We are almost there! Today is the final JISC programme meeting, and I am on my way to Birmingham (literally typing this blog in a train). I am looking forward to meeting JISC folks and other Strand B project leaders and sharing the EEVS findings with them. I like the idea of 'marketplace'  - great metaphor for for resource-sharing!

Amanda will be following the event from Australia (via email updates), where she has recently started her mini research sabbatical (lucky her!) 

Reflecting back on project experience, I can say that it was tough, (in combination with teaching, research and other activities) but definitely rewarding, as we found some really interesting things which  we were able to build into a coherent story at the end. Equally important -  we learned couple of useful things on the way...

Big thank you to JISC guys and gals who definitely 'kept us on our toes' throughout the project with frequent project updates and progress meetings, and yes - that was helpful!

Finally, while this is a formal end of the project, we are already booked for many other EEVS-related events and activities : HeLF in London at the end of October, HETL in Florida in January, local dissemination at Hertfordshire, to name a few....

So, the EEVS will continue to live for at least another 6 months - in the meantime, please visit our Design Studio page and feel free to re-use some of the resources we created. 

Ciao !

M&A

We're well into the final stages of the qualitative data analysis for EEVS here. We have been reviewing the themes and sub-themes of the staff interviews conducted in the past few months. We also have the qualitative comments added by staff to the end of the questionnaire. Plenty of thoughtful objective and subjective opionions expressed, which we are looking forward to sharing with colleagues at ALT-C.

EEVS @ IBLC etc.

Summer is almost here, marking is finished, preliminary EEVS data analysis is complete and we are starting to report on some initial findings !
Last week we presented on EEVS at the Seventh International Blended Learning Conference (IBLC). This gave us an opportunity to share preliminary findings from our project not only with our colleagues from iTEAM and UH, but also with Lisa, Marianne  and others from the JISC Assessment and Feedback team. We got some interesting feedback from the audience and some good suggestions for further analysis. For example, our colleague Steve Bennett from the School of Computer Science suggested that we could look at the (potentially) changing attitudes of our student bloggers as they progressed with their reflections - the longitudinal aspects of collected data will definitely be something interesting to look at and interpret!
This week we are presenting  preliminary findings at the internal L&T forum where we will meet again with our  colleagues from the iTEAM project. Other than that, we are both pleased with the work we have done so far, and looking forward to publish some of that after we complete the analysis and report. In addition to promised outcomes, we seem to be creating more and more interesting resources that have potential to be re-used by other similar 'technology adoption' projects e.g. students questionnaire, staff questionnaire, staff interview questions, methodology based on 'reflective blogs', instructions for student bloggers etc All these we intend to share via out Design Studio page. More to follow soon...

EEVS poster

It was good to catch up with some of the other Strand B projects on Tuesday April 24th in Birmingham at the JISC Learning and Teaching Experts meeting. Seven of us were there with posters from our projects. We had the opportunity to talk about the emerging findings from our projects in a session which saw all the 70+ delegates taking time to walk round and discuss the work we're undertaking. My only regret? Not enough time to hear what everyone else is doing and their early findings!

As usual it was a packed schedule and an ecellent opportunity to explore aother areas where learning technologies are being exploited in HE and FE. Thanks to Sarah, Marianne and Lisa and the team for their hard work in setting it up and organising the day.

Interim report

Phew ! We managed to publish the interim report on time, despite all other things going on in the background (teaching, marking, open days, programme validation events etc).

Writing report was a good experience as it reminded us of  how much we achieved in the last 5-6 months! We collected vast amounts of data through staff interviews, students' blogs, campus-wide questionnaire, and also, by listening to what our students and colleagues have to say about the technology...  Most importantly, we got a really good spread of data across different subject groups (e.g. business, computer science, law, engineering, life sciences, psychology, other humanities, creative arts etc)  so it will be really interesting to compare and contrast findings across different disciplines. We are both really looking forward to a well-deserved break over Easter holidays, and to a start of more focused data analysis in April. Happy Easter to everyone!

EEVS progress

We've been rather quiet on the blog recently as we have focused on our  student questionnaire and reviewing the student input to their narrative blogs on using EVS.

We are both very excited that the numbers particpating in the survey have grown over the past 3 weeks, the total participant list has climbed to 565 students. This has been achieved in 2 main ways. First of all, we asked the students completing their EVS blogs what would motivate them to take part and they all chose the options of Amazon vouchers as their main motivator. So we have included a prize draw for one large Amazon voucher and 6 smaller ones for any students who take part in the survey and include their name and email address on the final page. Secondly, we have asked our network of local School based champions and leaders for EVS to email their students and to place the call to take part in the survey where the students are going to come across it. This might be on a Programme website or via a specific module email list. We included a question on the survey asking participants for the specific School they are registered in and because we are using the BOS software we can see at a glance online which Schools are well represented.

 Our next steps are to follow up the academic staff in interview and questionnaire and then to spend some time analysing our data.

Meeting with iTEAM

Yesterday we had a good, productive meeting with our colleagues from the iTEAM project. The iTEAM guys  are doing some great work in the area of EVS deployment and adoption across the University, while Amanda and I concentrate on collecting, analysing and making sense of an ever increasing amount of data coming from students and staff using EVS. The way we work with the iTEAM is based on two-way information sharing on our work in progress: the issues they experience and lessons learned from 'the trenches'  provide direction and focus for our data collection and analysis, while our progressive findings help them in tuning their strategy and implementation. So, for example, we had a very interesting discussion on whether or not the University should adopt a single type of a handset ... More on this to come in our preliminary findings and reports ... Stay tuned!