The HNC & HND Computer Games Development awards are validated and available to centres. The Arrangements Document is available from the SQA website and can be downloaded here. The Group Award codes are: G9NX 15 HNC Computer Games DevelopmentG9NY 16 HND Computer Games Development The Unit Specifications are available for download from the HN Unit Search facility on the SQA website. We plan to produce Assessment Exemplars for a number of the new Units within the award – the writing…
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As part of the review of HNC/D Accounting, HNC/D Business and HNC/D Administration & IT, the Qualification Team responsible for these areas have recently revised and updated a number of HN Units as part of these developments. The new Units will become live on 1st August 2010, however the new Unit specifications are currently available on SQA website. To ensure that the ‘old’ Units are available for the 4 year runout period of the above HN Group Awards, the lapse…
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I updated the diagram that shows the vocational qualifications in Computing that are available to centres. Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io Save File: Computing Vocational Awards.doc You can download it here. The HNC/D Computer Games is now validated and I have added the new NPAs in Computer Games Development (although these are not available to centres yet). But the main change is that I have added SVQs. These are important qualifications that were missing from earlier versions of this…
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I came back to some good news today — the HNC/D Computer Games Development award is now validated! The validation event took place recently so it was great to get the conditions lifted so quickly. Many thanks the Nigel and the other members of the development team. The Arrangements will be online by the middle of this month. Most of the units in the award are available on the SQA website now (the missing ones are coming soon!). Contact Caroline…
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The Sector Panel for Computing & IT is one of two surviving panels from the days (around 10 years ago) when every subject area had one. The purpose of these bodies is to advise SQA about what’s happening in the respective sectors and the membership reflects the external stakeholders who SQA deals with, such as colleges, universities, employers and Sector Skills Councils. The Computing Panel meets twice per year and met today for its first meeting of 2010. It’s a…
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I met with Iain Shand of Cardonald College this afternoon to discuss his new role as the ITPCS Manager. Cardonald is the lead centre for the Microsoft IT Academy programme and Iain supports 15 centres across Scotland. Microsoft is one of several vendors whose curriculum we try to incorporate inside of SQA awards. There are presently three PDAs linked to Microsoft certification. We recently commissioned Deryck Nutley to develop a number of new HN units to map onto Microsoft’s new…
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The validation event for the new HNC/D Computer Games Development was held on Friday. The purpose of a validation event is for a group of peers, who have not been involved in the development of the qualification, to comment on the proposed award. So it’s a nerve-racking day for the development team since the panel can ask for major changes if it doesn’t like what is being proposed. Nigel Kennington, of Edinburgh Telford College, led the development team and Ron…
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Ideascale is a Web 2.0 service designed to get ideas about how organisations can improve. I’ve set up one for vocational Computing qualifications so let us know if you have any ideas about how we can improve.
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I attended one of the quarterly meetings in London today when all of the qualification organisations involved in delivering qualifications linked to the Sector Skills Council (E-Skills) meet to discuss issues relating to those qualifications. E-Skills used to be only responsible for NVQs and SVQs but over the years has got involved in a large number of IT initiatives. So today’s meeting covered a wide range of issues. SQA’s main involvement with E-Skills is through SVQs but we also work…
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I attended the Child Internet Safety conference today, organised by Holyrood Events. The theme of the conference was online child protection and representatives of various child protection and education agencies were present. The keynote speaker was the Minister for Children and Early Years, who opened the event with a talk about the Scottish Government’s views on child protection. His message was clear: the Internet is a vital part of contemporary culture and will not go away but we need to…
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