Busy, busy, busy...

This week is looking to be an interesting one. Not only are we in the midst of trying to get all of the project tied up, but we are holding the last management and advisory group meetings under the current funding. As with all of these project meetings more of my time is gobbled up by everything surrounding the meeting more than attending. I have though ordered the lunch, so all that is left is to get into the room for the meeting after the teaching has finished and set up. (Our centre administrator is on holiday, so its fend for your self time.)

Towards the end of the week, I am off to attend the community day of Dev8D and the evenings awards dinner. I'm off to the dinner as I have been nominated for an award. At the moment I am not sure what to expect, but it should be interesting to say the least. I will of course post the out comes if any.

Right I better get to the day job and make sure everything is in place for the meetings.

A quick update before a break

It's August and I have decided like the rest of Europe to take some time off. But this does not mean that the project will stop. Life and development will still be occurring.

Today though, the WebPA project has been held high as an example again. This time rather than from inside the project it came from the Programme manager David down a JISC drumming up support for the UK round of IMS award short lists. I would say that any JISC project should have a go. The reward to the project is phenomenal in terms of credit to the project team and also lead institution.

We are also in the process of writing a paper which will hopefully be accepted into the special issue of the BJET. But only time will tell.

However, when back we will be gearing up to make a new release of the WebPA tool, providing people with enough time to get an installation working before the next semester. If you are interested in using WebPA or installing it I suggest that you contact the project. If you do take the WebPA tool and use it you could join our list of adopting institutions.

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.

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!