PERSONALISED LEARNING - ACADEMIC GUIDANCE
I agree that our administration tasks have increasingly become very difficult to keep up, especially at the beginning of the year, during the enrolment stage; HOWEVER; I know that the time I have put into ensuring that students enrolled in courses have the pre-requisite when needed, received the assurance from their schools that they are able to work independantly has paid off because the individual has been looked at before the enrolment has been accepted.
When I was the senior academic dean, responsible for students placement in courses, considerable time was spent at the beginning of the year to review their previous year's achievements and goals set and courses chosen to meet those needs. Almost no one was turned away from a F2F course, but some conditions may have been put in place and negotiation between the teacher and student.
If we are allowing students to self enrol, then where does the academic guidance needed to ensure they are making informed choices being made? I think there needs to be an initial approval given, then the student could enrol, as would easily be able to happen with the scholarship mentoring; but even then those students need to be vetted first.
I also worry about student self enrolment and, down the line, it could lead to students in courses they should not be. I think they should be able to sit down with the eDean at their school, review where they are at with their academic progress and what they are looking at career wise and then view the courses that might be useful to them. It would be really good for the eDean to do the actual enrolment and then an email comes to the ePrincipal with details. Then instead of the ePs doing all the enrolment, the eP would work with the eDeans and support them.
It would be really useful if we could get teachers to have a downloadable course outline that would be available on enrolment. This could also contain all the contact info for the student. What would be perfect is if we could somehow work an MOU into this process!!
I would like more detail about directory synchronisation. Certainly a SSO will come eventually but I am not sure that schools are necessarily ready for that at the moment - if you are planning for the NEN future than it will not be an issue.
With regard to email address, that is one of the reasons I have enabled GApps for the cluster. I think this would be less of an issue if the sign on page had fields that were compulsory, ie including email address!
I very much endorse what Carolyn has said.Students need to be having guidance and schools need to know exactly who is delivereing the courses etc as it may end up that 3 different students enrol in different courses and we need to look at both internal timetables and Vc timetables to ensure ALL students can receive courses. I know Ken goes to considerable trouble to juggle our otagonet timetable to ensure delivery sites and receiving sites can work and through negiotiation with schools can often get courses to work for students that wouldn't show up if a student self enrolled it would just show as not available.Students need guidance regarding level of course and course requirements. As a dean I would certainly not want to see self enrolment. Perhaps the school Deans should be doing the enrolments in conjunction with the e Principal so that the above isssues can be addressed but the workload is decreased for eP's.Also many students would not have all the information they would need for self enrolment e.g. schools codes etc. The single sign on would be good. Would this include the Tertiary providers? How will school emails be linked to the vln email? I like the idea of the students having their portal but perhaps we need to look at what schools are doing and link the Vln in with these.
Thanks for your comments here. I too have doubts about self-enrollment for all courses. However, there might be some circumstances where it is appropriate (e.g. a revision or support course perhaps) so we need to design our systems to enable this. Just because it might be possible to self-enroll does not mean that it has to be enabled for all or any course.
Directory sync (or something that behaves as though the directories are synced) is a long term plan, but we need to design for the future when we work now.
Hi Trevor I agree that we need to plan not only for what we need now but what we may need in the future. I think the investigation into SSO is not really about self enrolment but all the other rationale you note in your table & scenario.
How does this fit in with the work the MOE is already doing for sign on to TKI, Digistore etc They are already trialling this? Shouldn't what you describe around the VLN services also be aligned with this?
