News on the Burgess Report

Change by degree

Student grades are to be reformed. But has the new system already been watered down? Polly Curtis reports

Tuesday October 16, 2007
The Guardian

Firsts, upper seconds, lower seconds and thirds have been part of the academic landscape in the UK for 200 years. Bob Burgess, the vice-chancellor of Leicester University, has spent three years examining how degrees are classified. When he issued interim reports declaring the current system "not fit for purpose", he triggered reports of a death sentence.

Today, the system gets a reprieve. His final 76-page report suggests the present classifications should remain, but a new Higher Education Achievement Report (Hear), will be issued alongside them, giving the "fine-grained" details of a student's learning: what they studied and how it was assessed. It is hoped this will be in place in all UK higher education institutions by 2010. Link

Graduates to get details of marks

• Current degree system not fit for purpose, report says
  
• Universities resist move to scrap existing grades

Polly Curtis, education editor
Tuesday October 16, 2007
The Guardian

Students will be given a detailed breakdown of every mark they receive in their degree and how it was assessed from 2011 in an effort to help employers distinguish between the increasing number who graduate with 2:1s and firsts.

The marking details will be given in a new two-page Higher Education Achievement Report (Hear), which will allow employers to scrutinise the detail of applicants' degrees and even to advertise for applicants who got a certain mark in a particular module. Link

Office life; how is it for you?

Here's an article from the BBC I read whilst, yes, scoffing a sandwich at my pc:

Workers 'want tea trolley return'

A survey of 1,000 office staff showed a break to buy tea and cakes from a trolley - a regular feature of offices in the past - would help motivate them.

Others traditions that workers want revived include a subsidised canteen, an annual works outing, and, above all, having a full hour's break for lunch. Link

and here's another, on another aspect of our daily lives here:

Email most stressful app

Email represents the single most stressful business application causing employees to become “tired, frustrated and unproductive”, according to research carried out by the University of Glasgow’s Computing Science department.

The survey of 177 subjects’ working habits found that 34% of workers feel stressed by the volume of emails they receive daily, with a further 28% of respondents regarding email as a major source of pressure. The research also found that workers typically switch applications as often as 40 times an hour in order to view their email, suggesting the application fosters unhealthy compulsive behaviour. Link

Online results in the news

Here's an article from the BBC, on how the Scottish Qualifications Authority are following our lead, kind of.

Pupils receive results on the web

Almost 35,000 pupils will receive their Scottish exam results a day earlier than most after they registered to access them over the internet.

More than a fifth of candidates have chosen to use the service, which has been made available across Scotland for the first time. Another 120,000 will wait until Tuesday for results to be delivered by post.

Meanwhile, Royal Mail has said that planned industrial action will not disrupt the results.

A total of 34,683 candidates signed up for the online results service, which allows candidates to view their results on a secure site. Link

The paperless office? Ha ha hah hah hah ha hah!

Paper. We get through so much of it it's not true. Or rather, it shouldn't be true.

I've no idea how many trees it takes to make a ream of paper (no doubt Wikipedia could give me number), but I'm sure there's a forest somewhere feeling significantly smaller as a result of two recent Registry projects. The first was servicing the year-end Exam Board, where everyone's results and awards are ratified and formally signed off, and the second was the publication of those results and awards to all the students.

The business of the Exam Board is to work through individual profiles for almost all our programmes, to discuss what needs discussing, and to confirm awards and progression. The profile itself is a Microsoft Access report, landscape format, with module and programme info for about half a dozen students on each page -- the modules they've registered for across all academic years, the marks they've received, the number of attepmts they took, the credits they've gained, and for finalists the award calculations and classifications they end up with.

There are pages and pages of these profiles, about four to five hundred for the July Board, and we need about twenty sets for all the members of the Board, Heads of Programme, Exam Officers and so on. And who knows how much paper we get through beforehand, when we first start running these reports, finding errors, reprinting, finding gaps, reprinting, inconsistences, reprinting. It all adds up.

The question of whether there's another way is one we hope to have answers for in the coming academic year. Possible avenues of enquiry include projecting the Board's set of profiles onto a screen in the boardroom, or perhaps filling the room with laptops or tablets or something. The mechanism for producing these reports will have to be re-written, but that's long overdue anyway. Something must be done.

