Last week we hosted the second unconference organised by UKEducamp. Some of the team have been part of the organising committee throughout, and most of us took part on the day. We all took something from this fantastic volunteer-led free event and recommend more higher education digital colleagues get involved.

UK EduCamp is a volunteer-run organisation who run unconferences to bring together digital professionals in higher education. We’re hosting the upcoming event on Friday 12 January. It’s free and open to book a place.

We’re running an open invite event on Microsoft Teams to share what we learned through the user research conducted during the summer of 2023. Join us to better understand the experience of prospective postgraduate research students, with the majority focus on PhD.

Last week we launched a preview of what undergraduate degree profiles will look like when the new system goes live. We call this a beta.

The annual web content-themed conference for higher education professionals is happening in Manchester this year, from 16 to 17 October. Lauren and I are contributing sessions, and the team are looking forward to a couple of days of learning and networking with colleagues across the sector.

Last month I attended a one-day UK EduCamp unconference at the University of Sheffield. The relaxed format provided lots of opportunity to discuss and learn about burning topics for digital teams in the sector, and to connect with colleagues old and new.

Listening to a podcast by journalist and author Jon Ronson, I was struck by what he had to say about social media echo chambers and feedback loops. It made me think about the parallels between his observations and findings, and how we run user-centred projects. In particular, the importance of working in the open.

Provision for prospective posgraduate research (PGR) students is largely devolved to schools, which makes it challenging to work out what is useful to publish in the centrally-managed Study section of the website. We’re undertaking discovery phase user research to better understand what students are doing and what might enhance their experience.

We have concluded that it’s not going to be feasible to release our new service for prospective students as planned next year, due to our dependency on the Web Publishing Platform which is not yet ready to roll out.

We’ll use an extended slot at this week’s Web Publishers Community to update on our progress so far this year, covering: timelines, content design and collaboration, user research and usability testing.