Manchester Metropolitan University

Student partners

Two student project partners have been recruited from the current first year (2009/10 intake) to work with the project team. These students are keeping blogs and video diaries to document their use of the PebblePAD eportfolio system and the key skills framework to structure their Personal Development Portfolios. The tagging function is used to save evidence, in a variety of formats, which document and record particular skills. The blog tool is used to promote reflection and the profile tool to audit learning skills. All evidence is being saved inline with the key skills framework.

The feedback from the students has been shared both internally with colleagues and externally with Pebblepad to help inform future developments of the eportfolio system.

Employer engagement

A meeting has been arranged with a local primary Care Trust to meet with the Physiotherapy team and get their feedback on the use of the PebblePAD eportfolio system and the key skills framework. Meetings with two further trusts will be arranged for later this year.

Dissemination

Two oral presentations have been accepted so far this year:

Hamshire, C. (2010a) Blogging, tagging and key skills how the Manchester Physiotherapy programme is using Pebblepad to enhance employability. PhysioEd conference, University of Nottingham 19 May.

Hamshire, C. and Cartlidge, A. (2010) Improving employability through benchmarking and ePortfolios New Directions in Employability; Beyond the Bolt-on? University of Central Lancashire , 22-23 June 2010

A third has been submitted for the CSP Congress 2010:

Hamshire, C. (2010b) Is the Pebblepad ePortfolio system an effective tool for first year students? The Chartered Society of Physiotherapy Annual Congress, Liverpool 15-16 October.

The LPC at MMU operates in an extremely competitive market with two private providers also based in central Manchester . In order to be competitive, the LPC at MMU needs to respond to changes in student and employer needs and therefore the LPC management team is currently considering how employability aspects on the LPC can be enhanced and whether students can be provided with different routes on the LPC whereby employability aspects are integrated into the course to a greater or lesser extent. This is in response to the results of questionnaires to all MMU LPC students in Summer 2009 who identified employability as a key aspect they wanted further enhanced on the LPC.

The law strand of the project is therefore concentrating on increasing employability within the Legal Practice Course (LPC), and whether the LPC curricula can be responsive to this need in course design, delivery and engagement with potential employers/the legal community. Between last March and June (2009) students undertaking the Housing and Welfare (H&W) elective on the LPC undertook a day work placement within a housing legal team. This was organised with the intention of improving the student’s engagement with the subject and to give them a better understanding of vocational practice. After the placement, students fed back to one and other on their experience through webCT, and also completed a questionnaire about their work experience and the relevance of current course content. The employer organisations were also questionnaired on a similar basis.

Student feedback was that overall they benefitted a great deal from the work placements and (subject to time constraints) would like longer placements. Of the employers involved, five out of the seven completed the questionnaire and they all wanted to be part of the scheme again and were extremely positive about the links with the LPC and how these might be enhanced. As a result, students who study H&W in 2009/10 will benefit from the availability of a week’s work placement at 4 of the organisations involved in the first phase.

The employer organisations and H&W students were also questionnaired on the future content of the H&W elective. It is currently in the process of being re-validated. Their responses, in particular the preference from the profession for an elective in Housing Law alone, will shape the deign of this new vocational elective which will be delivered from September 2010.

Thisexercise has, to date, produced useful data/experience about responding to the requirement for greater integration of employability such as greater employer engagement by the LPC as a whole, spin off third stream activities and a wealth of careers opportunities including a recent event attended by, amongst others, a number of placement organisations which highlighted volunteering and mentoring possibilities. It has also highlighted some of the more challenging aspects, such as the time taken to organise and maintain links and the difficulties when there is a change of personnel within the employer organisations.

The information generated has also been disseminated to all LPC staff currently developing elective subjects for a new vocational elective stage of the LPC which starts in September 2010. The aim is to encourage the incorporation of additional employability aspects into these electives through the sharing of good practice. The outcome of the enhanced work placements for this year will also be disseminated to staff.

Since putting together our initial project plan in which we intended students to reflect their achievement of the SRA’s ‘day 1 outcomes’, the original plans by the SRA to embed portfolios within solicitor training were abandoned in response to feedback from the profession.  We have therefore adjusted our original intention to utilise PebblePAD on the LPC and instead are now focussing on work experience and familiarity with practice issues as being more responsive to the professional body’s revised perception of employability.

The competency form has now been completed for 8 job roles, with 4 different digital marketing agencies. The job roles are all new entrant positions which exist (or have existed) within a digital marketing agency. They are:

• Social Media Executive
• Trainee Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Executive
• Graduate Display Assistant
• Graduate Search Assistant
• SEO Assistant
• SEO (junior) copywriter
• Project manager
• Website developer/Project Assistant

I have also visited another company and am waiting for their response. It is becoming more challenging to find companies who are willing to meet with me to discuss the competencies they seek. Whilst I am still pursing this, I am also looking to develop a blog which can be used to generate feedback from other companies, to see if they agree with the current list of competencies, have additional suggestions and so on.

