Qualifications Scotland

We're working on a new website. You'll see references to both Qualifications Scotland and SQA while we complete this work. Learn more.
Categories

Stay up to date with Computing and Digital Blogs

Read our privacy statement.

Computing & Digital Blog

December 6, 2013

Scottish Colleges Computing Consortium

I was invited to attend a meeting of the Scottish Colleges Computing Consortium (SC3) this morning, which was held at the City of Glasgow College. The group is convened by Cameron Walker of Aberdeen College. I was invited to speak about two things: the new way of accrediting vendor awards within HN qualifications, and the new HND Computer Science. There was unanimity about the value of vendor awards within vocational Computing qualifications but some debate about how best to do…

Categories: Computing

Bobby 0

December 3, 2013

Bridging the Skills Gap

I attended an event on Friday, organised by Iain Shand of Glasgow Clyde College, about the current skills gap and how best to prepare students to fill the gap. The event was held at the Microsoft offices in Edinbugh, and was well attended with 18 colleges represented. The keynote was given by Polly Purvis, of Scotland IS, who set the tone for the day. Polly pointed out that 45,000 new IT jobs will be created in Scotland in the next…

Categories: Computing

Bobby 0

November 22, 2013

CUSP meeting

I’ve mentioned the CUSP group before. There was another meeting last Friday (I’ve been meaning to post a message since then) that I attended. The meeting was held at Caledonian University. The prime goal of the group is to promote and ease articulation from college to university so members were very interested in the alternative assessments that I am developing for the new HN awards. I gave a presentation on this topic, which seemed to be well received. The new…

Categories: Computing

Bobby 0

November 11, 2013

PC Passport and NC Digital Media Computing validation events

The dates for the validation events for NC Digital Media Computing and PC Passport have now been set. The PC Passport validation event will take place on Thursday, 23 January and the NC validation event will take place on Thursday, 30 January. I’ve posted several updates about these developments during the last few months. The purpose of the validation event is for fresh pairs of eyes to look over the proposals. It’s a meeting of peers in that the panel…

Categories: Computing

Bobby 0

November 11, 2013

Verification Group meeting

I went along to Saturday’s annual update meeting for External Verifiers. The Computing group is led by David Drennan, who is the Senior External Verifier. It was a busy agenda, covering the new Quality Assurance Management Systems (QAMS), CPD, and David’s annual report on centre performance. I traditionally give a qualification update at the meeting to let EVs know about what’s been done and what’s coming. This year’s presentation (by both me and Caroline) included the new HND awards, the…

Categories: Computing

Bobby 0