Guest Blog Post – Registry, Governance and Students Directorate Away Day

Guest Blog Post from Richard Williams, PALET Project Team (Student Systems Development)

Each year, colleagues across the Registry, Governance and Students (REGOS) Directorate are invited to attend an away day. The away day this year (April 2011), included presentations from Dr David Grant (Vice-Chancellor) and Professor Elizabeth Treasure (Deputy Vice-Chancellor) on current and planned developments within and outside the University. The theme of the away day was, “Supporting and Enhancing the Student Experience and Managing Change”. 

As part of the group discussions it was suggested that SITS system should be used as the single source of all student related information, in order to provide a more holistic, consistent and improved experience to students and avoid duplication of effort and information across different systems. It was good to hear that the work that we are undertaking as part of the PALET project aligns directly with the wider institutional aspirations that were being discussed at the away day. PALET is working to develop processes to facilitate the capture of student focussed module and programme information (i.e. to populate programme specifications) in the SITS system. This will enhance the Student experience by enabling the dissemination of accurate and reliable programme information, from a single source. The new programme structures that are also being worked on as part of the PALET project should help to provide clearer and transparent programme information to students.

The away day provided a good opportunity to discuss with colleagues the work undertaken across REGOS as a Directorate and how we are working to enhance the experience of our Students. It was encouraging to hear both Senior Staff in the institution and colleagues across REGOS supporting the principles of consistency, transparency and single source information – all of which are key principles informing the work of PALET.

Programme Info Update and a conference at the Rovers Return

Is it me, or do four day weeks feel even longer?! Anyway, this week, we have spent some time looking at the information gathered at the ‘Programme Information Workshop’ that took place last Monday. The participants of the workshop were split into four groups to represent four key audiences of the programme specification and the module descriptions:

1. Prospective Student
2. Entrant/New Student
3. Graduate
4. Employer/Professional Bodies

Following this, the four groups reconvened and started to identify which bits of information about a programme, should be found within the programme specification and module descriptions. The information gathered at the workshop will be looked at further next week and eventually, and hopefully, very soon, new templates will be developed. These will then be circulated for comment, so watch your inboxes…

In project dissemination news… Andy and I are off to the ALT Conference in Manchester next week where we are presenting at two symposium sessions. The first session is titled ‘Herding cats? Engaging stakeholders in complex institutional change projects’, and is being run by the five institutions in Design Cluster B (Cardiff, Cambridge, Birmingham City, City University, Greenwich). The second session is titled, ‘Curriculum challenges: ‘big words that make us so unhappy’’ – it’s a session looking at both Curriculum Design and Delivery Programmes, which will try to identify the outcomes/dissemination that the community wants around these themes.
 http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2009/index.html