Certificate of Merit

[John Upham]

I've just realised I had omitted to post the results of the second CoM trial at Abbey Junior School, Reading on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 5pm.


17 girls aged between 7 and 11 years attempted the Level One test without prior access to the CoM DVD or to the Practise Level questions.

Passed with Distinction (>= 18/20)

3

Passed with Merit (>= 16/20 < 18/20)

3

Passed (>= 14/20 < 16/20)

4

Therefore out of 17 girls, a total of 10 of them passed = 59%

I hope that this is satisfactory and apologies in the delay getting the results to you.

[Matthew Turner]

Any news on the final trial?

[John Upham]

We are analysing the outcomes from the Wilson's School trial today and tommorow.

The current hold-up is as a result of the ECF Shop being taken off-line.

I pointed out that SSL needed to be enabled to secure the transmission of credit card information so that https is used instead of http.

I have proposed a solution and am awaiting sanction of that solution.

I will update as soon I have further information.

[Matthew Turner]

John,
I appreciate that I was jumping the gun a bit given that the trial was only yesterday. However, we are all keen to know how this important project is going.

[Matthew Turner]

John,
I know you have made some comments on the ECF website thread. Are you able to say anything more here. Just in simple terms, did the final trial go to plan? When do you envisage the COM going live?

[Matthew Turner]

Any news on the final trial or when the COM might go live?

[Carl Hibbard]

Any news on the final trial or when the COM might go live?

I would say given the list of ECF amendments to both hosting and website that John has suggested quite a long time

[John Upham]

I would say given the list of ECF amendments to both hosting and website that John has suggested quite a long time

All of these changes are very tiresome but needed. My list of pre-requisites given in late 2008 included a working, secure, ECF shop. I assumed https had been part of that until I checked before Christmas 2009 and thats when the shop was taken off-line. Moving the hosting to Hey Joes merely compounded the problems.

[Matthew Turner]

John,
Any news on the final trial or when the COM might go live?

[John Upham]

Matthew,

We are completing the analysis of the results plus the detailed feedback from Neill Cooper.

We need to test (but not via another trial) some admin functions for the schools and the ECF Office.

The main question mark now surrounds the means of payment for credits.

I believe that once these issues have been resolved we can add the look and feel requirements for the sponsor.

We could then go live for schools at least. This forum will be kept informed. I've not heard one iota from the current CfS manager (The CEO) so I've no idea if he is interested or not.

[Matthew Turner]

John,
Sounds like the COM will not be going live in the near future. I assume that in the meantime £450 per month will still be being spent on 'The Right Move' to be funded by future COM profits.

[Carl Hibbard]

We could then go live for schools at least. This forum will be kept informed. I've not heard one iota from the current CfS manager (The CEO) so I've no idea if he is interested or not.

Who "owns" both the new CoM domain and the source code for the application you have produced then John?

I ask since the grading site is a bit of a grey area for historical reasons

I would be interested to know your ECF arrangement?

[Matthew Turner]

John Upham wrote,

"We are analysing the outcomes from the Wilson's School trial today and tommorow.

The current hold-up is as a result of the ECF Shop being taken off-line."

It seems that the ECF Shop is now on-line so are we any further along with analysing the results from the final trial. I note that earlier you were talking about the tests costing £5, but on the ECF shop the credits seem to cost £6. Is this an error or has the price gone up and is there any specific reason for this?

[John Upham]

The migration of the main ECF web site has progressed well. The internal links are being cleaned up and the external ones being checked as many of those give 404 and other 400 http status codes.

The goal posts of CoM have slightly shifted following close collaboration between myself, Kirstie and Andrew Walker as follows :

The CfS and CoM projects now share some of the critical back office database functionality. In 2008 I stated that this would need to be in place for CoM to work efficiently. Finally in late January 2010 Kirstie and I (free, thank goodness, from Director and IT Committee interference) worked out a solution that would allow the ECF Office to maintain the CfS database (Phase 1 and Phase 2 have now been aggregated) which is a field sub-set of the CoM database tables.

The outcome of this is that the ECF Office admin the CfS data and CoM data synchronously. I won't go into further detail on this suffice to say we can now focus on finalising the payment systems, report writing and other back office functionality.

The bottom line in all of this is that when I agreed to take on CoM I knew it would be a much more challenging and time consuming development that anyone had imagined. The challenge wasn't simply a technical one but getting the required co-operation from the office. Luckily, Kirstie and Andrew have more than risen to the challenge!

I knew that CfS and CoM HAD to be integrated and that CoM was very much more than a souped up on-line quiz that you see every day and every where on the Internet.

I also want to make it clear that without Kirstie and Andrew in the Office then none of this would have happened and the office would still be in the dark ages. In the office this is literally true since huge amounts of rubbish have been skipped and old paperwork shredded. When CJdM visits the office shortly he will see the fruits of KLs and others labours. It is no longer a Health and Safety hazard waiting to go up in smoke.

Stewart Reuben wanted to make some minor changes to CoM during his brief reign including raising the price of a CoM credit to £6 and dumbing-down the pass mark to 14/20. I've not heard a dickie bird from the CEO who allegedly took over CfS / CoM on January 1st, 2010 : I assume that he remains too busy to get involved?

I realise that we have been waiting for CoM for a long time and I apologise to all for the delay especially Andrew Martin who has supported me all along : we are close to going live.

[Carl Hibbard]

I am not sure I would want to tie the CoM (which shows promise) with CfS which is clearly failing or has in fact failed?