The Student Experience

Spent a lot of time today doing some preparation for some work we're doing on a strategic look at how the Professional Services support different areas of the University. Next week we're looking at the student experience - in a bid to get away from any silo mentality, we're getting together to look at how we can work together and with the new Faculties to improve the student experience and how we can add value.

Today we looked at the areas where we as a department contribute to the student experience - it's wide ranging and in many cases done in conjunction with other departments.

We provide (and in most cases write) the systems that handle the students from the minute they think they might want a prospectus and look at our web site, to finding the on-line prospectus, CRM to manage their interactions with the University, allocating their accommodation, registering and choosing their modules on line, scheduling exams, getting their exam results through the assessments system, allocating them to degree ceremonies and printing their degree certificates, collecting their careers information and then keeping them in touch with the university via an alumni directory.

We give them a computer account, filestore, and an email address, and give them access to everything though a portal including self service systems and access to electronic resources

We provide a managed desktop with over 200 pieces of software, printing and scanning facilities. and an on-line learning environment.

We support their own laptops and machines - whatever platform and operating system they have, and keep them free of viruses and spyware. We give advice and support on privacy and security.

We timetable teaching space, allocate rooms to lectures and provide AV and IT infrastructure in them. We provide and support learning spaces including the Information Commons and student computing rooms. The Drama Studio is a place where students can learn how to use a real theatre and put on productions. We manage the Octagon Centre - a place where concerts, music nights and other events are run.

We provide a network in the student residences, IPTV and a wireless network across campus.

We give advice and support on the use of new technologies and facilitate innovative teaching and communication methods.

Not a complete list - I could go on - let me know what I've missed! And some still say that CIT isn't strategic to the institution.....

Sharpen the Saw

We'll be having an Investors in People assessment in August for part of the department, so spent some time yesterday morning talking to the assessors about work we've been doing on a vision and our objectives for the year, as well as our management development plans.

Then it was my own SRDS interview with my line manager - a chance to sit down and reflect on progress throughout the year, and look forward to the next one. It's also the chance to look at what support I might need and training and development needs. The main thing I need is time - time to network more and to get on with all of the things I do outside of the University including UCISA work, which if you're not careful, tend to get pushed to the end of the priority list. I'm a big of a fan of Steven Covey and his Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. One of the habits is "Sharpen the Saw". He describes this by using the analogy of a woodcutter who is cutting wood. Gradually as the saw blunts he becomes less and less productive. The solution is to stop cutting for a while and sharpen the saw, but he doesn't because he's too busy cutting wood. Some people misunderstand this habit, and think it refers to getting away, maybe having a rest, but that's just putting the saw down - it will still be blunt. It has to be an activity - I do it by meeting someone from outside the department and talking through a few issues with them, or trying to think of a good speaker for a UCISA conference, or reading a good book, or writing this blog!

Office speak

This made me laugh, and cringe at the same time - I've even used one of them in my last post!

Don't mention the war...

Programme Board today - progress on all of our projects looked at and commented on, and as usual, the main issue was how we resource them all as well as continue to support existing services. A couple of new projects were approved. One was to look at scanning technology - initially we need to gather user requirements for a scanning solution across the University. We already know of specific areas where such a solution is needed – Livelink, SAP and Academic Departments where storage spaces is limited. We also need to draw up guidelines for the use of a scanning solution based in part on user requirements, and partly on best practice drawn from across the document management sector, both inside and outside HE. this part of the project is about to start, and then we aim to evaluate the leading scanning solutions and draw up a shortlist. However, this can only be done when we have available resources.

The second project we approved today is an evaluation of a 'Pay on the Day" parking permit scheme to replace the current situation where staff pay for a parking permit for unlimited use throughout the year. It's hoped that this scheme will incentivise people to leave their car at home occasionally if they only pay for actual usage of the car parks. Of course, in a University like ours, with many car parks, many of them small areas behind buildings, this will pose a number of challenges! There's a number of areas where we'll have to carry out some work - finding the most appropriate mechanism to charge people in controlled and uncontrolled, car parks, collecting the data collected from barriers, informing staff of what use they've made of the car parks, and charging them direct from the payroll. This proposal is still being discussed with the appropriate bodies in the University, but we need to start doing the evaluation work now.

