Plans for 2018

Looking forward to another busy and productive year. The year will require good planning on my part as there will be quite a bit to get through. We will be down 2.3 educational developers (. 0.5 and a 0.8 = 1.3 through retirement and another moving to a different role in the schools sector). One of us is also working for another part of the institution. Therefore, the shortfall will need to be shared amongst the educational developers left.

To start the year, I will need to support the programme development process for two degrees. Both are reviews of degrees with long histories at Ara. The computing degree should be off to NZQA by the end of summer. The midwifery degree to be away by Easter.

A priority through the year is to analyse the data and findings from the 7 sub-projects which make up the eassessment project. The project report is due in the middle of the year. 5 of the 7 sub-projects have now completed their participatory action research cycles and have or are writing up their reports.

In anticipation of the above curriculum development activities, I have worked on several articles near the end of last year and have already submitted two journal articles for publication in 2018. However, will also need to make a start on articles for publication in 2019. There should be 7 articles generated through the e-assessment project. I will be working on submitting 3 to 4 across 2018.

This year, NVCER ‘no-frills’ and the NZ VET research forumwill be held in August, in Sydney. My initial plan was to support several of the eassessment projects to be presented at each. Now, we will need to work on presenting a few of the sub-projects in Sydney instead. Also, the annual AVETRA conference is now ‘re-branded’ to be a practitioners research conference. It is to be held in Melbourne at the end of April. I will be putting in a paper for this conference around the outcomes of the eassessment project as well.