Online services provide a great way to communicate and collaborate with people, and I’ve recently been working on ways SQA can use web services when we develop new qualifications. I came up with this diagram. It shows how services such as blogs, wikis, online storage and e-groups can be used during the qualification development process. I’ll resist calling it “Qualifications Development 2.0”! I hope to use this approach when we develop the revised HN awards in Computing and Networking. If…
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The details for this year’s Scottish Learning Festival were recently published and the programme includes a seminar dedicated to the new NPAs in Computer Games Development. The lead developer (Julie McLaren of Madras College) will be leading the event. I hope you chose to come along and find out more about these new awards. You can sign-up for Julie’s seminar here. In the meantime, contact Hilary if you want to know more about these new awards.
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I met with David McDade, of Stow College, this afternoon to discuss a proposal for a new HN award. SQA’s procedures permit centres to come forward with ideas for new awards – and I thought Stow’s idea was a good one. The process is very simple. Basically, the centre notifies SQA about the idea, fills in a form, and then gets on with developing the award. Most centres have devolved responsibility for validating SQA awards, although SQA has to validate…
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I updated the team organisation chart today. Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io Please download and print this document and use it when contacting SQA.
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SQA has had formal links with Oracle for several years. Oracle has recently updated their Certified Associate curriculum (from 10G to 11G) and requested that we update the links to reflect this change. Our links with Oracle involve college and school programmes. I met with Willie McCabe (of James Watt College) and Wendy Reith (of Royal High School) this afternoon to discuss how we should deal with the changes. On the college side, we agreed to update the PDA in Database Programming (at…
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I recently mentioned that the units within the new NPAs in Computer Games had been finalised but I didn’t mention that these units would also be included in the NC Digital Media Computing frameworks. I have still to think through exactly what will go where, but it is (highly) likely that the units (and the associated NPAs) will be put inside the appropriate NC awards. For example, the NC award at Level 4 will include the NPA Computer Games Development…
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We recently developed three new NPAs relating to computer games, entitled NPA in Computer Games Development at SCQF 4, 5 and 6. I spent most of Friday doing final checks on the units that make up these awards. The original proposal was a single award (at Level 4) composed of existing units but, after consultation, this changed significantly – to three awards consisting of entirely new units. So what was originally a small development became quite a large project. But…
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I attended the launch of Getting British Business Online (GBBO) on Tuesday evening, which was held at the Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh. This initiative aims to get 100,000 new businesses online by the end of this year and is supported by Google, BT, and E-Skills among others. It’s a really attractive initiative since it provides small businesses with a free website (with a personalised domain name), including online payment facilities. Around 250 people attended the event. Mostly small (one or…
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After the recent meeting at Central College, I said that I would convene a meeting of interested people to take forward the links between SQA units and Cisco’s CCNA curriculum. That meeting took place this morning. Eight representatives of colleges attended, including Anniesland, Central, Adam Smith, Cardonald, Angus and Stow colleges. It was a productive meeting. We agreed to write four new units, with the same titles as the existing units, to reflect the changes to the Cisco course. We’re…
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At the recent HN consultation meeting, I said that the next stage in the process would be to form a Qualification Design Team (QDT). We’ve already had several volunteers but please contact Caroline if you want to be considered for membership of this team. We’ll ask you to complete a short form and, on the basis of this, will make a decision about membership using defined criteria. I hope to convene the initial meeting of the QDT in the near…
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