Critical Friends: An Effective Guide - wiki Critical Friends: An Effective Practice Guide / How the Critical Friend role has developed
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How the Critical Friend role has developed

The development of the CAMEL model

 

The original CAMEL project, (Collaborative Approaches to the Management of e-Learning) funded by HEFCE's Leadership, Governance and Management Fund (LGMF), led by JISC infoNet and the Association for Learning Technology (ALT), had partners that included four selected HE/FE institutions (Staffordshire University, the University of Greenwich, Leeds College of Technology and Loughborough College), the JISC and the Higher Education Academy (HEA) and carried out its work during 2005-06.

 

This first CAMEL project developed and tested the 'community of practice' in e-learning model - CAMEL. At that stage CAMEL did not include a 'critical friend' but only a formal evaluator. The role of the external agencies, including JISC and the HEA, was to monitor progress in and to contribute to the development of the project. The CAMEL model itself was originally devised by Seb Schmoller, CEO of ALT, from his experiences of learning about the Uruguyan farming community 'self-help' group in which his uncle participated. Seb compared agriculture with education in some respects, i.e. the issue of designing support processes that encourage growth.

 

The first successor CAMEL project was the JISC-funded eLIDA CAMEL Design for Learning (DfL) project, led by Dr Jill Jameson of the University of Greenwich, with participants including JISC infoNet, ALT, Loughborough College, Leeds College of Technology, Barnet College, Greenwich Commmunity College and Dartford Grammar School. eLIDA was the first CAMEL-based usage of the critical friend, with Professor Mark Stiles of Staffordshire University invited to play this role, alongside the formal evaluator role, carried out by Dr Liz Masterman of Oxford University. This revised CAMEL model - including a critical friend to stimulate reflections amongst participants in the growing community of practice - was highly successful.

 

Further development by JISC

 

JISC Users and Innovations programme (2008 - 2009). As the programme developed, four critical friends were appointed to support projects organised in clusters (but this did not adopt the CAMEL process). The role of the critical friends was to support projects in achieving their potential, help the projects seek continuation and sustainability with the HE institutions in which they were based, and advise them on engagement with other existing support and evaluation structures.

 

JISC Curriculum Design and Delivery programmes (2008 - 2012). This programme adopted the critical friend and CAMEL model from the outset as part of a comprehensive support structure which included programme managers and external evaluation. Feedback from the now completed Delivery programme suggests that critical friends have played a useful role in the development of both the programme ethos and the projects and clusters.


Adoption by the Higher Education Academy

 

Pathfinder programme (2006 - 2009). The Pathfinder programme was part of a three year initiative funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). It was part of the same initiative which funded the benchmarking of e-learning exercise which completed its pilot phase in August 2006. Most of the institutions that took part in the benchmarking pilot exercise took part in the Pathfinder programme.

 

Change Academy is organised through a partnership between the Higher Education Academy and the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education and supports institutions in both rapid innovation and capacity-building for longer-term change.

 

Enhancement programmes (2009 - current). In 2009 the Academy introduced a new phase of supported organisational development, to be called the Enhancement Academy (EA). The EA is informed by both the successful outcomes of the Benchmarking/Pathfinder Programme and the Academy’s well-received Change Academy model. It is designed to help senior institutional teams fully develop, in an intensively supported environment, a project idea for the institution in the broad area of enhancement through technology.