I am pulling together a list of the common competencies, across the different job roles listed and grouping these together as

• Key professional skills - `doing’ skills e.g. uses Microsoft Office Tools
• Research/understanding skills – e.g. comprehends the psychology of online behaviour
• Communication skills e.g. excellent orally presented work
• `Internal’ values e.g. entrepreneurial and experimental

Whilst currently most skills and competencies are being suggested under key professional skills (16), this is closely followed by research `understanding’ skill (15) and internal values (13). Whilst there were fewer competencies listed under communication skills (which is a more defined category anyway), there was great consistency from employers, with every job role requiring `excellent written work’ and `excellent orally presented work.’

Mapping the competencies onto courses

The next stage was to meet with Dr Ian Grime, undergraduate programme coordinator, for marketing and retail courses in the Business School at MMU. With Ian’s support I will be looking in detail at the Undergraduate Unit Specification document for courses delivered in the business school. We identified that the courses which are most likely to be relevant for our needs are Digital Marketing Communications, Business Information Technology, Business Enterprise and Marketing Management. By studying the Unit Specification Document I plan to map where the competencies are currently being delivered, how they are being delivered and identify any gaps in provision.

I am aware that some of the competencies may be taught within other faculties across the University, so will look to make links with other academics. I have already had contact with Richard Eskins, Senior Lecturer within the Department of Information and Communiciations, who is interested in the findings of the research. There is a possibility that I may be involved in an event in June, for those teaching web design.

Views of students

During the meeting with Ian Grime we talked about surveying final year students studying the Digital Marketing Communications degree, to get their views on the competencies they believe they have acquired. Part of the original remit was to look into whether students/graduates could present the skills they had acquired, so this will be an interesting insight into whether more could be done in this area.

Views of employers re e-portfolios

Employers at the Pro Dev days (the most recent of which was held on the 04/11/09) and also employers who I have visited, talk about wanting students to demonstrate their passion for digital by being entrepreneurial, showing initiative etc. This could be through setting up a blog and getting x number of followers. Any type of institutional portfolio is likely to be considered too prescriptive within this dynamic and rapidly changing sector.

The changing nature of the industry means that it is important that changes within courses can be implemented rapidly. The University is developing a project to look into validation of units, this will hopefully support the Supporting Responsive Curricula project.

Nicola Critchlow

Nicola Critchlow from the SRC project and Careers, has produced a summary of how the ProDev days started and the experiences of students, staff and employers as it has evolved through three annual events. Read Nicola’s thoughts here.

The first SRC annual conference was held on 5th November 2009 and was attended by thirty people from across MMU. The purpose of the conference was to encourage university-wide debate on the responsive curricula issues which SRC is trying to address and seek input on priorities as the project moves from baselining to starting to implement change. It forms part of the validation plan for the project and will be repeated in subsequent years of the project.

The conference was opened by the Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Kevin Bonnett, who introduced the guest speakers – Freda Tallantyre from the HEA who gave a national picture of initiatives involving employers and HE and Fleur Corfield from Staffordshire University who discussed lessons learned from their initiatives in engaging with work-based learning programmes. Mark Stubbs gave an overview of the first year of the SRC project and was followed by Nicola Critchlow (Creative Digital) and Claire Hamshire (Physiotherapy) who described work with employers and professional bodies within these two subject strands. Detailed notes of the event produced by Rachel Forsyth and the powerpoint presentations can be downloaded below:

• Notes from the Conference - Rachel Forsyth (pdf doc)
• Developing a Responsive Curriculum - Freda Tallantyre
• Employer Engagement at Staffordshire University - Fleur Corfield
• SRC Briefing - Mark Stubbs (powerpoint presentation)
• Digital Creative Strand - Nicola Critchlow
• Physiotherapy Strand - Claire Hamshire

We have had several discussions about the direction and purpose of this workshop.

The latest involved, Nicola, Eddie, Jane and Robin.

We decided :

• Workshop for staff - Jane to have a go at drafting some objectives so that Nic and I can plan it.
• Focus group for students to ask the following questions (to be reviewed)

1. What will the LPC provide you with?

2. What do you think you will be doing on the LPC

• Structure (compulsory elements/electives, skills, etc)
• What will it contribute to your professional development (beyond skills & knowledge, e.g. “professional conduct”)
• How have you found about this?
• How would you find out about this?

3. What is PDP

• How have you evidenced the skills you have acquired?
• From units?
• From external sources such as p/t jobs?

4. What influenced your decisions about where to apply for an LPC?

• Was it vocational elements that were available?
• Are some universities better for employment?
• Are there issues about where you have studied that influence your career progression?

5. How will you provide evidence to employers about the skills and knowledge and professional ethics that you have acquired during your course?

It quickly became clear that mapping Skills/Competences to assessments would encourage an instrumental attitude in students which was undesirable. Hence map to Units.