And the second Registry project, hot on the heels of this one -- the publication of results -- is another A4-heavy process that is not sustainable, going forward. Currently every student whose profile goes through the Board get a letter. Thousands and thousands. It's right and proper that finalists should get the 'congrats-here's-your-award' letter, so too for the 'sorry-you've-been-terminated' letter, but the normal fail/resit letter? The normal pass/progress letter? There must surely be a greater role for e:Vision and e-mail in all this, for these thousands of bog-standards communications. The 'next actions' from these results letters, to borrow a GTD term, are in the main tasks like re-enrol for the next session, or register for re-sits; the former an e:Vision task, the latter soon to be. So let's have it all online.

The more applications and services we push online the better, as far as I can see, not just in terms of improving our service to staff and their Exam Board profiles (faster access to the data, improved portability, clearer presentation of information, more convenient and useful formatting) and students and their results (no postal delays, instantaneous processing, 24 hour access, off-site access, with of course e-mail support and phone support), but also in terms of improving how we use our resources.

The whole save-the-planet campaign seems to be bordering on the manic these days (where's the equivalent one about human trafficking, say, or Darfur) but however corny the sentiment it's up to us to play our part, to find areas to improve and, in improving them, move us all along a little.

Module evaluation on e:Vision

I've just finished a PowerPoint presentation to Academic Standards Committee on how we could use e:Vision to create, deliver and collate module evaluation questionnaires. It seemed to go down quite well, my shaky delivery notwithstanding, and I'll now be trying to pull together people and modules for an extended pilot for semester 1 of 2007/8, across all the faculties and subject areas.



See also:
Now - headaches, coffee. The future - slick, efficient processes. Oh yes.

Laurels

Right. Back in the land of the living.

It's great having a blog, I feel very cutting-edge, but they tend to fall into disrepair very quickly if left unattended, as this has been for a while now. Two large projects, and a growing series of smaller ones, have prevented me -- or rather, I have let them prevent me -- from updating this blog with what's current and underway with Registry, with my half at least.

First we had a(nother) HEFCE audit, swiftly followed by a year end Exam Board. The former involved a lot of running around with various lists making sure all the records in our central student database match with reality, as experienced by module tutors and students and the like, whilst the latter involved a lot of running around with various lists making sure all the records in our central student database match with reality, as experienced by module tutors and students and the like. Another way of looking at it would be to say the former checks the data that becomes the information that becomes the money, and the latter checks the data that becomes the information that becomes the awards. Both equally important, both dependent on the other. Either way, both were dealt with very successfully, thanks to the great work put in by the team.

But sadly there's no time to rest on our laurels (do any of us ever get the chance to do that?), as we're straight into the next set of projects: publication of results, enrolment, graduation, module evaluation, collaborative provision processing, HESA etc etc etc.

Web Review staff survey

Well, the Web Review staff survey has finally been released. To recap, we're seeking views on how we need to develop both the intranet and internet to meet the needs of all our users in the future. We'll also be surveying and talking to students and external users of the website. The results of this survey work will inform our website strategy, and will be the launch point for more detailed one-on-one interviews.

http://web1.yorksj.ac.uk/Survey//TakeSurvey.asp?SurveyID=mM3l934L996KG

The responses I've had already are flagging up a general confusion about what is internet and what is intranet. What I've been saying is that the internet site is the external-facing website at www.yorksj.ac.uk and the intranet sites include the Staff Homepage, the Student Homepage, the Document Directory, the Staff Information Point; sites that require users to log in, or are not generally intended for the public. The rule of thumb I've always gone by is that inter- is between or amongst, and intra- is within; the internet is stuff for everyone and the intranet is just stuff for us staff. I managed to identify 38 distinct websites or microsites within our total web presence, however we describe it, and I hope we don't get too bogged down with worries about assigning the correct label -- it's all stuff that needs sorting, that needs pulling together. What all these sites provide is valuable, useful content; it's just that it is all so awkward to find, difficult to navigate through, hard to digest.

Here's a quick question to illustrate my point. The hefty Your Rights, Rules & Responsibilities guide book that we distribute to all the students at the start of their programme; that contains all the policies and contracts, the regs and procedures; that they read from cover to cover and internalise fully; an important document they might need to refer to at any point in their time with us — where's that on the web?

Stick a link in the comments if you think you know.