myWORLD Continuation Inception Meeting

The start-up meeting of the myWORLD continuation project took place today: 1200 - 1500 at Oxford Brookes University. Attending: Ellen Lessner (Abingdon and Witney College), Joe Rosa (Blackbird Leys IT Zone), Neil Smith (Knowledge Integration), Chris Foss (Plumpton College), Adja Cici (Oxford Brookes, Project Administrator), and me, George Roberts (Project Manager)

We determined that:

• If at all possible we will run with applications based on OSP 2.1.x: "Running with the same software is not an option" (AWC); "Users found the software unreliable and uninspiring" (Plumpton). It is important thet the end users not lose confidence in the application. Both AWC and Plumpton only require "a very simple system".
• There is need for more support for case studies from the project manager. It is expected that by running 4 OSP case studies and 1 CV Builder case study this will be possible (in comparison to the 13 case studies that emerged from the myWORLD project.
• In the software's favour
  • it is localisable and, in theory skinnable
  • there is an underlying pedagogical model that can be elaborated
  • OSP is the "devil we know". There should be less of a learning curve than there would be if we were to adopt another system.
  • JISC is specifically funding an exploration of OSP, not e-portfolios in general. We need to give OSP a really honest crack.
• We are elaborating a third-party hosted, ASP model based on OSP for the smaller institution that might not want to install and host its own e-portfolio system. One fundamental question we will attempt to answer is, is OSP an application suitable for deployment in this mode?
• We must try to separate the trials from the development to the extent possible.
• To determine initial requirements we need a "sandbox" environment as soon as possible
• We need the final Evaluation Report
• K-Int will, initially host 4 applications:
  1. Abingdon & Witney College
  2. Plumpton College
  3. Oxford Brookes CPD
  4. demo/sandbox
• K-Int may need to selectively "turn off" Petal 1.5 applications to reduce the load on the machine.
• Neither Ellen nor Chris require data to be "imported" from the earlier Petal 1.5 application environment
• K-Int will let us know asap:
  1. when can a test environment be ready
  2. when could individual test systems be ready for AWC, Plumpton, Brookes
• The schedule:
  • AWC needs a working system for September intake (Ellen, what is the "launch day"?)
  • Plumpton needs a working system by 2nd week of October (Chris, when your schedule is out let us know the start day)
  • Brookes can be flexible with the introduction of a system to a small cohort of academic users but this should be in October.
• I propose to participate in the design/development of all case study applications and to give at least three tutorial sessions for each case study (beginning, middle, end) by arrangement.
• ALT will continue to host its system based on OSP 1.5.
• It is intended that ALT host AWC's system. However, given the novelty of the OSP2.1.x software, it is not felt to be a good idea to implement this until some experience is gained on the project's server at K-Int.
• Seb and I will need to discuss,separately, ALT's migration to OSP 2.1.x
• BLITZ requests a meeting with the Open University to discuss their Moodle/e-Portfolio developments. I will try to set this up.
• "CV to Go / PLE on a Stick" and CV builder will be implemented at BB Leys in October. I will go to BLITZ on 10 July to start this work.