HeLMET aims to develop and implement services to support collaborative working in distributed communities of practice, working closely with users in accordance with UIDM Stages 3 & 4. Services comprise integrated social networking software and a collaborative support module, the latter comprising a semantic wiki, a novel ‘wiki harvester’ and on-line document authoring, and their implementation and use processes. The modules will integrate with the HeLM Teacher Portfolio using a generic interface specification. The project takes distributed collaborative revision of the undergraduate Medicine curriculum as its exemplar.

HORUS e-Learning Management Extension for Tutors (HeLMET)

Overview

HeLMET will provide generic services to support on-line consultation and brainstorming in distributed communities of practice, using social software. HeLM takes as its exemplar the update of the undergraduate medical curriculum, in a collaboration between hospital-based Placement Education Supervisors (PES) and university staff. Work-based PES are often loosely affiliated with Faculty and on dispersed sites beyond the HE/FE environment. The contribution of PES to curriculum development and other activities is a valuable asset to the institution. The development of intuitive technologies promotes inclusivity of PES within University activities, therefore enhancing the experience of PES and ensuring participation in Faculty activities.

Aims and objectives

1. To deliver services to support collaborative working within distributed work-based communities of practice, leveraging the benefits of Web 2.0 technologies; The proposed services include a social networking manager, an ontology development tool, a semantic wiki, a collaborative document authoring tool and an interface to a portfolio. The five components will work together to support cycles of discussion and collaborative document authoring.

2. As an exemplar, to use the services to develop an on-line community of practice for distributed placement education supervisors (PES), and utilise the services to update the curriculum of the Manchester Medical School undergraduate Medicine programme.

Project methodology

The project will adopt the UIDM approach to development and implementation of the proposed set of services. Using this agile development methodology the project will develop an integrated SOA-compliant system comprising social networking and collaborative working modules, and integrate the modules with the existing JISC-funded HeLM Teacher Portfolio services.

The project will undertake change management activities to realise a distributed PES community of practice and achieve full-scale roll-out of the curriculum development system and evaluate the development and change management processes, within the context of the UIDM Stages 3 and 4 and the e-Learning Maturity Model (eMM).

Anticipated outputs and outcomes

The main output from this project is a SOA based technology derived from a set of requirements gathered using UIDM Stage 1 and 2 approaches to application development. This will be used to achieve the main outcome of the project, which is the successful collaboration of a disparate Community of Practice on the development of the undergraduate medical curriculum. Success criteria for the achievement of these outcomes will be defined through the evaluation process at the start of the project.

Technology / Standards used

The main standards that will be used in the development and testing of the HeLMET Tool are:

Web Standards:

  • XHTML
  • CSS

Accessibility Standards/guidelines:

  • WCAG

Metadata Standards:

  • Dublin Core
  • OWL
  • RDF

Syndication/Alerting Standards

  • RSS
  • Atom

Personal Data Standards:

  • VCard

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Summary
Start date
1 January 2008
End date
31 March 2009
Funding programme
Users & Innovation: Personalising Technologies
Project website
Committees
  • JISC Learning and Teaching committee
Topic