The importance of having everyone in the room

Today we had a Skype call with James at ULCC, preceded by an agenda and action plan - very helpful.  On our side, we had myself - now e-Learning Coordinator, my line manager who is Director, Curriculum and the IT Services Manager.  Clarifying questions from all of us couldn't have been easy but James did it well (I felt the voice of experience was useful here!).  It was so important to have us all in the same room so that questions, answers and explanations were clear to all.

What we primarily discovered is that our enrolment process needs to tie together the right information so that Moodle can pick it up and put a number, a name, a course and an IT logon together in order to populate an e-ILP that will pick up information from our e-registers.  [If you didn't understand this sentence, you are probably where we were about 3 hours ago.  We have several drawings and doodles to get to the place where I could write this.] [Cigarettes were smoked, tea was drunk and wine was put in the fridge after frantic phone calls home]

Up until today, we had talked about doing this but we didn't have a driver.  Our Blackboard installation never talked to the MIS system and wasn't well used enough that it was ever an issue.  Network logins were generated quickly and were based on course codes but not linked to enrolment numbers.  It all worked fairly well at the time.  Now we realise that we need to talk to RM (IT Manager) and learn about Active Directories, Macros and Visual Basic (Director and me).  We will get there.

The critical thing is that we were in the room together, we talked before the Skype meeting and we carried on talking afterwards - moving closer to a solution that will be really good.  No sleepless nights yet.

Don't give up!