The lapse in blog posts has continued

I am aware that the lapse in blogging has continued. There are many reasons behind the lack of posts, mostly related to time.

Since the last post we have held our very first user group meeting for the WebPA tool. I am happy to say that the event was more than successfully. It out stripped my expectations of the day, my only wish was that people would talk and interact with each other. Well they all talked, talked and talked some more (causing us to over run on sessions). This makes such a nice change from me doing all the talking about WebPA, and also from event delegates behaving like the students they say never interact.

One of the best statements about the day came from a delegate who said;

This tool has a great future but it needs to move quickly if it doesn’t want to be overtaken by the big boys’ (e.g. Blackboard et al) growing desire to jump on the ‘assessment and feedback’ bandwagon. Congratulations to all those who’ve worked on it so far and I’d like to express my interest in getting involved.

Really that statement says it all for me. Not only does this person see how they can implement and support the tool at their institution, but they also want to become involved. I think that we can say that we are now at score 2 (score1 being reached a while ago). And that was really what I wanted to get out of the user group, but believe me we got more... one implementer has talked about creating a ''power link for Blackboard, another suggested they help us work with the Moodle community, the list goes on and on.

In addition to the user group, the Physical Sciences Subject Centre held an assessment event last week and again the feedback has been really positive. The day after I was at an e-learning conference at the University of Ulster. This was yet another interesting event and initial feedback was positive and encouraging. I think that we may have collected more potential adopting institutions. I still think more the merrier, but we are coming to the end of the funding and although they will be good for the sustainability of the project, at the moment it looks like with out further funding many of these potential adopters will be out in the cold and not have the support adopters up till now will have had. Only time will tell though

Demonstrator Launched

As a project we have assimilated a lot of the information about open source projects and how to be one, from all sources that can be found and in particular those at OSS-Watch. One piece of advice we where given was to make a demonstrator and make it available to potential users to see what the software is about. Well this was realised at the end of October. Within this first week we have had a phenomenal response.

Firstly, Ross from OSS-Watch sent out a very nice comment to the projects JISCmail list, stating that this is a significant step for community development. Secondly, the statistics that are being gathered about the visitors to the site are looking incredible. Already, there are visitors from the UK and the most interesting are the visitors from further afield. It appears that we are getting global interest already. (Not bad for a little JISC funded project with 2 full time staff and another who contributes 1/2 a day a week.)

I hope this has a knock on effect for out fledgling community, by attracting more members. Only time will tell though. But for now I think that all those people who have helped the project get this far, deserve a pat on the back!

Getting there slowly

I am in the process at the moment of supporting a number of institutions with their own installations of WebPA.

The first institution is well on their way to getting the installation complete. However, I am not to clear on what version/revision of WebPA they are using, so supporting any queries that come in is interesting, as I can not tell if I have previously fixed the problem.

The others are also on their way to getting an installation, which is really exciting. But again, the issues that come through the door are always directed to me, rather than through the WebPAsourceforge area . This leaves me to add the information to the trackers myself. At the moment this is okay, as there are not to many requests. I am encouraging the users to use the sourceforge system, so every time I email back with the solution I endeavor to include tracking information, as well in, the hope that at some point they will use the system.

The other major success that has occurred over the weekend is the number of downloads of WebPA we have had. I released a version of WebPA as a download on Friday 5 October, since then we have had five downloads. To me this is good going, but only time will tell if it is a success.