Professional Development Open Course Development Process

The purpose of this guide is to explain the National Forum’s professional development (PD) open course design and development process and to provide guidance on good practice for collaborating development teams. This document should be read by the full development team to inform their open course development proposal and preparation for delivery.

Shared Core Professional Competencies for Medicine, Nursing and Pharmacy

Each profession has defined competencies that have to be achieved by all students prior to graduation. It is the students’ responsibility to seek out opportunities from clinical practice and develop their cognitive knowledge to achieve these competencies, which establishes the profession’s role in the protection of the public and ensures that the new graduate is fit for purpose and fit for practice.

ePrePP has carefully appraised the competency documents of medicine, nursing and pharmacy in Ireland and identified the shared competencies as a professional and as a practitioner.

The competency diagram shows the 5 domains of a professional and the 3 domains of a practitioner that are shared between medicine, nursing and pharmacy practice. The resources below will help you and your tutor to establish your learning needs.

Learning Analytics Platform Guide

The information in this guide was submitted directly by interested vendors through a request
for information (RFI) that was issued internationally by the National Forum and HEAnet through
eTenders, the Irish Government’s tendering platform (Reference number: HEAnet_DESSI_
LearningAnalytics18). RFIs are standard business processes, through which suppliers and vendors
are asked to provide information on their products’ capabilities.

Individual vendors were not targeted. Rather, a general request was extended through eTenders,
inviting responses from self-selecting vendors that met a range of criteria, most notably that they
had already worked with HEIs in Europe to provide platforms that enabled analysis of data relating
to student engagement and success.

Vendors were asked to respond to a standardised set of questions relating to:
— User functionality
— Service agreements
— Cost
— Infrastructural and technical specification
— Compatibility with platforms currently in use in Irish HEIs

In total, nine responses were received, all of which are included in this guide. The responses have
not been altered or edited and are presented in the exact format in which they were submitted
directly by the vendors themselves.

Identifying Learning Analytics Questions

The fundamental role of Learning Analytics is to answer questions. These questions should provide actionable insights that institutions, teaching staff and students use to drive effective change. Identifying the initial question to be addressed is a key first step as it will dictate every other aspect of the institutional strategy.

This resource is intended to help institutions to review some questions they may wish to begin with as well as some of the data sources that may be used to provide answers. It is divided into questions designed to enable institutional insights, lecturer-facing insights and student-facing insights.

This resource should not be considered an exhaustive list, but rather a high-level guide to some of the popular applications of Learning Analytics. It should also be noted that the data recipes below are not the only means of answering the questions listed, they are merely suggested methods.

Institutions are also reminded that any use of personal data must be fully compliant with the conditions of the GDPR.