A problem for the software structures we envisage is that skills might be mapped to several units, skills are often transferrable between contexts/units.

A question arose about the equivalence and mapping between the professional frameworks that Physio work with, e.g. CSP curriculum framework, Skills For Health (SFH), Knoiwledge and Skills Framework (KSF) and Health Professions Council (HPC). We discussed asking Simon grant to look at this and advise about ways forward that will minimise completxity.

The SRC steering group asked me to find out more about the Staffordshire University Fast track validations FLAP.

I have just spoken to Mark Stiles at Staffordshire and am circulating my notes on the conversation and raising some questions about where we take this. In particular Mark has asked us to clarify what we want to know and I have started to list some questions. PLease let me know your thoughts on this by going to the Project Web page and adding your comments.

Spoke to Mark Stiles at Staffs Uni re their fast track validation process - FLAP.

First thing to note is that this process is only for courses of 60 credits or less – I learnt today that we have some kind of fast track for 120 credits or less already, but I don’t know how our process works.

At first I thought that Staffs will have little to offer us but as Mark talked around the subject I realised that it is not that simple.

They also have two kinds of validation for larger courses – one that is only in-Faculty and another that has two levels of approval – Faculty and University.

They are also looking at extending the FLAP model to take account of using already validated units in new programmes, a little like our Digital Creative Industries is likely to do.  They are also reviewing the documentation they use as they believe it is trying to be “all things to all men” but failing in supporting the validation process and the consequent courses as a result.

He suggested we try to formulate our questions. This will then allow us all to see how best to take this forward. He is happy to come and talk to us but wondered whether a small meeting with Heads of QA and Academic Development (not sure what our equivalent is) and … from the two organisations might be a useful starting point.

What do we think about this?
What are our questions? - I have listed some below.

Robin

1. Does the Fast track validation cut corners in terms of QA/QE or does it simply compact the process?

2. Could the fast track process Staffs have adopted to used for larger courses?

3. Does the Fast track compensate by doing more detailed post delivery feedback from staff and students?

4. How does Staffs handle the re-use of units that have already been validated for a different course?

5. Has Staffs investigated the use of a generic programme framework that is validated with the intention of  slotting  in additional units in the future as needs arise?

Robin and I have been finding the scenarios useful to help us to think about the processes in more concrete ways and to map examples against the current processes. We’ve agreed to continue collecting/writing scenarios from as wide a range of quality enhancement situations as possible, and from as many perspectives as possible. Not all of them will need detailed analysis and we may construct ‘composites’ later. Liz is making appointments with a variety of people for me to ‘interview’ them to try to get some further scenarios but I’d also welcome examples from as many people as possible. I think it would be especially useful to get some administrative perspectives and some ideas of where problems have arisen in the past.

I’ll also try to talk to project leaders from the key institutional projects of Retention and Student Success and Embedding Employability to see how they see their work being embedded in QE processes.

Robin is also going to ask projects who are undertaking specific PARM activity to record what they’re doing using voice recorders which we’ll transcribe, to try to find out if there are any additional processes - or shortcuts - which are currently undocumented  and which we might need to factor in.

mail from Alan Paull

We are currently working on the Archimate and systems thinking stuff.

The Archimate work is proving very interesting.  As the current system
is paper-based, we have no actual Enterprise Architecture type
structures (no ICT), which means the COVARM-in-Archimate will be
business layer only.  We will have some comments on the COVARM model as
it stands, having discovered one or two dangling threads!

I would like to make a note here about complexity and the purpose of our
process modelling.  The COVARM model of MMU processes is complicated and
reflects their complex nature.  The purpose of the COVARM model was to
enable the project team to analyse the processes alongside processes at
other institutions in order to create a generic course validation model,
so it is not very accessible to other audiences.  On the other hand our
purposes are four, I believe, at the moment:

(1)    To gain an understanding of the whole process, with a view to …

(2)    Presenting potential interventions (ICT tools and process
improvements) to a wide audience and …

(3)    Modifying these in the light of comments and experience, and
finally …

(4)    Recording the changed processes, with the engagement of the
community in the maintenance of the models.

This means that the parameters of our models might be these:

The viewpoints need to cover the concepts relating to the HEI staff
practitioners, those involved in the processes, rather than from the
viewpoint of application developers.  Viewpoint from employer would also
be essential.

Understanding of the current processes, indication of intervention
points and presentation of any new or revised processes will mean the
focus is probably not as fine-detailed as the COVARM version.

Concentration should be on the main flow of processes, with only a
passing mention of exceptions or alternative flows.

The models will be iterative and therefore subject to change as we
receive stakeholder comments.

We will keep a clear split between our ‘as is’ model and our ‘to be’
model(s).

The model will not provide all the answers!  I think this is important.
Witness that the COVARM model does not include a lot of highly pertinent
information, for example the extent and nature of the documentation
referred to, which will colour perceptions of those actually involved in
doing the processes.