$75 Laptop

Not that I'm a sucker for gadgets of course, but I like the look of this mock up for OLPC's (One Laptop per Child) latest design. It has two screens instead of a screen and a keyboard, and the second screen can be a touch screen keyboard. Or you can turn it round and it becomes an eBook, or two people can play a game on each screen. At a target price of $75 and power usage of about 4 watts, it's an ambitious project!

Senate

Senate meeting yesterday afternoon - 2 major discussion items. First was the on-going process around restructuring. All of the Faculty Pro Vice Chancellors are now in place, and the new University Executive Board (UEB) will take over on 1 August. UEB consists of the Vice Chancellor, 5 Faculty PVCs, the 3 cross-cutting PVCs (Teaching and Learning, Research and Innovation, and External Affairs), the Registrar, Director of Finance, Director of HR and Academic Secretary. More professional service reps than before (still no IS rep though but I'll keep working on it...). We're promised that there will be much more transparency of decision making - no inner cabinets, just a collective responsibility, which is a good thing. There's still a lot of work in progress around the role of the Faculties, including their governance structures, but this seems to be progressing well. I'm in the process of meeting all of the PVCs - I've had 3 very positive discussions so far - about how we might work in partnership with them to provide the most efficient, cost effective service to them, and add value to the support they already receive from their departmental staff.

Second item on the Senate agenda was the capital programme, with details of new buildings on the cards, as well as significant refurbishments. The most significant refurbishment is the Arts Tower. It's over 40 years old, and a Grade II listed building, and in drastic need of a lot of money spending on it! I wonder how many of you realise that it's inspired by the Seagram Building in New York - which has twice as many floors. The building will be gradually emptied over the next few months, (with the exception of the Estates Department who have bravely agreed to move into it during the works), and then the outside cladding will be replaced as well as an internal refurb of some of the floors.

Another two major refurbishments are Western Bank Library, and University House (Student's Union) which will have a significant amount of work done on it to create a variety of new spaces.

I've mentioned the concept of Learning Hub before, but rather tha a new build, we are currently looking at trasforming the Edwardian wing of the old Jessop Hospital into teaching space, including self help space for students for the English Language Teaching Centre and Modern Languages Teaching Centre. They will have to get rid of the dead pigeons first though!

Document storage

Our Electronic Document Management project has been very slow to take off. We bought the software at least a couple of years ago and encountered all sorts of problems, including technical and support issues, as well as internal resource allocation. However, I'm pleased to say that it now seems to be taking off - we've restructured the project team with more resource allocated to it, and we've got three pilots about to start. A student eFile, web-based computer registration for staff, and programme specification approval and storage. These should test both the workflow and the document management parts of the system, and hopefully they will be up and running by September. Assuming the pilots are successful, we'll be looking to roll it out in targeted areas across the University - I say targeted as it has enormous potential, and we will have to be careful how we resource it. I'm keen to see all of our committee papers moved into it as soon as possible for example.

We will have to be very careful about guidelines and policies for storing documents - we already have a number of places staff and students can put stuff. We have personal filestore, shared filestore, the portal (MUSE), central filestore (the SAN), our own hard discs, and now a document management system. Even more places to lose stuff....

Happy Monday

Good day today, for a Monday. Took a huge box of chocolates into work (and I mean, huge!) from a colleague on sick leave - wonder how long they'll last. A nice lunch in the sun with a colleague from another department, a few pleasant meetings in the afternoon, then spent the evening in the garden sipping wine and following Steve Job's keynote to the WWDC announcing the new iPhone and MobileMe. Loads more things for me to play with - can't wait! Lots of new Enterprise applications - for once Apple seem to be targeting business. Lets hope they get their corporate contracts and tariffs sorted out then!

Exec Team meeting this afternoon where we discussed lots of topics - sometimes we have one or two major items to discuss, other weeks we go through lots of smaller items. Today was one of the latter. We talked about team awaydays, and how to link them in to our management development framework, making sure they have clear objectives and outcomes, as well as the fun and team building element.

