My dissertation project.
The International Faculty of the University of Sheffield complies with TUOS in its learning and teaching strategy. The top priority of this strategy is the Programme Level Approach. Part of how this strategy is implemented is the introduction of the Sheffield Graduate Attributes. These constitute a system of validation of the fact that, the students, during their studies, developed specific skills employers would be interested in, how they developed them and when in their studies. The International Faculty has implemented an abstraction layer on top of this, which incorporates badges that represent those graduate qualities. Those are included in each unit's syllabus, to make it even more useful for the overall experience of the students, as well as to provide a sense of contiguity in their studies, helping them recognise what aspects of their employable persona are enhanced, when and why, in the specific unit structure and programme as a whole. The software that should be produced during this project is an enhancement of how the administrative board keeps track of the graduate attributes, in the form of badges, for each unit and a concrete method to validate the quality of education the graduates receive, based on TUOS's standards.
The issue with the present solution of the syllabi badges is the fact that the whole process of identifying the unit attributes based on the badges is performed manually by the Administrative staff. To elaborate, their current responsibility is to gather all the syllabi proposed by the lecturers, get to the badges section, note down what badges appear on which units and then manually orchestrate statistics based on this data. This is a lengthy and tiresome procedure and there is room for error or even changes in the syllabi altogether. Therefore this project is introduced on top of that procedure, to eliminate some of the time needed organising all that data and help the users of the eventually produced system solely focus on what is important: A more suitable strategy to achieve a holistically beneficial result for the students' Programme. The interesting aspect of this project is the way this could be implemented so that its users can achieve more in a lot less effort than before and possibly open new paths of flexibility in their work-flow and making room for the introduction of more useful units for the students.
The project's definite aim is to make the manual process the administrative staff is currently following automated, from data gathering through the badges, to statistics produced based on the data. This has to be easier and quicker than the currently followed method, so that it opens the possibility for the administrative staff to focus on more important issues, regarding the holistic vision of the studies, instead of information gathering, organisation and presentation.