{"id":1675,"date":"2015-12-18T16:24:00","date_gmt":"2015-12-18T16:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.qualifications.gov.scot\/computing\/?p=1675"},"modified":"2015-12-18T16:24:00","modified_gmt":"2015-12-18T16:24:00","slug":"review-of-the-year-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.qualifications.gov.scot\/computing\/review-of-the-year-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Review of the year"},"content":{"rendered":"

This seems a good time to look back over 2015. The most significant event (for me) was losing Caroline<\/a>, who had worked with me for a long time. My loss is SOLAR’s gain. On a happier note, Caroline’s vacant position was filled by Helen<\/a>, who had been working with me on a temporary basis.<\/p>\n

From a qualification perspective, the big development was the NPAs in Cyber Security<\/a>, which went live at the end of July<\/a>, followed by the new Award in Cyber Security Fundamentals<\/a>. These developments were European (and, possibly, world) firsts and there has been a huge amount of interest in these new qualifications. Almost 100 teachers attended the launch event in early October<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There were other significant developments. Digital Passport came out of pilot and went live in early August<\/a> and this qualification has also received a lot of interest from centres. The validation of PC Passport took place in November<\/a>. The new version of this award has many advantages over the current version, including compatibility with Microsoft Office Specialist. The launch event for both of these awards took place on 1 December<\/a>. The new NPA in Computer Refurbishment went live in July<\/a>.\u00a0The refreshed NPA Digital Literacy went live earlier this month<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Not all the action was in the non-advanced area. We developed a number of new HN Units including ones in Big Data and Data Science<\/a>, and one in Digital Skills<\/a>. The reviews of HNC\/D IT, HNC\/D Interactive Media and HNC\/D Computer Games Development are on-going. We recently validated a new suite of PDAs relating to Software Development<\/a> that, I hope, will be popular in the coming years. And, finally, we commenced the development of two new HNCs<\/a>: HNC Computer Science and HNC Data Analytics.<\/p>\n

I got a new Senior External Verifier in March<\/a>, We started to use Yammer in April<\/a>.\u00a0A significant innovation this year was the introduction of FAQs<\/a> for new qualifications. These appear to be popular with centres.<\/p>\n

The team changes meant that the team was (and remains) short handed and that brought particular workload issues. It will be a priority, when I return after the holiday, to get back up to full strength. But, in spite of that, it’s been an exciting year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This seems a good time to look back over 2015. The most significant event (for me) was losing Caroline, who had worked with me for a long time. My loss is SOLAR’s gain. On a happier note, Caroline’s vacant position was filled by Helen, who had been working with me on a temporary basis. From a qualification perspective, the big development was the NPAs in Cyber Security, which went live at the end of July, followed by the new Award…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qualifications.gov.scot\/computing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1675"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qualifications.gov.scot\/computing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qualifications.gov.scot\/computing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qualifications.gov.scot\/computing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qualifications.gov.scot\/computing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1675"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qualifications.gov.scot\/computing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1675\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1676,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qualifications.gov.scot\/computing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1675\/revisions\/1676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qualifications.gov.scot\/computing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qualifications.gov.scot\/computing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qualifications.gov.scot\/computing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}