Picking up speed towards the finish line

The pace of our project is speeding up as we engage with a crop of dissemination opportunities both on the Compass project and more generally in the cluster.

Next Thursday, 15 May, the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit is hosting an eLearning Day for LSBU academics - the first in a series of events planned to keep academics at the university abreast of the initial findings from the project. Another major day will take place in September with the specific intention of exploring how what we have learned in the Pathfinder process might be adapted and applied throughout the university.

As our official clustering period draws to a close, the four teams have had three acceptances to present the Cluster C's work from major conferences. Maria Papaefthimiou from Reading represented the cluster at the Networked Learning Conference 2008 in Halkidiki, Greece, earlier this week on 5-6 May 2008. The Cluster's poster was entitled: Developing an Evidence Base for Engagement and Impact in Higher Education Institutional e-Learning Projects.

Representatives from all the institutions will be attending EdMedia 2008 (30 June-4 July) and ALT-C (9-11 September). At EdMedia, we are presenting a symposium - Variations on Themes: Four Universities Explore Strategies that Generate Evidence-Informed Embedding of E-learning in Their Local Context - in a format that sees each team address one theme that has emerged from the joint projects. After these short papers, Prof Gráinne Conole, our "critical friend", will chair a session in which questions are fielded from the audience and answered by the presenters.

At ALT-C, we are engaging conference-goers in an interactive poster workshop: Strategies for adopting an evidence-based approach to embedding e-learning. Each team will produce a poster depicting the journey of their Pathfinder project and workshop participants will be asked to view the posters and interrogate their content using PostIt notes (which will be stuck onto the poster). Then the attendees will be asked to select the poster that most interested them and return to the poster for an indepth group conversation with the representatives from the team who produced it.

At the last cluster meeting on 23 April, we decided on the briefing papers that we wished to produce as a cluster, and as individual institutions. So there is plenty to keep us busy!