Friday 7 March 2008

Teaching space review

One of the discussions I'm involved in at the moment is a review of our teaching space - have we got enough, is it in the right place, is the right size, is it in good condition and does it have appropriate facilities in? Changes in the way we teach means that we need different sorts of space - for example flexible spaces, break out rooms etc - and we're looking to see how that can be provided. There's also issues of how we timetable the huge number of modules we run and allocate space to them. Lots of work involved!

I've also had a meeting about the University Collaboration Improvement Programme, and in particular how we measure the use of our services. It's important to measure use so that we can track changes as we try and increase the uptake of some of the services we offer. We're especially looking at MUSE (the University portal), myCalendar and myChat at the moment. MUSE is going well, with a large increase of people using it, but we have a lot to do to get the use of myCalendar and myChat up to our desired levels. Measurements of use are by department and we will be making these public on our web site soon, so we can see where departments are making full use of the services and maybe use those as examplars to other departments.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"MUSE is going well, with a large increase of people using it,..."

Interesting.
To what do you attribute this increase? Can you tell what people are actually accessing within MUSE?

Unknown said...

Hi. At the moment we're not measuring what people are accessing, but I guess the increase is due to the increased number of applications accessible from it. For students that includes their exam results, PC booking and MOLE. For staff, it's probably the number of groups using it to share files etc, and the new applications such as myJob and myTeam.