Where we've been for the last two months!

We've been having a busy time at the SkillClouds depot over the last couple of months.

As Stuart described in his recent post, we have just launched a pilot SkillClouds resource for students within Biology and Environmental Sciences.

In September, we presented the SkillClouds project to senior management at the University, and are starting to explore with the University how SkillClouds will be evaluated to decide whether or not it should be developed further and launched here. We had extremely positive feedback from this meeting, and SkillClouds was included on a briefing note for departments at the University outlining some of the initiatives available at Sussex to support students.

A couple of weeks ago, we were invited to the School Management Meeting of a large school here at the University (at Sussex Uni, a school is a group of departments). The group were very keen on SkillClouds and identified that one of its key uses would be to support academic staff in discussing future careers with students in Academic Advising sessions. Several departments asked whether they could be part of the pilot.

John has created a screencast of our presentation.

One of the unexpected outcomes of these meetings for us was that several academic staff stated that they would find the set of skills within the cloud extremely useful as a tool for them to identify the range of skills that their graduates might be acquiring:

Skillclouds prototyping in Sussex University career development course

The University of Sussex Careers Development and Employment Center (CDEC) is currently using a Skillclouds beta prototype in its course running with second year Biology and Environmental Science students.

Alongside a moodle course, developed by CDEC, Skillclouds will provide resources for the students' first assignment during the course.



We are quite excited about this and hoping to get some valuable feedback from both the tutors and the students on the course.