JISC

 The Remora project will explore the use of mobile devices to support social work students and mentors when students undertake their placements. In common with many other professions, the training of social workers requires students to be placed in social work settings and to undergo assessment in the workplace. Trainee social workers in England must successfully complete 200 days in a practice setting.  Currently the social work professional bodies indicate there is a lack of e-learning support for all stakeholders involved in the placement assessment process to address a number of key issues: Evidence of learning gained in practice – collation, representation, cross referencing to case work and tracking needs to be made easier; Production of final assessment reports by the practice assessor is time consuming (using practice evidence) and shortage of mentors and assessors (trained social work practitioner educators) means that tools to support practice learning would help in attracting staff by reducing the burden.

The project will take a user-centered approach and workshops will be conducted by all collaborators with students, workplace mentors and tutors to determine and prioritise the requirements for the application. TVU and Southampton will lead on the development of the mobile applications using the architectural lessons learnt from a previous project – MPLAT. The final software application will be evaluated by piloting and using the application in student setting at Royal Holloway.

The project will led by TVU and a project advisory board  with representation from local authorities, professional bodies and partner institutions will provide general steering and advice.  

The project will apply the technical architecture and lessons learnt from the MPLAT project. (Deliverable: Architectural Style for Mobile applications in the wild)

The project will conduct user-centered co-design workshops from which an application will be formulated. (Deliverable: Requirements Specification: UML models conforming to E-Framework Domain Map artefacts)

The project will design, develop and implement a mobile application (Deliverable: Software services assembled as a mobile application;) The application will be evaluated in social work placement setting. (Deliverable: Evaluation Reports). The evaluation experiments will utilize instruments developed for the project by RHUL.

A final project report to JISC (Deliverable: JISC Final Report).