As we move forward with implementing ITIL, we've arranged some training and awareness sessions for key staff which will happen towards the end of the summer.

Our self service portal for the helpdesk is almost ready to go live - this will allow users to log their own calls, track calls and jobs and access a knowledge base. The second stage will be the analyst portal where second line support staff will be able to deal with and close calls.

We're also thinking about a review of the way all our media is delivered, including podcasting, streaming media, IPTV, and lecture capture. The main aim of the project will be to ensure that fragmentation of service provision is hidden from the end-user.

A plug for another blog

As part of our Innovative Communications Project, we held a Wikis and Blogs workshop yesterday - Chris Attwell, the project manager blogs about it here.

The blog itself was set up to share good practice and innovative ideas in teaching and learning, and there are some interesting posts about Good Practice week, to which we contributed with sessions on Taming Technology.

Office 2007

Discussed putting Office 2007 on our managed desktop last night - and agreed to do it this summer. Currently we have Office 2003 on it, but new PCs and laptops come equipped with Office 2007 and have done for a while. So many members of the University, especially students, are using Office 2007 on their own machines and are surprised when they come to University and find Office 2003 on the managed desktop. The Microsoft treadmill is not something we particularly want to be on, but in this case, it's unavoidable - we're supposed to be an innovative department, and providing out of date software hardly supports that vision!

There will be communication and training issues, but nothing insurmountable. Now, I'm just about to update my mac to Office 2008 and see what differences there are!

hehehe

I love the new, extended version of the latest Get a Mac ad....

Wonder if it's really John Hodgman singing?

Unified Communications

Discussion on our collaboration improvement project this morning and how we take forward new collaborative functionality on our upgraded telephone switch. Obviously a long way to go as we've only just upgraded and things are still bedding down, but we will be starting to look at how we take advantage of it soon.

I'm very interested in Unified Communications (UC), especially when I think how many ways people have to communicate with me at the moment. You can email me (but I get hundreds of emails to 2 different email addresses and I'm not always in front of a computer or connected to the internet); you can phone me (but on what number - I have a home phone, a work phone and 2 mobile phones); if I don't answer you can leave me a voice mail (on one of my 4 different voice mail boxes); or text me (to one of my 2 mobile phones); or send me an instant message; or Twitter me; or send me a message via Facebook; or through Friends Reunited, MySpace, or Linkedin; you could videoconference me; or meet me in Second Life; or send me a message via the many Internet Forums I belong to. Or - you could be really radical - and send me a letter. Or even more radical - come and see me!

But - how do you know where I am, physically or virtually, and how do you know how I want to be contacted? And how do I manage all of these different communications, and how do we integrate them into business processes?

No single communication mode is going to replace all of the others - each has a useful function and is the right solution in different circumstances. Plus, will we be willing to give up any of them? But using so many devices and methods is so cumbersome, especially if each has it's own separate way of addressing users, of creating and managing contact lists and of establishing communications sessions. What I'd like is all of these things to work together somehow and be aware of each other, with one way of addressing users and a single contact list. The ideal would also to have some presence awareness, with a context of where I am and how I'd prefer to be communicated with.

Maybe in a few years...

Banned books

A former colleague sent me this link today and asked me if I'd seen it. I hadn't, but it worried me enough to do some reading up on it. I found lots of coverage, including this web site set up to promote the cause of the arrested member of the University of Nottingham's staff. It made interesting reading, especially the fact that so many of Nottingham's staff had signed a letter in support. Very scary. It makes you realise what an important decision it is to call in the police. Once you have done, you lose all control - it doesn't matter if you then say, "oh sorry, we made a mistake, this really was a legitimate research paper" - it is out of your hands. There is only one reason I would call the police in without giving it a second thought, and that's when indecent or abusive images of children are found. That really is the police's domain to investigate (and in fact we would be breaking the law if we did anything else).

There are so many things about this case that worry me. In work terms, I'm thinking about what guidelines we might need to deal with this sort of incident. I will be on the phone to the HR Director tomorrow.