The third meeting of the Student Engagement System (SES) Business Action Group (BAG) was held on 3rd October 2012.

Items discussed included:

• Technical update - new software features added - filter tab - requests for changes
• A discussion of the UoB aattendance project - supersedes SES attendance functionality
• Update on attendance equipment installations
• Draft user manual was accepted - now live for all users on the University intranet
• SIMIE project update by Yanqing Duan
• New Engagement Monitors introduced to the meeting
• Now that the SES was in a business as usual phase the chair of the BAG/User Group would pass to the new Senior Engagement Adviser
• End of Project report to be submitted to the next Student Information Systems Programme Board

JISC SIMSE Project Meeting

The JISC SIMSE project meeting took place on 19 June 2012, focused on updating the university wide IS development and deciding the next course of action. The main university IS development includes the appointment of two new deputy IS managers responsible for IS and infrastructure, the planning of the integration of SES and SITS, new BI tools and other devices to be used to better support SES, and new software licence to be purchased to allow more users to access SES. The team decided that the evaluation matrix for appraising the current status of the project and the needed change will be circulated at next BAG meeting for comments.

Yanqing attended the Business Action Group (BAG) for student engagement systems (SES) meeting on 26 April. She provided an update on two JISC projects: Business Intelligence project and transformation project. The revised EA questionnaires were distributed to the meeting participants. Yanqing introduced the six key enablers for strategic use of student engagement systems in the university and drew BAG meeting participants attention to the importance of considering the long term use and impact of SES.

JISC SIMSE Project Meeting

Our monthly JISC SIMSE project meeting took place on 25 April 2012. University wide IS updates included: SES is to be integrated with Personal Tutoring Systems,  SES monitoring equipment will be installed in every teaching facility, and data-warehousing system will extract data from SiTs (student record system), Timetabling, and attendance databases.

Other University IT announcements includes the opening of the University Repository Service to direct submission by staff. Training sessions have been arranged throughout May but direct support will be available for staff if large scale data enty is required.

It was agreed that the terms of reference for the Steering Group is to drafted to clarify the membership, objectives and planned meeting of the Steering Group. It was agreed that the key function of the Steering Group will be to review the SIMSE project progress and implementation against the original objectives of the project application.

We had our first Steering Group (SG) meeting on 30 April. Six people attended the meeting representing key stakeholders of student engagement systems in the university (Senior management.(academic and student experience), planning in registry, ISD). Project Leader introduced the JISC transformational programme and the UoB's transformation project SIMSE. Terms and references were discussed and accepted. The draft SICT implementation plan was discussed and approved. It was agreed that the project should focus on three key strategic ICT enablers: ICT governance, commnucations and engagement, and ICT shared services.

Next SG meeting will be in six month later (Nov/Dec).

Student Attendance Monitoring

I am presuming as a response to the value being attached to the Student Engagement System (SES) data warehouse a new project is to be undertaken to introduce a student attendance data warehouse alongside the SES.  This is at the initial planning phase but quick progress is being made.  The project will be in three phases.  UHF RFID equipment will be installed at University entrance/exists.  This will be of great benefit to the SES as there will then be full coverage of people onsite so that those requiring further support, as they have not been on the premises, can be quickly contacted and any problems can be rapidly resolved.

The second Phase will be to install monitoring stations in all University classrooms and last but by no means will least be a data warehouse project to link the attendance data with the student record system and the timetabling system.  Although, this will be a large scale development it will provide a crucial role in supporting several prominent business imperatives that are in the new draft strategic plan.

Student Engagement System

On Friday 20th April the revised Student Engagement System was presented to the Monthly Head of Department meeting.  There was a live demonstration of the fully functioning system and an explanation of how the system worked, how it was being used and future a related projects.  It was explained that the original concept of the system remained the same as back in 2009 and all the technical issues had been resolved.  The positive influence on the system of the JISC BI project was discussed and it was explained that a second section "Dev Tab" of the system was available to all users and they had been tasked with evaluating enhancements that had come about because of the project.

Concept: A system to automatically identify students who are starting to disengage but not impose any extra administration by using data that is already being stored in University systems and then analysing what has happened in the last few days, while recognising the patterns will vary from course to course