IMS Regional Finals for the next IMS Learning Impact Awards

This morning I received an email about the UK having their own regional finals for the IMS Learning Impact Awards for 2009. Over the past two years there have been two successful UK entries to the Awards, WebPA (Loughborough University) being one and OpenLearn from the Open University the other.

I would encourage anyone with a project in the UK to have a go and see where you get. There is no harm in trying and if you are successful you will be awarded with the recognition of your project within your institution and the UK. Being an award wining project means a lot for both the project and those involved. If you don't know where to start, I would recommend contacting the folks at JISC Cetis as they know the community at IMS better than anyone. You can also read about my experiences of attending the conference and the award process by reading the past entries I made related to the IMS Awards.

WebPA is now award wining

I spent last week at the IMS Global annual conference in Austin, Texas, USA. The main reason for being there was to represent the WebPA project for a submission that I made back around Christmas time.

The main aspect of the awards process after being shortlisted comprised of a speed dating style presentation to small groups of conference attendees for five minutes and then all change to the next group. All in all we repeated this for a total of twenty three times. I am really glad that Peter Willmot, a colleague here at Loughborough, was able to accompany me there, as I don't think that I would have been able to do that on my own. At the end of the presentation time I think we had lost the plot, I can't remember what we said, to whom and when. Some of the groups that came round must have had the same things repeated to them a couple of times during our presentation. I do know that this whole process lasted over two hours.

The rest of the conference had some interesting points, but in the main a lot of the sessions where misleading. I attended a session on learning out comes and analytics, which turned out to be more related to data mink for student retention, the challenges and reasons why it is difficult to do.

However, as with every conference it was the networking time that was more beneficial. Various people showed interest in the WebPA system, including representatives from the Open University in the UK, Sakai and the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. All of which I intend to follow up in the near future.

At the end of the conference was the awards ceremony, during which the WebPA project was presented with a Bronze Award. Although I am sure that we could have gotten a silver or higher if we where more prepared for the presentation people herding session. But a bronze is better than no awards at all.

Looking back on the experience I definitely would say that the almost ordeal of going through the whole process including the presentation aspect has been well worth it. Not only will this benefit me as an individual in my career (I put in the submission in the first place), but also the institution that I am based and of course the project and JISC. I will also take the opportunity to thank the JISC Cetis for all the help and support in assisting us with the submission, and supporting us at the conference.

Back to juggling...

At the moment there are so many different things happening.

Tuesday, the project will be at the JISC Conference 2008. Where I will be demonstrating on the OSS-Watch demonstrator stand. I need to set-up some time to prepare a laptop and ensure that there is enough data in the database to provide a meaning full demonstration.

At the same time there are element of the IMS awards that I need to prepare for. I intend to develop a series of small videos of the software that can be re used else where. There are also the posters which we would like to take.

This is all on top of trying to support all the other institutions who are adopting WebPA and keeping up to date with what stages of use they are at.

In addition to all this I need to find some time to actually sit and do some more coding. This however, may be delayed for a while and I will try and block a time for some intensive coding. Until then I will continue to fix all the problems, but not code any new major feature.

So what happened to March

At the almost beginning of march I wrote about attending the JISC Programme Meeting. Well the outcomes where that it was interesting to see that other JISC e-assessment orientated projects are having some of the same issues that we as a project have been facing. However, in other respects we are miles ahead of others in what we have accomplished. A lot of attendees where interested in how we had progressed to being open source so quickly in the project and where interested in finding out more about what they could learn from us. Also the other main area people where interested in was the IMS Award shortlist. For me the afternoon was not quite as good as it could have been, and I really didn't have much to take away with me.

The following week I was at the OSS-Watch Risk Management in Open Source Procurement. For me the key elements that I picked up on where:

• The more customisations move away from the original code the harder they are to maintain and also integrate back in
• What business reasons can we provide to show that the adoption of WebPA is beneficial
• What are the upgrade cycles for a project, as this will often help to sway a potential adopter
• What would aid our survivability, would it be via becoming a service.
• How can we best show the scalability of the WebPA system.

A lot of other topics where also covered, far too many to mention here.


In the middle of this I have damaged my hand and wrist so, somethings are becoming slightly behind as I work through the pain. I have also had to take some holiday, so that was the end of March really.

Now we are in April, I am getting back into the swing of things. However, I still have a list as long as my arm that I need to complete soon, as well as, preparing for the IMS Awards next month, which is only 5.5weeks away!

Update on one little action...

The JISC have to day published a press release on WebPA being short listed for the IMS Global Award. Also with the continuing support from OSS-Watch, who also included the WebPA project in one of their latest blog atricles, there is no pressure...

Further to this Rowin has posted on her blog as well.

One innocent little action...

In the run up to christmas I suggested that it would be good for the project to enter the IMS Global Learning Impact Awards. In doing this I landed my self a huge chunk of work in filling out the application. The application was not as straight forward as I had hoped and it even ate into my christmas holiday. But the application went in, with some in put form the WebPA evengelists here at Loughborough and the JISC Cetis Assessment co-ordinator.

The new year came and went. Then at the beginning of Feburary news came in that we had been accepted as a finalist. There were a couple of weeks to decide whether to progress to the finals or not. Now progression has been agreed and in the space of a few days news is already getting around.

Firstly, the Cetis co-ordinator sent an email with congratulations and now JISC are asking for a quote for a press release on how the project feels. Hopefully all this publicity will work for the project and draw in more institutions that will want to use the tool. All in all, not bad for a little open source project, bearly a year old!