Wanted: Party Organiser for Charlie Sheen!

Many of you will do something nice for your mum this weekend, but I very much doubt that you think it qualifies as deserving of a medal. Unless of course, you're Prince Andrew. He, like me, has just spent a day in Northern Ireland. Whereas I was running a series of college workshops and visiting the HEA ICS Subject Centre, he was there as part of his role as unpaid trade ambassador, something for which he's received his latest honour for personal service to the Queen, the Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order to add to his earlier honours for the same thing, the Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order and the Royal Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter.

Now I don't want to sound churlish, but how often has he been in the crush to get a seat on a north-bound train out of King's Cross, or spent the night in a Travelodge/Premier/Holiday Inn? His "business", as far as I can see, is all first-class and five-star, and while he might not receive a salary, he's unlikely to have paid for anything either.

Ten years travelling the world "representing British interests abroad", whatever that means, is not something most people outside of unelected dictatorships would consider worthy of a chest-full of medals, and is for most us, something we'd have preferred to have been an April Fool joke.

Space (centre): the no-Phil Frontier

Having been asked to help coordinate a "Creative Assessment to Help Eliminate Plagiarism" workshop as part of the joint JISC/HEA e-asy Assessment day at the National Space Centre, I arrived in Leicester late last night to be told by the organisers that Professor Phil Race, the advertised keynote speaker, was ill and unable to attend, so "could I step in"?

3 beers, a glass of wine and a pizza-full of persuasion later, meant sleep was postponed while I re-purposed a collection of resources and wrote a presentation to make up a (hopefully!) coherent 2-hour session around the day's theme of "engaging with innovative ways of assessing learners to make assessment e-asy".

Fortunately, when the moment of truth arrived, adrenaline overrode the effects of having had only 3 hours worth of sleep, so my delivery was something close to normal, but after an afternoon workshop, a plenary and three hours to get home, the effects of "boldly going where no one (well me anyway) has gone before" has left me feeling very tired....

The Elephant in the Room..

The Higher Education Academy has apparently been informed by the funding councils that its grant will be reduced for the forthcoming academic year, something which the subject centre workers I've spent today with think is going to significantly impact primarily, and unjustly, on them.

It's my view, and it's also one apparently shared by all the delegates at today's event (not just those representing the subject centres), that whoever makes the decisions needs to very seriously consider the educational impact and current returns on expenditure.

The HEA board will doubtless claim to look at the big picture as it considers the challenge of managing the prospective funding cut, but given the contractual position of the subject centres, reducing/stopping their activities is relatively easy to implement and representatives of the central function are hardly likely to admit that their well-documented ticking of many boxes isn't a desirable output?

However, the easiest option is unlikely to be the best one, as the subject centres are not only the most visible part of the HEA, (other than running a recognition scheme, what do all those people at York actually do?), they are also, according to 2008's interim evaluation of the HEA "valued because they tackle enhancement from the ‘ground floor’" and “widely cited as the Academy’s flagship programme”.

It is also the regular engagement with those lecturers actually delivering the HE programmes, individuals who can have a direct impact on standards, that makes subject centres so effective: extensive repositories of generic information and strategy/policy documents do not have anything like the same potential for positive change as working together within and across learning communities.

Therefore, surely either reducing the size or number of the centres before, or instead of, reducing the size (& cost) of the central "coordinating body" first, will eventually lead to the closure of the HEA anyway, as without them what's left of the organisation won't be able to deliver anything of use to any of the people who want or need it?

Anyone willing to assuage the fears of centre personnel that they won't be bearing the lion's share of the Academy's cuts while the York white elephant is protected like the endangered species it now surely is?

Acronymed Out!

As I'm now on a train heading North after attending today's HEFCE FEC Data Day at the Regent's Park Holiday Inn, I'm wondering who decided that everybody in education had to have some sort of snappy acronym to confuse first-time delegates at these kind of events.
In no particular order there was NUS, HEA, IFF, HEFCE, TQI, NSS, IM, QAA and many more mentioned in the presentations, all of which I knew but there were many delegates puzzled by what some of them stood for. Time for conference organisers to include a glossary?
Memo to self - add one to next month's Strategic Priorites pack after I've read the presentations.

