APU the Institution

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APU the Institution

• APU has two main campuses at Chelmsford and
  Cambridge
• APU had approximately 26,500 students in 2003/4
• Of those, students in Partner Colleges totalled
  approximately 4,750
• The map on the next slide shows the extent of
  APUs remit across the Eastern Region.

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The Nature of Our Relationships with Partner
Colleges

• 19 indirectly funded partner colleges
• 5 directly funded partner colleges
• No consortia arrangements
• Relationship with the indirectly funded colleges
  SHOULD be of franchised programmes only
• Relationship with directly funded partners a mix
  of franchises and no franchises.

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What Does HEFCE Expect?

• HEFCE defines two categories of funded students
  directly funded and indirectly funded.
• Where students are directly funded, the
  Institution teaching the student receives the
  funding and makes the HESA and HESE returns for
  their students. Where the student is indirectly
  funded, the funding is channelled through the
  lead Institution. For this latter arrangement
  there can be a further two sub-divisions they
  may either be a franchise partnership or a
  consortium arrangement. In a franchise, the
  receiver of the funding is fully responsible for
  the student, accountable for all aspects of
  finance, administration and quality relating to
  those students. In a consortium the student
  remains attributable to the individual
  institution.

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DIRECTLY FUNDED INDIRECTLY FUNDED
?
FRANCHISE CONSORTIUM
Fully responsible for quality Student
attributable to Individual institution
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What Does QAA expect?

• (from the QAA Code of Practice Collaborative
  provision and flexible and distributed learning)
• The awarding institution is responsible for the
  academic standards of all awards granted in its
  name.
• The awarding institution is ultimately
  responsible for ensuring that the quality of the
  learning opportunities offered through a
  collaborative arrangement is adequate but it
  might choose to delegate operational aspects of
  this responsibility to a partner organisation
  where it has confidence that the partner has the
  capacity to discharge that responsibility. An
  awarding institution needs to consider carefully
  the distinction between responsibility for some
  aspects of quality management which it may choose
  to delegate, and responsibility for the security
  of the standard of the award, which remains with
  it at all times.

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Data Flows for Franchised Programmes Students
on them

• Franchised programmes must be approved through
  our normal processes.
• The modules to be taught on the franchised
  programme must be approved for delivery in the
  Partner College.
• Franchised programmes are subject to APU annual
  monitoring processes.
• Franchised programmes are subject to quinquennial
  review most often now at the same time as the
  core APU programme is reviewed.
• Students must register/re-register at the start
  of the academic year (pre-printed re-registration
  forms are provided by APU blank registration
  forms are provided for new students. (If/where
  colleges use our Admissions processes we can
  provide pre-printed forms for new students too).
• Withdrawal, intermission, and change of course
  information must be sent to APU quickly.

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Data Flows for Franchised Programmes Students
on them

• Students attendance confirmation is required for
  all INDIRECTLY FUNDED full time undergraduates
  for student support payments via BACS First.
• Information on assessment for student support
  should be forwarded to APU from the Partner
  College (we do get that via SLC too).
• Students module enrolments should be notified to
  APU at the start of each semester
• The marks given to students for their assessments
  should be passed to us at an appropriate time for
  our assessments/awards processes.
• APU notifies students of their progress/marks/awar
  d and invites them to an award ceremony where we
  manage those for the College.
• For INDIRECTLY FUNDED partners APU receives the
  SLC element of the tuition fees and the HEFCE
  block grant and distributes it to the College,
  minus agreed tax.

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Difficulties we experience in maintaining the
student record

• The range of relationships we have a SRS that
  is theoretically automated, but because we do not
  have simple and consistent relationships with
  our Partners it depends upon the knowledge of
  individuals for things to happen.
• The SLC course database it can be very
  difficult to find out what partner colleges
  will/will not be offering next academic year and
  what dates they work from.
• What students might partner colleges be expecting
  next academic year? Some do their own
  admissions, some choose to admit via our
  Admissions Office, at least for full time
  undergraduate students.
• What students have they registered as APU
  students? The partner colleges should be sending
  the APU registration re-registration forms to
  us as soon as possible (last year the worst of
  our regional partners coughed up by June!)
• What modules the students are going to take in
  the forthcoming semester and is the college
  actually approved to run that module (we never
  have time to do that check in point of fact!)?

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Difficulties we experience in maintaining the
student record

• Are all the modules acceptable for the course of
  study?
• Is the assessment as per the module approval
  process?
• What marks have been awarded for the assessments?
  Have they been through the double-marking
  process?
• Which students have withdrawn/intermitted/changed
  course?
• There is no systematic process for telling core
  APU of the outcome of study on EdExcel-approved
  programmes, so never know when to close a record.

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Methods of Communication with Partner Staff and
Students

• APU prefers electronic communication.
• However, validation documentation, Rules and
  Regulations, Student Handbooks, Course Handbooks,
  registration and re-registration documentation
  are all essentially paper based.
• The registration of full time students is
  notified to core APU by e-mail.
• Marks can in certain circumstances be sent to APU
  via a spreadsheet and uploaded into our SRS,
• Students receive their interim marks via their
  web page (e-Vision) and can access information
  about the modules upon which they are enrolled
  through the same medium.
• We hope to move to mark submission via e-Vision
  shortly.
• Read-only access to our SRS is available to
  authorised lecturing staff at partner
  institutions but there is no write access
  devolved.
• Next year students should be able to re-register
  on line.

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Management of our Regional Partnership
Arrangements

• APU had a central unit the Regional Office -
  through which went everything and anything to do
  with our partnership arrangements. They provided
  a one-stop shop for enquiries.
• This was disbanded at Christmas Now, partners
  have to go directly to the Faculties for some
  information (i.e. dates of assessment processes,
  which vary by a day or two from one Faculty to
  another), come to Registration Services for
  queries about the SRS, Admissions for their
  queries etc. etc. We have yet to see how this
  will work in terms of data quality!

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Benefits to the HEI, the Partner Colleges and
(potential) students

• From an academic perspective the networking has
  been invaluable, academics in partner colleges
  have welcomed the opportunity to deliver HE We
  have been able to draw on expertise in the region
  to cover areas of the curriculum that otherwise
  APU could not offer (i.e. hospitality, land based
  studies, equine studies) and useful research
  opportunities have developed.
• APU has found the Regional Partnership a vital
  plank in its Widening Participation strategy.
  It takes higher education out to areas with
  historically low participation rates where the
  customer base is reluctant to travel far and
  where, being rural, transport links make it
  difficult anyway to travel.
• However, there IS a significant overhead to these
  relationships.

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The Future

• APU has a new VC, who is keen to simplify and
  standardise everything in sight, including our
  partnership arrangements and who is now working
  on re-defining relationships. The plan appears
  to be to have fewer partners, concentrating on
  the larger ones. APU is exploring Joint Venture
  Company (JVC) arrangements. The JVC will be set
  up with APU owning 51. The staff employed
  within these will be APU staff and thus nothing
  will be franchised and the students will all be
  ours, albeit being taught at out centres. Could
  this simplify issues around fees, as variable
  fees repayable post completion come into being?
• Operationally, we plan to roll out electronic
  re-registration to Regional Partners from 2005/6
  (following its use for the first time in core APU
  this academic year). It might help to marginally
  improve the speed at which we capture this
  information but