself is sustainable as a way of teaching and learning!
We now intend to hold similar meetings with each of the faculty representatives to help them score their own area, before we then aggregate these to create own institutional score-sheet.
Dave Harden
Learning Technology Co-ordinator
16th February 2007
Posted by Dave Harden at 18:11
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24 January 2007
Cohort meeting at University of Derby 16th January 2007
Paul Bacsich and Bruce Carter were present as consultants. Also Veronica Adamson and Jane Plenderleith from Glenaffric Ltd. acting as Evaluation and Dissemination Support Advisers.
Representatives from the other institutions introduced themselves and were asked to list if they were aiming to use slicing and which supplementary criteria they were going to use.
I explained that we intended to use 4 slices, one for each campus/faculty and then aggregate these to create our institution-wide benchmark scoring.
The seven criteria we had chosen are:
62-Integration
63-Leverage
66-Physical
70-Widening Participation
73-Sustainability
94-Student Satisfaction
95-e-Portfolios
The EDSuT team gave us a explanation of their role in the benchmarking exercise, and answered a number of questions.
Paul explained how HEFCE might attempt to map their "Measures of Success" against the benchmarking at a later date.
Many discussions were had around how the different institutions would be carrying out their scoring.
The meeting was very worthwhile and helped to answer some burning questions, as well as being able to network with colleagues and share experiences.
Phil Gravestock and I will be attempting an overall scoring as an example for the Faculty Representives before they work on theirs.
Posted by Dave Harden at 16:57
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Benchmarking meeting on 18th December 2006
Present were:
Professor Paul Bacsich
Claire Hanson
Dave Harden
Bill Lawrence
Nina Reeves
Our latest definition of e-Learning was distributed:
"The design and integration of electronic technologies into a curriculum to support students to actively engage in their learning"
The first half of the meeting was mostly concerned with looking through the new Pathfinder document so that Paul could make comments and give advice.
Paul wished to point out that anyone putting together a bid should be aware that HEFCE look at bids in a different way from JISC but that the fact our institution is organised over four (or five) campuses would give us an advantage in terms of having particular issues that might be of interest to other institutions with a similar set-up.
Pathfinder
Working through the Pathfinder Invitation to tender, Paul made several observations, including these:
• Point 8: The most important words here are "scaleable" and "transferable" rather than the use of 'new gadgets'.
• Point 9g: The Evaluation and Dissemination Support Team (EDSuT). More information about how this team might help will be forthcoming and more information should appear at the Leicester meeting.
• Point 10: Paul wanted to make it clear that Pathfinder is not a continuation of e-Learning Benchmarking.
• Point 15: Pathfinder does not include support from a consultant, but Paul could be engaged privately and paid for through Pathfinder funding to fill the 3-month gap between Benchmarking and Pathfinder.
• Point 16: We will need to appoint our own Evaluation Team.
• Point 18: We could organise into a "Cluster" with other institutions working on similar issues such as fellow ‘Pick & Mixers’ or possibly look outside Pick & Mix for collaborators.
• Point 19: Match funding will need to be carefully organised.
• Point 22: Note that there will have to be two blogs, one Public and one Private to HEA staff. The Quarter 4 public weblog should be used as the basis for a final written, peer-reviewed report.
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e-Learning Benchmarking
Looking at the additional criteria, Paul suggested there is not really much effort saved by leaving out one or two criteria. He agreed that the ones recently suggested (62-Integration, 63-Leverage, 66-Physical, 70-Widening Participation, 73-Sustainability, 94-Student Satisfaction, 95-e-Portfolios) would be a good range to work with.
There was some discussion about 63-Leverage as the name did not seem to describe the criteria very clearly.
Posted by Dave Harden at 16:37
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18 December 2006
Definition of e-learning
What do we mean by e-learning? This question was discussed by the University of Gloucestershire e-Benchmarking team, so that there was some consistency in the way that we were interpreting this, rather broad, term. We were keen not to have a definition that was all-encompassing, such as the Higher Education Academy’s “any learning that uses information and communication technologies (ICT)”, as this would make consistency in the benchmarking process difficult across the four University Faculties. Our initial, tighter, proposal was as follows (see attached document for additional commentary):
“The use of electronic technologies in an integrated and directed way to encourage students to engage actively with their learning.”
The rationale for this definition was to try to eliminate the use of e-learning as simply an electronic repository for teaching and learning materials; however, feedback suggested that this was too restrictive, and that many Faculty practices that would have been considered as e-learning would not fit in this definition. I have added some of the emailed discussion about the definition as comments to this blog posting.
As a result of these comments, our revised definition of e-learning is as follows:
“The design and integration of electronic technologies into a curriculum to support students to actively engage in their learning.”
Posted by Phil Gravestock at 09:24
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13 November 2006
Reflections: 'Kick-off' meeting - 9 November
The University of Gloucestershire's 'kick-off' meeting between the core team and Pick & Mix consultants Paul Bacsich and Bruce Carter took place on Thursday 9 November 2006 at the Francis Close Hall campus, Cheltenham. A list of team members is attached to this message (click 'Read More' at the base of this message).
After a useful 'strategic' discussion in the morning about the Benchmarking exercise in general, and its relationship with other initiatives, we focused in the afternoon on specific issues relating to the Pick & Mix methodology (e.g. core criteria, supplementary criteria, scoring, evidence). This discussion was particularly useful, as it gave a feel as to what information we already possess and what work still needs to be done in terms of evidence-gathering.
One of the reasons why the University applied to participate in this e-Benchmarking exercise is that we would like to capture the range of e-learning activities in each of our four Faculties. Each Faculty is in the process of developing its own Teaching, Learning and Assessment Strategy, and we felt that this exercise would provide a useful mechanism for identifying the good practice which is currently taking place within the Faculties, and for evaluating areas that may need further development. Our original expression of interest is also attached to this message.
Posted by Phil Gravestock at 15:21
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