We do a lot of engagement via University mailing lists, and on the whole do pretty well in terms of response and reaction. I wanted to share with you a few things I’ve learned over the years in the course of communicating with the communities we support.

With the end of the long migration of content from Polopoly into EdWeb now in sight we are looking at how important website content can be preserved and potentially archived. The decommissioning of Polopoly will start 1 June 2016 and editors will have full access up until then.

I’m introducing a new usability testing service for the University, for an initial trial period up to the end of July 2016. It will be an easy and convenient way to embed user insight into your development projects, and provide learning opportunities for anyone interested in trying the techniques out for themselves.

In the Website Support Clinic this month, we were asked about working efficiently with the MyEd Event Booking system – and specifically, how to consume feeds of forthcoming events onto EdWeb pages so that visitors could browse and book onto courses effectively, and without manual intervention on the part of the website’s editors.

The Desktop Recorder software on Media Hopper is a great resource for creating training videos.

This year’s UCISA conference is being held in Manchester from 16 to 18 March. I’m contributing a ‘university showcase’ in which I’ll talk through how we use collaborative usability testing as part of our development processes.

Digital transformation is a popular term cropping up in many organisational strategies, including our own. But what’s it all about? I attended an excellent seminar last week that prompted me to reflect on my views on the subject.

On January 28, I went along to the first of a monthly showcase series on how learning technology is being used around the University. Hosted by Learning Technology and eLearning@Ed, this inaugural session focused on interactive teaching and learning, particularly using media to enhance the student experience.

This month’s Web Publishers’ Community session included talks on Lean UX, responsive widgets and the monthly project update on the EdWeb CMS. We were also joined by two guest speakers: Ewan McAndrew, the new Wikimedian in Residence and Stephen Donnelly, who spoke about the new media asset management system, Media Hopper.

Back in September 2015, I attended a day-long workshop on Lean UX, led by author of the book, Jeff Gothelf. The day was all about how large organisations can adapt to the challenges of today’s business environment where small start up companies are significantly disrupting established business models. In this post I’ll run through the […]