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It’s been a busy week here at GCU Blended Learning Towers. We’ve just finished the onsite part of of the Jisc Effective Analytics Programme. So this week has been a flurry of workshops and interviews led by the consulting team of Andy Ramsden and Steve Bailey. Although Andy and Steve work for Blackboard, the discovery phase is “platform agnostic” and is as much about culture and people as technology. The evaluation rubric used had more about culture and people than technology. Having a team who really understand the UK HE sector was very reassuring. Sadly, it’s not often that you can say that about and HE.
I think GCU is the second institution to go through the discovery process, I know there are quite a few others who will be doing the same over the next six months. The process is pretty straightforward and outlined in the diagram below.
A core team from the institution have a two online meetings with the consulting team, relevant institutional policy/strategy documentation is reviewed before the onsite visit. At the end of the onsite visit an overall recommendation is shared with early findings, before a final report is given to the institution.
I was pleased (probably slightly relieved too) that we got a “ready with recommendations”. That’s what we were hoping for.
Although we are still awaiting the final report, the process has already been incredibly useful. It has allowed us to bring together some of our key stakeholders; (re)start conversations about the potential and importance of learning analytics; the need to develop our infrastructure, people and process to allow us to use our data more effectively. The final report will also be really helpful in terms of helping us focus our next steps.
Andy described the process as a bit like “holding a mirror to ourselves” which is pretty accurate. The process hasn’t brought up issues we weren’t aware of. We know our underlying IT infrastructure needs “sorting”, we starting to do that. What is has done is to illustrate some potential areas to help us focus our next steps. In a sense it has helped us not to see forest from the trees, but rather show some twinkling lights and pathways through the forest.