Last week I attended the validation event for the centre led proposal for a National Certificate in Computer Games Development at SCQF level 5. Fiona Jackson from Forth Valley College was the lead developer and the design team included representatives from other colleges including Aberdeen, Adam Smith, Kilmarnock, Motherwell and Stevenson. The Award has a number of new Units which have been designed to develop creativity in candidates, and will also hopefully increase the candidate base by attracting more females…
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I attended a JISC event today, in the National eScience Centre in Edinburgh, entitled Open for Education. The event had a number of speakers and workshops around how education can use open source software. I throughly enjoyed the event. I was particularly impressed with the Google Docs and Facebook talks. Colin Maxwell, of Carnegie College, gave a very persuasive talk on how colleges can use Facebook as an alternative to the traditional VLE, pointing out how difficult it can be…
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I attended a validation event yesterday, at the City of Glasgow College, to serve on the validation panel as the SQA representative. The college had devised a new National Certificate award, at SCQF Levels 5 and 6, which relates to the more technical aspects of the subject, entitled National Certificate Computing: Technical Support. It was designed to articulate to the more technical HN awards, such as HNC/D Computer Networking. The purpose of a validation event is for a group of…
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I previously mentioned a joint college/university partnership designed to improve the student experience when they move from college to university. The College University Subject Partnership (CUSP) aims to improve the “soft skills” that college students need when they go to university. The project is led by Anne Russell. There have been several meetings. I attended the latest meeting this morning, held at Caledonian University. The focus of this meeting was the current review of HN Computing qualifications. I gave members…
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The Assessment Support Packs (ASPs) for the National Progression Awards in Computer Games Development at SCQF levels 4, 5 and 6 are now published and available to download from the level 4 page on SQA secure site. The ASPs integrate the three levels in one pack and cover each strand ie one pack for Design, one for Media Assets and one for Development. Any checklists in the pdf versions are also available as separate word files for assessors to use.
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SQA hosted a group of Palestinian educationalists this morning, as part of their study visit to Scotland. I gave a presentation on qualification development to the group. Palestinian study visit View more presentations from bobbyelliott. The purpose of my talk was to explain how SQA goes about developing, reviewing and maintaining qualifications. Giving it, reminded me of the strengths of the Scottish system — particularly the collaborative way that we work with teachers and lecturers. But there are also challenges…
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Through our Curriculum for Excellence Teams, the draft Course Specifications for National 4 and National 5 have now been published on the SQA website (draft course specifications for Computing & Information Science can be found under the ‘Technologies’ heading). The Course Specifications highlight the mandatory high-level skills and knowledge to be covered in the Course and outline the subject skills, knowledge and understanding that a learner will cover and which will be assessed at the end of the Course. They have also published the…
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I learnt today of a new SQA service, which permits you to comment on SQA qualifications. The online form permits you to comment on qualifications and/or support materials (including assessments). If the comment relates to qualification development or maintenance, I would ensure that it is considered by the appropriate Qualification Support Team. So please take the time to provide feedback. I’ve added the link to the list of “Useful links” in the side-bar.
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As I posted earlier, Jiglu closes tomorrow. We are moving the online groups to a new service provider — hosted by GroupSpaces. If you are currently a member of one of the Jiglu groups, you should have received an invitation to join one of the new groups. If not, please join the generic support group here, and we will take care of you. In fact, everyone should join this group since it is the main support group for all vocational…
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As you are aware, we are currently consulting on the five group awards which are part of the HN Review (HNC Computing, HND Computing, HND Computing: Software Development, HND Computing: Technical Support and HND Computing: Networking). If you have not yet had a chance to complete the online consultation survey, it can be accessed here. Once all frameworks have been finalised we will be in a position to identify new units to be developed and also those requiring revision. Given the high number…
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