Getting ready for online External Verification

The 26th March was planned months in advance as the date for the EDEXCEL E.V. to visit the college and scrutinise our work on the Level 3 Award in Education and Training (AET).

Unfortunately this had to be cancelled, no problem I said “why don’t we do it online” ?

Little did I know at that point that moving from a paper based traditional onsite E.V. visit would be so time consuming due to information and documents being held / stored in many different places both paper and electronic.

However, with the help of Manda Perkovic we have managed to scan in, sort and collate all the required paper work (lots of it, E.V.’s are so needy) and the samples of student work requested by Sue our E.V. into one folder on OFFICE 365 which was shared this morning. (fingers crossed it works)

Luckily, getting samples of student work was the easy part as this year for the first time I had moved fully from hand written feedback on students submissions to using the ‘comments’ function in Word via Office 365.

Providing formative feedback this way has been very efficient and enabled students to more easily read, understand and respond to the feedback provided. Students made corrections and changes which I could more easily follow and re-mark.

SO! What has this new experience taught me and what plans are being hatched for the next intake?

· Start an E.V. Folder on O365 from the start of the course

· Populate the folder with all the required documents so that they can be edited as the course progresses

· Students to complete their evidence portfolio via a shared document so that the I.V and E.V. can both access when required.

· Upload all Edexcel editable documents, trackers, I.V. documents and course information to the shared folder to allow access by Assessors, I.V. and E.V.

· Use Class OneNote with students for future courses.

Hopefully these changes will negate the need for endless scanning in of documents and substantially reduce emails.