Student Engagement System Business Action Group 9 Feb 2012

Last week I attended the Student Engagement System Business Action Group.

The student engagement system is a piece of software that monitors individual student’s engagement with the University.

It does this by collating information from a number of sources as follows.

1. Records of assessments received and those that may be overdue.
2. SiD activity
3. Logins to Blackboard
4. Logins to e:vision
5. Novell logins
6. Library – taking out of books.
7. Swipe / auto-readers in lecture rooms

The system has just been updated and we now want to encourage all students to swipe when they encounter a reader. Could all course leaders please make sure that their students are aware of the importance carrying their cards and of swiping as standard.

We currently have two types of reader, first the standard swipe reader, but also a small number of auto-readers where students do not need to swipe, the reader picks up on the chip in their cards, so they only have to be near enough for it to trigger.

The Polhill readers are as follows.

P0.32 – auto reader
P0.33 – auto reader (thus the students do not now need to swipe when using these rooms – the swipe readers are redundant)
D1.01 (theatre) - swipe reader
P0.50 – swipe reader
P1.01 – auto reader
P2.04 – swipe reader

The Business Action Group would like to receive any suggestions for other locations that would improve the chance of recording a student’s presence on campus. Currently, if students do not enter any of these locations they will not be recorded. Suggestion can be passed directly to me.

The card readers are not attendance monitors and so it is also important that normal attendance records are also kept.

The software calculates an overall engagement factor. It would be helpful to have any opinions from course leaders on how this data might be used. Again, please contact me by email with suggestions that I could pass onto the group.

Phil Wright 13th February 2012.

JISC SIMSE Project Meeting

The JISC SIMSE project meeting took place on 25 January 2012. After updating on new development in university wide IS projects in general and the student engagement system and JISC BI project in particular, the potential application of relevant JISC resources in the strategic use of SES in the university is discussed. As a result, two main JISC resources, Enterprise Architecture and IT governance, are considered to be the most pertinent.  It was also agreed that a systems thinking approach -“The Critical System Heuristics (CSH)” will be used to operationalise Enterprise Architecture and IT governance for the SIMSE project.

Project meeting at Bedford Campus 3pm on 3 Feb

Another SIMSE meeting was held at 3pm today in Bedford Campus. Team members discussed the questionnaires to be used for SES (Student Engagement System) Business Action Group (BAG) meeting.

The purpose of the Business Action Group is to determine how the Student Engagement System (SES) can be best used to support the student experience. The group will ensure that a consistent approach is taken so that duplication is avoided and produce the necessary support documentation including:

• Triaster process maps
• Training requirement specification
• User documentation
• Communication plan - user instruction, advertisements and posters
• Equipment monitoring specification

The group will also input into the feasibility of expanding the current placement of attendance equipment and web based analysis software to interrogate the attendance monitor unit data.

BAG membership consists of the representatives of the key SES stakeholder including Registry, ISD, faculty managers, faculty administrators, UKBA compliance offer, Academic staff, International office, etc.

Based on the Critical Systems Heuristics (CSH) framework and JISC EA guidelines, the questionnaire asks respondents to reflect their thoughts on the “as is” (current) state and the “to be” state of SES in the following four basic boundary issues: source of motivation, decision making and governance, source of knowledge and guarantee, and source of legitimacy. To each basic boundary issue, three categories are assigned: stakeholder, concerns and difficulty.

This is an exploratory exercise aiming to examine stakeholders’ understanding of SES and their sense of directions.