Manchester Metropolitan University

Don’t know your QIP from your QAP? Ever wondered when it might be appropriate to ‘daf’ at MMU? Want to know what a PAF is, or the difference between a PAF 1 and a PAF 2? The Centre for Learning and Teaching may have the answer, on our curriculum development terms page.

Please send any suggestions for additional terms to Rachel Forsyth 

The Higher Education Academy on conjunction with the University of Glamorgan is running a workshop on Teaching Computer Forensics at Glamorgan on the 27th November 08.

Computer Forensics (and similarly titled programmes) continues to be an increasingly popular subject within Higher Education Computing disciplines. The
aim of a Computer Forensics course is to provide students with the necessary specialized knowledge that they will need to become professional
practitioners of Computer Forensics. Employers now expect graduates to have practical experience of working with a range of forensic tools. However,
there are difficulties associated with the development of practical teaching material that can give students the experience of working on realistic computer forensic scenarios and case studies.

This workshop will focus on the particular challenges and opportunities associated with the development of practical teaching material for Higher Education Computer Forensics courses.

If you feel you would like to contribute to the day please send a short abstract outlining your potential presentation to pthomas@glam.ac.uk as soon as possible.

It makes a good opening line for a newspaper article...”Degree standards in many British universities are in danger of collapsing because lecturers are under pressure to “mark positively” and turn a blind eye to plagiarism, the man who was in charge of safeguarding standards at Britain’s largest university will say today.”, especially when you also find that he “warns that “league table culture” has led to an explosion in the number of firsts awarded.”

There may have been a cultural shift about what constitutes a first class undergraduate degree: that doesn’t mean that academic staff are all dumbing down, being lenient and/or ignoring cheating. Getting a first means that you have consistently performed to an excellent standard in achieving the stated learning outcomes across a range of units. Maybe in the past it meant something different (have produced something publishable?) but at least we are usually now able to articulate what these grades actually mean.

The article is a bit casual- eg “Professor Alderman’s comments on plagiarism appear to be backed by research which shows that – despite 9,229 recorded cases of plagiarism in a year – only 143 students were expelled.” – they aren’t going to be expelled unless that’s the penalty, which is unlikely for a first offence. The AMBeR project, which is the source of this data, says that 99% of regulations allowed for expulsion. So this suggests that only 143 students offended seriously enough to be expelled. There is also use of the expression ‘raking in’ applied to student fees.

By all means think about your assessment strategies, but don’t take this kind of thing too seriously…

The HEA and QAA, with HEFCE support, have just published a report entitled ‘Quality enhancement and
assurance – a changing picture?‘ The report aims to paint a picture of “about ‘enhancement’ is perceived and defined, what its relationship to quality assurance might be, and how it might be changing.”

With institutional audit  coming our way in Autumn 2009, this report provides a good snapshot of thinking on quality enhancement which should help us to ensure that we are thinking along the right lines.

JISC has just published a report which aims to:

• Understand first year students’ experiences of ICT use and provision in HEIs, particularly in light of the expectations which emerged from the first study in June 2007
• Examine whether there is a mismatch between expectations and reality

“The research re-visits a cohort of the school and college students who participated in phase one of the research in June 2007 to explore how their current experiences of ICT in their first year of higher education match up with their expectations. A representative sample of first year students from across the UK was also surveyed to identify whether findings emerging from the cohort were reflected across the wider student population. Over 1,000 students were researched using quantitative and qualitative techniques.” Click here for an executive summary and a link to the full report.