Archive for August, 2007

Reviewing Progress and Looking Forward

Wednesday, August 29th, 2007

This week, we have been spending this week reviewing project activities and data collected so far … this is centring around the construction of case studies of participating departments and faculties, drawing on documentary sources; interviews and discussions; surveys and the student experience research carried out last term. These case studies will be useful foci for engagement with broader groups of participants in the next stage of the project, and we hope that – as ‘working documents’ – they will be developed and elaborated further.

We are also planning a range of other engagement activities involving students, staff and alumni; we will be using events at the beginning of the coming term to raise awareness of our work and recruit new cohorts of project participants.

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Critical Friend Visit

Sunday, August 26th, 2007

Our project ‘critical friend’ visited on the 14th August to review the project and to discuss the nature of the support they could provide for our work and for the cluster group to which we belong.

We identified three areas in particular where we anticipate further discussion with our CF – it would interesting to know if these align with the priorities and challenges facing other pathfinder projects:

  • managing multiple, complex data sets in such a way that they support the work of the project as it exists at present, but at the same time, so that they have the potential to be used by others around the university, or for secondary analysis at some point in the future. While we can’t possibly address all the possible research agendas and questions which might be current across the institution, it would be an important outcome for the project if we could at least provide part of an evidence base for others to use
  • making the transition from working with self-selected ‘champions’ and existing teaching and learning projects, teams and groups to broader engagement across subject areas and colleges
  • disseminating to multiple audiences and stakeholders – project participants; other practitioners both within and beyond Cambridge; instructional designers and technologists; policymakers at different levels and research communities, for example.

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