The joint events hosted by the Moving Forward and Real WoRLD initiatives were both a great success and well supported. The event was opened by the Principal and the new PVC for Learning Innovation, Professor Sue Scott.  More than 80 members of staff, students and College Partnership representatives participated. 

 Ruth introduced Moving Forward.  Karla presented and discussed that the purpose of the Moving Forward event was to officially launch/introduce the GCU Transition and Progression Framework and to establish our mini communities of practice (mini-CoPs).  These mini-CoPs are based on the project streams which were clearly identified at the Service Design event in May 2008.  The following CoPs have now been set up and an email will be issued to our wider Community of Practice shortly inviting them to join/participate in group(s) of their choice.

The aim of these groups is to work throughout the duration of the Moving Forward initiative to enable cross-institutional sharing of practice, approaches, issues and support development of new approaches (following the distributive leadership model). Anyone is welcome to join and to participate in the cross-university discussions on these topics.  If you would like to join a group, please contact movingforward@gcal.ac.uk or any member of the project team.  The Moving Forward team will assist with the initial set up and co-ordination of the mini-CoPs. 

Members of staff and the student’s association provided four informative presentations for discussion. 

1. Irene Bonnar – BNE ‘PoP’ Module
2. Douglas Chalmers – Wiki and weblog learning:  encouraging self assessment through wikis and blogs
3. Angela Shapiro and Aidan Johnston – ‘a snapshot from two vidcasts’ – essay writing and final year report writing – http://www.gcal.ac.uk/els/vidcasts/index.html
4. Student’s Assocation – Independent Learning - Comparing Student Perceptions with University Expectations’

Some great discussions took place at the event, some of which have been captured in the notes taken at the event, either from the flipcharts or the summaries provided by our facilitators.