The Interim Programme Meeting began with information on project documentation (we must submit our Interim Report by 21 February) and useful updates on accessibility and evaluation & synthesis – I will look at the document on “outputs” before writing the interim report. Materials from these sessions will be available soon.

In the afternoon, the OMAC strand projects had their own session. It was interesting to hear updates from the other projects – and good to know we are all feeling the pressure of a one-year project timeline.

In the OMAC session, we discussed the question of “community”,  how an OER community in the area of HE learning and teaching can be developed and maintained, whether we have a sense that such a community exists.  Interacting with one another’s blogs was one strategy suggested.

It was nice to make contact again with Richard, from Open for Business.  We hope to meet up again to talk about common issues.  This meeting was also the start of a week’s close collaboration with DELILA. We are paired together for evaluation and we share a critical friend.  The train journey to and from Birmingham gave me a chance to talk through a number of issues with DELILA project director, Jane Secker.

Very useful feedback on our resources from the steering group and our critical friend, Sandra Griffiths, at this week’s meeting.
We talked about the need to provide guidance materials for different groups of users, for example individual learners, educational developers, course leaders. We had been wondering how to make PowerPoint presentations as useful as possible; for individual learners, presentation as a text document (as in our Values in Higher Education materials) was preferred. Jannie Roed (Thames Valley University) and Anna Douglas (City & Islington College) were both looking for resources on e-learning and may be able to give us feedback on the “Learning, Teaching and Technologies” unit.
We also talked about dissemination, and how to increase the impact of the project. We will follow up Henry Potts’s suggestion of putting pdf documents in UCL ePrints, since this is searched by Google Scholar.

CPD4HE starts tweeting now as we are gearing up for the first release! Follow us on Twitter and be the first to hear news from the CPD4HE project!

It’s been quiet for a while over the Christmas but we are very busy at the moment preparing for the release of the materials from the two units. June, our IPR and licensing adviser, had a meeting with Holly and Ros in December to give advice on IPR and licensing issues. There were lots of discussions and debates on which creative commons license our project should use.

Ros and I also tried recording voice over slides for the PowerPoint presentation on Assessment and Feedback. We have figured out the optimum settings to achieve good sound quality. Lots of materials have been uploaded to the team area of the project web site and we are in the process of releasing some of these very soon. So watch this space!