Proper Planning Prevents Poor Pork Pie Performance

I was sent by the HEA to the Skills for Sustainable Communities Lifelong Learning Network (based at the University of Leicester) after a request for a conference speaker had been passed to me with no details whatsoever about audience type. After outlining the work of the academy & its subject centres, we then spent the afternoon discussing my high-profile speaking engagement at their annual conference next month in Melton Mowbray: "Maximise the potential of your people for improved business performance".

The aim of the event is to bring together their educational partners to celebrate success of partnership working, help provide ways they can work together in the future and overcome any barriers to help vocational learners progress.

After agreeing a biography they're putting on the website & in delegate packs, I now know that I'm supposed to be an expert on "The importance of FE and HE working together, new developments for FE/HE (good job I went to an Advanced Apprenticeships meeting yesterday!), can give many successful examples of FE and HE partnerships, and talk about regional policy/strategy as it affects HE in FE".

Fortunately the content of the speech won't be a problem, but it would have been nice to know what the brief was before the meeting so I could have put some proposals together. Still, this will serve as a good example of the 6Ps I can give out to give students prior to their vivas.

Who ate all the pie?

3rd/4th December, Bolton
As a reward for my concerted efforts at a two-day event on the Student Learning Experience , I got to stay in a very posh hotel (the Reebok) and find out what a £20 steak pie tastes like. Disappointingly, it turned out to be pretty much the same as a £5 one, but was probably placed on the nice plate very carefully and with much pride. After all, how else could they justify £20 for a pie in Bolton?

Other than sampling the culinary delights of the North West, delegates from a diverse range of institutions (e.g. HEA Subject Centres, JISC RSCs, FECs, HEIs and a LLN) discussed student expectations, experiences and encounters with higher education, challenges and priorities for the HE sector in using technology by:

• considering the effectiveness of resources which have been developed to support the student learning experience,
• considering how to improve access to and take up of resources for a range of stakeholders,
  identify additional developments/support that may be required to support the student ‘life cycle’,
• exploring how organisations might collaborate further to enhance support for the HE student learning experience.

PWL 2 - The story so far

Spent today finalising the programme for the next HEA HE in FE conference at Scarman House on May 13th - "Playing with Learning 2: Making the Connection".
This year's doubtless fantastic conference will involve Alan Mortiboys (from Birmingham), Colin Beard (from SHU), Kirsten Hardie (from Bournemouth) and a courtroom theme "you, the lecturer, stand accused of failing to engage your learners etc..." (or something like that anyway).
It will also have 4 workshops, a man wearing a papier-mâché head, another graphically-facillitated large painting (might need another house with an extra room for it to go in) and more freebies.
The local JISC RSC are providing voting tablets (delegates=jurors) and technical support for the day, but insisted on some social networking angle so we don't have to pay. Unfortunately, this got translated into a reason for incorporating Second Life so I now need to find someone to facillitate the attendance of assorted daleks, falcons, teddy bears & talking vending machines at my flagship production...

HE in FE Think Tank - Norwich

I was asked last month to help convene a ‘think-tank’ to seek the views of those with recognised expertise in the field of HE in FE on how best to support HE in FE practitioners in their use of technology to enhance learning, teaching and assessment as part of a collaboration between the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the Higher Education Academy.

It was held at City College Norwich using HE in FE Research Centre as host venue & local RSC invited some college practitioners with the aims:

1. to consider the effectiveness of resources which have been developed to support academic staff in their use of technology to enhance learning, teaching and assessment, by the two organisations (including the Academy Subject Centre Network, JISC Services and Regional Support Centres)


2. to consider how to improve access to and take up of resources,


3. to identify additional developments/support that may be required by HE in FE practitioners


4. to explore how the two organisations might collaborate further to enhance the provision of HE in FE.

11 of us, including representatives from SURF, Netskills, CETIS assembled for dinner the night before, and 18 of us met in CCN's bespoke Business Development Centre for 8 hours to present on, and debate/discuss the aims above.

The HEA will be publishing the outcomes of the day as part of their collaboration project with JISC early next month.