We have a number of significant updates for EdWeb that we are releasing together and deploying all at the same time. It’s been quite a while since our last deployment so we are bundling together a number of enhancements to the Profile content type including better support for PhD students, as well as our new flexible JavaScript and web application support and a set of core and module updates that complete the picture.

Prospective postgraduate research students are a very important part of the University and there are a number of staff looking to improve their experience of how they find a supervisor and can review past and current research topics as a way of exploring what they would like to do. The initial work to create a flexible Profile for both staff and students has been very successful with over two thousand Profiles being created.

Enhancements to our dedicated pages for staff and student profiles

The first release of the Profile content type was a year ago and some key people supporting staff and students in the Colleges in creating these profiles have gathered some additional requirements to improve the data held – especially for PhD students. This work was sponsored by the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences – so many thanks to them.
A number of changes have been made:

1. A checkbox to flag profiles as being for a PhD student.
2. This disables some fields (work phone, job role etc. and enables some new fields (PhD tab with thesis title, year of study and supervisor links) to allow more student target profiles.
3. More data pulled from PURE to display research activities
4. A new conferences tab to allow staff and students to promote the work they are doing attending, speaking at and organising conferences.
5. Profiles can now be flagged with level 6 items from the University Organisational Hierarchy so that tables can be generated automatically on Profile Overview pages. As Profiles are added or removed they will appear or disappear from these tables automatically rather than having to be updated manually making the process much more efficient and saving staff time.
6. Some important accessibility enhancements to mark the contact details with some hidden data that gets picked up screen reader software used by people with visual impairments to make it easier to find contact details, work address and their availability.
7. Some work to tidy up the heading structure so that it has a more logical hierarchy that nests properly. This is strongly recommended to enhance the accessibility of the content. Some of the heading text has been updated too following feedback.

There is likely to be a number of projects around the University to support the strategy of helping to promote the excellent research being carried out by staff and PhD students. Our Profile enhancements are just one step to help in that process.It’s actually part of a bigger complex problem of where to hold all this relevant information and how best to make it available to search and display.

How to keep up to date with what’s happening in EdWeb

We post to this blog at the point of every deployment. The posts are tagged so that you can see the complete history of deployments and check back periodically to see what’s new. It’s one of the best and easiest ways to keep up to date.

Complete history of EdWeb deployments

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