Peer Support and Evaluation

A video-conference was held with Andrew Broughton, Lucy Warman, Helen Ellis and Niall Woods (UCLAN) and Charavanan (Chara) Balasubramaniam where a joint project evaluation was discussed.

2 of the objects were shown:
St Georges University of London: REViP http://labyrinth.sgul.ac.uk/openlabyrinth/mnode.asp?id=qgxlrdbu3lpfvf4jesngxlrdbtpr9kq)

University of Central Lancashire: BioPeL (http://www.visualization.org.uk/pain/pain.html)

There is now going to be a student questionnaire/evaluation of the projects. Chara is organising this with a group of St George's students.

JORUM Training at UCLAN

A useful day spent finding out what we have to do with the RLO when we have one!
Members of the 'Biology' peer group also attended the day, and it was useful to see how they were progressing with their re-useable materials.

October Meeting

I was unable to make this meeting, but work has been progressing on the evaluation plan (see the documents page http://ephrum.pbwiki.com/Project+Documents), and the EPHRUM project has been allocated a set of 'peers' that will evaluate each others' projects:

St Georges University of London: REViP
University of Central Lancashire: ADAPT
University of Central Lancashire: BioPeL

I shall look forward to working with this group, as there should be a certain amount of synergy (or at least a supportive environment!).

Some Really Useful Tools

Liam Earney as Casper, together with the web2rights team, has produced a really useful tool on copyright clearance, which can be found at: http://www.web2rights.org.uk/casper/ . There is also another free to use copyright toolkit that has just been released by the EduServ Foundation.
http://www.copyrighttoolkit.com/index.html

And Sheila McNeill from Strathclyde University is part of a team developing a webservice which will convert content into various different types of packages e.g. IMS CPs, moodle, Blackboard etc. There will be limited set of packaging "flavours" in the first release, but they hope that this will be built on. To do that they need some idea of the most popular packages people really need. There is more information (including contact info) @ http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/Get_Involved_with_Transcoder.

Rolling out the Module

The Department of Geography decided (due to staffing issues, one of the lead tutors on the module has handed in his notice) to postpone the rolling out of the module until September 2010. This means that some of the (internally produced - new) course material will not be available yet, although there is still the committment to produce it. The research assistants are continuing to find external material and material within the organisation.

Module Specification through Quality Processes

The EPH module (GE6016 - Environment, Poverty and Health) was approved on 5th September by the Faculty of Social Science Board of Studies to form part of the Geography and Development Studies Programme. The module specification can be found on the module wiki (project documents page) http://ephrum.pbwiki.com/Project-Documents#

Researcher appointment

2 research assistants were appoointed by the University in June to gather material for the module from both inside and outside the University.