Background

At the time of writing (mid-2007), the HEA is encouraging Subject Centres to provide resources to support new academic staff (“SNAS”) and complement those made available centrally. The ICS Subject Centre has been keen to respond positively to this initiative.

This page explains what we did, and why.

What type of information should we provide?

It was not obvious, however, what appropriate support could be provided by our Subject Centre. Institutions provide pedagogic support for new staff through the PG certificates which new staff are normally required to undertake, and we were anxious to ensure that resources we provide as a Subject Centre should not duplicate institutional provision.

We therefore contacted institutions (through our Department representatives) to identify the scope of central provision, and received 13 responses including universities in Scotland and Wales. A variety of delivery models have been adopted. Some institutions have a substantial centralised unit providing most of the material, with others adopting a decentralised mentor or “learning advisor” based approach. The pedagogic input may be faculty-based, and materials provided by the Academy may support the teaching and learning content.

It was apparent that programmes were of high quality and comprehensive in their content, and would include basic pedagogy (delivery, assessment) and institutional induction (structure, policies, resources). Department/school induction (course structure, who’s who) was routinely carried out.

Some subject-based topics were identified as not always covered, and included (for example):

• accreditation issues;
• external examining;
• career planning (including portfolios and CPD);
• institution eLearning resources and policies; and
• industrial links and liaison.

A recurring theme when discussing these matters with colleagues in computing departments was that an “information gap” exists. The central resources are generally perceived as adequate, and the basic information about department/school and its courses and modules is sufficient. However, there appears to be a gap between the (pedagogic or administrative) information provided by the institution, and the practical knowledge required to operate effectively within the academic department. A couple of generic examples might be the following.

• According to the timetable, my lecture is 10-11. What time do I actually start, and what time must I finish?
• What is the Department's policy on plagiarism in programming assignments?
• How do I get new software for my course installed on the Department's systems?

We returned to our Department Representatives and requested that they contact new or recent academic colleagues, and identify what questions they asked (or should have asked) which weren’t covered anywhere in the induction process. The responses were analysed and categorised — for example, at the top level, the questions fell clearly into four categories, namely practicalities of teaching, assessment, research and general administration.

How should we deliver the information?

Since the issues in each department are unique, it would be inappropriate simply to package the questions as a simple document or web resource — many specific questions would be irrelevant or incorrectly phrased. Ideally, each department would require a “personalised” copy.

An appropriate solution appeared to be a Wiki. We took the results of our previous activity and used the categorisation to inform the structure of the Wiki. For each question, a “dummy” response was included.

We reviewed available Wiki products, shortlisting MediaWiki, PhpWiki and TWiki. MediaWiki was identified as appropriate for delivering the resource, being a popular open-source tool with a reputation for robustness, security, configurability and ease of use. Our deliverable would thus be content for a MediaWiki installation which could simply be imported.