Update event – the future of prospective undergraduate online provision – 1 December
We’re running an online event on Thursday 1 December to share our latest work, give you the chance to feedback and register interest in collaborating on a preview beta release early in 2023. If you’re a contributor to the current online degree finders, or just interested in the prospective student experience, book a place.
We’ll be recording the session, so if you can’t make it you’ll be able to review later. We’ll share everything in a subsequent blog.
Date change to Thursday 1 December
This event was previously promoted as Wednesday 30 November, but due to industrial action we’ve put the date back by a day.
A reminder of what’s happening
Over the past couple of years we’ve shared a lot of research and thoughts on where we need to improve our online provision and how we might get there. Central to this has been the need to replace the degree finders which are at technical end of life.
My previous blog, slides and video of my presentation of plans for a future state (May 2022)
Since we shared this extensively researched and planned proposal, the funding for a three-year project has been formally confirmed by the University Secretary and the team has engaged the design and development agency TPX Impact as our partners in this project.
TPX Impact have worked with IS Website and Communications (who manage the current CMS EdWeb) to plan and deliver the new Web Publishing Platform which is being rolled out through 2022/23.
(TPX Impact were previously called Manifesto before a reorganisation and rebranding this year. We’ve referred to them by their old name in previous blogs.)
The design and development work with TPX Impact and Website and Communications is just beginning, but this year we have learned a lot about the prospective student experience and the University’s web publishing landscape as it impacts prospective students.
Carla’s analytics blog post about prospective undergraduate use of school and college websites
Nicole’s blog post about our content audit work and what we learned
Student experience map blog post and video
Our future state will change how we manage online content
Our user research, stakeholder engagement and auditing work is all leading to a clearer view of what our future state will be.
We know that delivering a significantly enhanced digital service will impact:
- The number of central websites providing information and services to prospective undergraduates
- The nature of content we expect to see published on college, school and subject area websites
- The range of content published within a degree programme profile
- The balance of generic and school- or subject-specific content published centrally
- The service we provide to contributors to the current degree finder
This will continue to evolve as the project progresses. We are keen to keep sharing our findings and thinking as we go so we can sense check our plans and delivery.
Join us on 1 December for updates and new insight
Agenda and approximate timings
- 1430: Recap overview of the project and an update on most recent activity
- 1450: Our work-in-progress content model – how we got here, why we’ve created it, implications for changes we plan to bring
- 1520: Break, with time for independent review of the content model and to ask questions
- 1540: User research findings summary – two short summaries of research around presentation of course content and use of video
- 1610: Towards a beta release – our plans for a preview and a callout for collaborators
- 1620: More time for questions
- 1630: End
When: Thursday 1 December, 1430 – 1630
Where: Online using Microsoft Teams. We’ll share a link before the session.
If you can’t make it
We will be recording the session, and sharing a summary via our blog so you’ll be able to catch up on anything you missed.
Any questions?
If there’s anything you want to ask ahead of the event, please do drop me an email.
Neil Allison’s contact details
