Any views expressed within media held on this service are those of the contributors, should not be taken as approved or endorsed by the University, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University in respect of any particular issue.

Choosing the project, why a website?

Initial project ideas: geological walks

Before starting this outreach course, I already had my ideas about outreach projects. These ideas were mostly based on the idea that geosciences are the most interesting when experienced in the field, and as such, I was planning on organising geological walks. During the 2020 summer COVID regulations, there was hope for such walks to be possible. These walks could have been organised in tandem with museums (Dynamic-Earth for example) and would aim to enlighten the public about the outstanding geology in Edinburgh (Hollyrood park, Castle rock, Blackford Hill). The other possibility was to link these walks with schools, reaching out to level 5 Edinburgh students with the idea of giving them a taste of what geosciences are about. With the dwindling number of geoscience university students and the increase in demand for geoscientists around the word, the need to reach out to prospective students had not been greater. These were my ideas at the time of submission of my project ideas to Andrew Cross on the 7th of October 2020. At the time, geological walks outside would comply with COVID regulations as it is possible to keep social distancing during the delivery.

The evolution of the ideas: from walks to a website

After meeting with Katriona Edlmann and Dylan Price on the 22nd of October 2020, we settled on 3 project ideas. The first being a geological walk for visitor centres with as potential clients Dynamic-Earth, Hollyrood rangers and Roselin chapel. The second idea was to organise geological walks with schools as an optional “discover geology day” for level 5 students. The third option was to create an online, long lasting resource for the level 5 students. This last option would be possible to do even if COVID restrictions became stricter, which they did. The client for the last two ideas would be the Edinburgh University Widening Participation Team (WP) or the Edinburgh University Marketing Team.

After presenting these ideas to the Kay Douglas and Andrew Cross, we decided on the 27th of October 2020 that, in order for this project to be COVID-proof, I should focus on an online resource. As Leonluca and myself share this interest of reaching out to level 5 students, we decided to make our projects work in tandem. With that in mind, he focused on delivering an online webinar to the students (where I am a guest speaker), and I would work on creating a website designed for these students to discover geoscience degrees (while hosting the recording of the webinar).

All that was needed now was the approval from the clients. For this purpose, we sent an email on the 10th of November 2020 to WP and the marketing team. We got no response from either until on the 23rd of November, when Andrew Cross personally followed up. Then we got a response from WP, but still none from the marketing team. We decided to meet up with Niel Speirs from WP as our client and discard the marketing team as potential client due to their lack of response. We ended up meeting with Niel Speirs on the 30th of November to pich our projects (webinar and website). During this meeting we revised and added precision to the project, with the task for Leonluca and myself to write an additional, detailed project summary to send him at the start of January 20201. We sent him the detailed document about our motivations, target audience and how we will achieve it on the 2nd of January 2021, but even with reminder emails, Neil remained unresponsive until the 26th of January. We had to wait for his “go ahead” before starting on the project, and thus endured a delay due to the late response from Neil. But after this meeting, he was happy with our propositions and I could start with setting up the website.

 

Leave a reply

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

css.php

Report this page

To report inappropriate content on this page, please use the form below. Upon receiving your report, we will be in touch as per the Take Down Policy of the service.

Please note that personal data collected through this form is used and stored for the purposes of processing this report and communication with you.

If you are unable to report a concern about content via this form please contact the Service Owner.

Please enter an email address you wish to be contacted on. Please describe the unacceptable content in sufficient detail to allow us to locate it, and why you consider it to be unacceptable.
By submitting this report, you accept that it is accurate and that fraudulent or nuisance complaints may result in action by the University.

  Cancel