After completing a very satisfying Day 1, the conference moved into the Exhibition and Systems Day of the conference.
Outside of BETT, the conference manufacturer and supplier exhibition was the largest in HE this year - which is some achievement. Indeed, it's given us food for thought for future events.
The first presentation of the day came from Professor Nigel John at the University of Chester, and focussed on the provision of a virtual training environment for medical procedures. This was a fascinating run through how well things have developed in 20 years. Even down to the newest form of student app for training on specific procedures. The assessment seems to show that it is of benefit to the students.
Some of Nigel's work is here:
http://medical-graphics.org/
After this first session, the Exhibition proper started:
If you'd like a rather good review of events - Lis from St. Mary's University has done it....
https://thepostmoderntechslacker.wordpress.com/2016/07/01/schoms-exhibition-at-the-university-of-bath/
There were two parallel sessions later in the morning, just before lunch
- Marc Poffley from Crestron presenting EDID - http://www.crestron.com/downloads/pdf/product_misc/4k_whitepaper.pdf
- Sarah Davies from JISC presenting Digital Capabilities.
We attended the session by Sarah.
It covered the production of a new service, and the process of working with stakeholders and sector bodies, to provide clear guidance over what digital skills are required - and equip leaders and staff with the tools and resources they need to improve digital capability at a local or institutional level.
It looks like a very robust way to approach developing skills.
https://www.jisc.ac.uk/rd/projects/building-digital-capability
In the afternoon, there were two other parallel sessions:
- Matthew Green and Jonathan Rhodes from University of Wolverhampton presenting Teaching Science.
- Rob Hyde and Sarah Turpin from University of Bath presenting the LITEbox project.
Obviously I was presenting the second session!
We covered the whole LITEbox development, and collected feedback from the audience about how other universities conduct this process. It's being used going forward to inform the direction of our project!
The final session of the day was a duble-header; the SCHOMS bursary scheme, and the Benchmarking Exercise.
The SCHOMS bursary scheme is designed to assist members to take a project on that will be of benefit to the community. This year's beneficiary was Caroline Pepper at Loughborough who used the funding to conduct a benchmarking with several other universities - including us at Bath, to examine the running of AV services.
The results have provided an interesting insight into the operation and differences across the sector.
More information is here: http://www.schoms.ac.uk/aim-to-build-on-schoms-bursary-impact/
After a final visit to the Exhibition, we then broke for the SCHOMS Conference Dinner, which this year was held in the Pump House at the Roman Baths:
I think we can agree.... It was a brilliant evening, and will be quite hard to follow!
Respond