Members of the Pineapple team have just attended an APEL tea party organised by the Faculty of Health at the University of Plymouth. 

As well as enjoying some great homemade cake,  Rob, Sophie, Harriet and Mark found the event extremely useful. Firstly, it was important to learn more about the APEL processes employed by Health.  Secondly, it was a rare opportunity to hear about the way that other faculties operate in relation to APEL and the different barriers that need addressing.  Fantastic stuff!

Development has been continuing this month. Still focusing on the administrative side of it. I’m basically designing the system to be able to design a branched step processes in order to accomodate the APEL process we have designed but also to allow modification and support for multiple processes.

The way it works is each step has a title, content and a number of links or options. In addition to this tasks can be added.

Within a task people can be set roles, e.g. Tutor interviews student. Student completes form, etc. In addition to this resources can be added to the step such as a document, web link, etc. I’m hoping this will cover everything we need for PINEAPPLE whilst allowing additional flexibility if others want to use the system.

I aim to start focusing on the front end of the system once I am able to fully input and manage a process. I estimate this will be around the end of March but possibly sooner.

Completed Developments this month

• Admin – Add, Delete, make admin (Users)
• Process Manager – Create, edit processes
• Process Designer – early development started. Interface and basic functionality
• Improved CSS menu system
• General Database design improvements

Attended a JISC Lifelong Learning and Workforce Development Programme meeting last week. It was a good opportunity to talk to people from other projects and find out what they are doing and it turns out that there is a lot of common ground when it comes to tackling APEL issues. I made some interesting contacts that I hope to follow up.

I’ve been keeping a log of development progress so far on the system. Been concentrating on backend administration so far whilst we finalise the APEL process aspect of the system. Much of this functionality is in basic stages and will be refined in time. Got a bit more work on this backend basic setup side of things before moving onto APEL applications and process side of project. Aim is to add in AJAX and javascript functionality down the line to improve usability and error checking.

• Basic site structure HTML and CSS
• Basic setup system script (to create admin)
• Register user
• Login / Logout
• User profile page (edit/update)
• User list of contacts (within college / upc)
• databases structure setup
• input error checking

Admin Area

• Edit User information
• Manage roles within system (e.g. advisor, tutor, administrator, student) (Add/edit/delete)
• Manage Areas (Institutions) within system (Add/edit/delete)
• Manage Locations (Campus’ or sites) within system (Add/edit/delete)

The PINEAPPLE team are pleased to announce our second newsletter covering our progress up to February 2010. It can be viewed here.

Pineapple Newsletter # 2 - Screenshot