An introduction to the new Design School Portal

Editor's Notes

1. Lawrence’s notes here if required….
2. Developments since 2006, Illustration, Fine Art versions 1 and 2, model moved to Fashion. What the students said, what the staff said (upcoming slides), what we learned and the next step.. Bespoke to Opensource WordPress and BuddyPress. LT Review, what has been decided and what hasn’t, timescales, pilot external hosting this year and the SITS issue. Discussions ongoing to link to new systems from next year on internal servers. New requirements to show contact hours etc, we can do more to show the quality of our pedagogy and students to the outside world. Developing a system that will fit with current and future needs.
3. Just give you a minute to read some of these…
4. And these……
5. The wireframe you have been given (although rather small!) shows the overall plan of internal and external areas. Internal areas operate as a VLE for the whole School through a series of groups. All courses will have groups and other groups can be created by both staff and students, giving the students greater control over their communications and networks within the School. Blogs have been added to all these so that we can expand on the potential of this powerful tool for PDP and reflection, presentation and professional development. Also enhanced gallery possibilities and personalised view for each student along with other features that Martin will be showing us in a minute. Bringing together all the varied ways that staff have been working with students online over the past years to give one basic minimum level of support throughout the School, greater opportunities for interdisciplinary sharing and collaboration. The Recent student experience review recommends student engagement through LTA strategy to enhance retention, satisfaction and employability, and we have specifically addressed the goals of the LTA strategy in our development. It also suggests that student opinion should be systematic and strategic. We have aimed to create a system that will fit current needs of staff, students and the changing HE and technological environment, whilst remaining flexible enough to respond to the demands of the future. External areas allow us to promote Research work, Industry partnership and form a locus for potential future OERs. These areas will link to KU sites such as the Faculty website where appropriate, but form a meeting point for the outside world and the students, teaching and research that takes place within the School.
6. … .To this end we would like to involve some student reps at an early stage to help inform our implementation of this new scheme, and are working on a concept of student ‘ambassadors’ – or similar term, who could be funded through staff bureau, trained to provide additional technical help to staff and students during the early months. They would also be able to help us monitor the induction process for students at the beginning of the academic year, and along with a larger student group, give us feedback and evaluation of the system at key points in the pilot year, including suggestions for future developments. The student experience review and KUSU have made it very clear that our students expect a high level of good online resource to support them in their studies, so its really important that we set up and maintain minimum levels of course information for all courses, whilst sharing experience across the school of enhancing the students digital literacy through experience of blogging and other media as appropriate.
7. At an earlier meeting we raised the issue of User roles. These have been designed to ensure that most staff will only need to learn how to do basic functions, a few will have an enhance role to change things within the system and only one or two to make major changes. This should minimise the learning curve for most staff. Lawrence has agreed that the ‘super admin’ role would represent part of a workload and therefore not be in addition to current load. We are offering a hands-on getting to know the basics session next Monday 11 th in DMW 1 from 2.00 – 4.30, and you would be very welcome even if you are not able to attend the whole session. Please fill in your feedback forms today with your KU ID number, as we need to make sure we have got you all logged in. There will be time for questions at the end of this presentation, but please feel free to add any comments or questions that occur to you at this point on this form today. I have also set up a page on my EPADE blog for discussion around the portal, so you can post comments there, or feel free to email me directly.