An APEL seminar held last week at the University of Plymouth provided another ideal opportunity for us to learn more about practice across the partnership. Neil Witt’s presentation about the Pineapple Project triggered a lot of questions about how the Pineapple tool will be used by staff. New and useful contacts were also made - we will be calling upon you to help us collate case studies and pilot the tool!
Thanks to everyone who helped make the afternoon a success.
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
The Pineapple Project will be supporting an APEL seminar organised to take place on 4th March at the University of Plymouth. This event, part of the HELP CETL and University of Plymouth Colleges (UPC) seminar series, will be exploring APEL for HE in FE. If you would like more information about this or would like to book a place, please contact help-cetl@plymouth.ac.uk.
Despite the snow and ice we are working hard on the pineapple model, documentation and organising and attending APEL related events. We are also in the process of writing the latest newsletter which will be published here by the end of January.
Great news! We have achieved a 50% response rate for the Pineapple Project online survey.
Thank you to all those UPC HE in FE Programme Managers that responded. We can now use this information to help develop the Pineapple tool. We can also present some of the findings next week when we host an event for UPC staff.
Following an extensive piloting phase, the Pineapple survey has just been sent out to 169 HE in FE programme managers across the UPC network. The survey will provide us with information about general awareness of APEL among staff and any support they require. Looking forward to seeing the results. Our target - 100% response rate!
We’re looking forward to visiting the University of Bradford on 8th October to take part in an assembly on APEL. This will give us the opportunity to share ideas with other JISC projects about APEL issues. All we need is to get the presentation ready!
The pilot survey has now been sent out to a sample of people from different colleges. This time next week we should have all the feedback and will be able to start making any necessary changes. The final version will be ready to send out to all HE in FE programme managers in a few weeks time.
Went to a CETIS run XCRI introductory meeting yesterday. Interesting to hear from those who are already working in this area. I can see that, if widely adopted, in the future XCRI could help to make APL less of a problem as it would be easy to find out about course content even where there was no exam.
