Winter's discontent made glorious

I have now been working on the ESCAPE project full time for nearly two weeks. And what a two weeks! Hertfordshire has seen the worst snow in many years with the result that the univesrsity effectively closed for three days last week. In spite of this we have managed to have extremely fruitful meetings with senior colleagues and stakeholders in the School of Life Sciences and the Business School. In the School of Life Sciences We have had meetings with Peter Stanbury, Associate Head of Department and Areles Molleman one of the LTI teachers who has a unique cross school perspective - they are both extremely supportive of the project and we are really looking forward to working with them. There are some changes to the mix of modules we are going to be looking at with one module being swapped as it is not running again for a similar one that has exhibited that has some novel and interesting assessment practices. Excitingly such is the enthusiasm for the project within the school - we have been approached to see if we can also include fifth module in from a master degree programme run by a keen supporter of the project, who has been involved in some novel work on assessment. This is I hope an indication of the building momentum that the project is generating.The ground work has been laid for the next stage of the project which is engaging with the module leaders in the school to look at a baseline audit of the assessment practice in their modules.

We have also been busy with colleges from the Business School - we have had meetings with Professor Mick Broadbent Head of Department, Karen Robins Associate Head of Department and Jan Filosof the programme manager of the programme we are looking at. We are in the process of narrowing down the choice of modules that we will be looking at through speaking to the module leaders, looking at the historical statistical data, AMERs and programmereview documentation etc.. We want suitable modules which would lend any developments to portability and sustainability within the school. There are a number of possibilities at the moment.

We submitted our draft project plan to JISC on Monday, with a deadline of the end of the month for the final version. The work package timelines have changed from the original bid document in that we have moved the time that we engage with the Business School forward so that we are working with the schools in tandem. This will mean that synergies can be encouraged and developed between the module teams and managers in the two schools schools. In addition the workpackages have been deconstructed slightly to enable more transparency in the plan.