Project summary (derived from Final Report)
The project exploited the institutional virtual learning environment (VLE, Blackboard) to establish simple models for the development of communities of support and guidance and to manage and administer the programmes; with a significant amount of administration being moved from paper based to online processes. In order to include employers within the institutional intranet and VLE the university’s identity management process was re-engineered to allow selective access to online systems.

SUM (service usage model) available at https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=c3RhZmYud2VzdG1pbnN0ZXIuYWMudWt8aXdvYmxlfGd4OjczNjdhOTIxYWFiOTY5YTI

In order to achieve the objective of creating a community for the work based learners including staff from the work place, whilst maintaining the legal and contractual obligations imposed by some of the software suppliers, a limited extranet needs to be created. This will provide a space for all those individual who although not employed by the university, contribute to the work based learning experience. This can be achieved by creating and implementing a new access role in the IDM system of Work Based Tutor [WBT] which would have only a limited access footprint in the university applications ecosystem. To achieve this, the university will need to implement:

** An easy interface accessible to named university staff for the collection of information on WBTs
** A workflow system for the approval of the account generation
** A new role of WBT in the IDM vault, possible identified by a flag or user type
** The modification of all IDM drivers to university applications to make sure the WBTs only access the applications they need to support the students.

Have produced a Service Usage Model (SUM) for the creation of customised accounts for employers to enable external mentors/employers to login to university systems

challenges - Low participation/activity levels

* Blackboard site for the Postgraduate Mentoring Programme;
* Student blogs & wikis;
* Video clips of students, employers, mentors, tutors etc talking about work placements/mentoring;
* IDM with specific access for external mentors etc

Building on the use of current technology (Blackboard VLE and Elgg SLE], the project needs to invest in the procedures that provision accounts to these systems. Currently the university uses a Netware based identity management (IDM) system that relies on a central data store of user information known as the IDM vault. The IDM system then relies on event driven programs known as IDM drivers to circulate the information between all the systems connected to it. The IDM system does not currently discriminate between different roles in access to the university resources.

Identified the need for the institution’s identity management system to discriminate between different roles whilst maintaining the legal and contractual obligations imposed by some of the software suppliers. A possibility is to include the role of a Work Based Tutor [WBT] with a limited access footprint in the university applications ecosystem.

Dealing with work based mentoring

Using Blackboard as VLE AND ePortfolio block