Innovation
Working with an Australian commercial partner Quantum IT, Leeds Metropolitan University (LMU) has developed and implemented a regional placement management system coordinating student placements across 5 universities and 2000 placement provider organisations. The system enhances the student experience through improved coordination of placement-related learning and support, and delivers significant operational efficiency and cost-effectiveness through providing a shared service across partner organisations.
What prompted innovation?
The project was driven by the increasingly complex logistic, legal, governance and quality requirements of student placements and the desire to optimise efficiency and cost-effectiveness in managing multiple work-related placements. InPlace replaces staff time-intensive administrative processes, enabling academic staff to be deployed on enhancement activity directly supporting students and staff in placement provider organisations. Staff efficiencies are maximised through a centralised placement administration platform and a communication and reporting hub for all stakeholders. The system is the first of its kind in the UK to manage such a wide range of professional groups and placement models, giving access to instant reporting and live time allocations for practice educators, students and tutors as well as providing support for generic underlying business processes.
What makes innovation different?
Despite the clear business opportunity for a system capable of organising complex and variant clinical placement processes, there is no application globally that delivers the functionality of InPlace used in the way Leeds Metropolitan University have deployed the functionality across 18 professional groups and 5 collaborating universities. The three key technically challenging elements are:
- Business user configurability of the workflows, dependent on discipline and placement type
- Widely variant data requirements around the business process
- An automated allocation process based on rules defined and configured by business users, able to use the data attributes created by business users.
Changes in practice
- Reduced email traffic from the placement unit to placement providers, students and tutors as the online tool is a live capture of all allocations and reports and holds all student details and fitness for practice data.
- Allows the capture of all MPET data and financial reporting for social work placements
- Allows placement evaluation and placement profile information for student benefit.
- Single sign in for students and staff so no need to log onto VLE for placement information.
- Links to google and bing maps so that placement directions and location are easily accessible to students and tutors.
- PLFs in Trust can access all of the allocation and student data that they need for their reporting processes.
Impact
- Impact will be more profound next year but we have had a lot of interest from other UK and Irish Universities who have heard of the development through the CoD.
- Tutors and Trusts are very excited about the development as it will make their communications with the placement unit and students more efficient.
- NSS and SSS for practice learning criteria as improved as we have rationalised our systems and for all professional groups we score greater than 90% for placement learning satisfaction.
Dissemination
- I spoke at the CoD meeting in October 2011 and we presented at the HEA H&SC conference in Leeds in June 2013.
- We have presented widely in our own University notably at the Annual Planning day in September 2012 and have recently been successful in the internal university development bid to explore the transferability of our model and Inplace to other Faculties and services.
- Our Dean, Ieuan Ellis, spoke at the recent Learning and Teaching conference in Melbourne in April 2013 promoting the partnership with Quantum and our implementation of the Inplace system.