The first response to some of the questions in the section comes from Writtle College, and is drawn from the JISC funded GIMIS project

Embedding the system

What stage are you at in the embedding of your MLE?

The GIMIS Project is now full deployed both operationally and pedagogically throughout the College, including our sister College (Shuttleworth College) in Bedfordshire. All staff and students have access, including access via an extranet to access information externally subject to being authenticated and authorised to view specific content.

Students actively use StudentNet, as an integral part of using the Information Technology infrastructure whilst on campus. Course material and lecture notes are published on StudentNet, in addition to personalised learner information.

As part of the ongoing work with an in-house Accessibility Project, a student with special needs has been co-opted onto the Dis-Tribute Project Team, who is now actively working with the cooperation of the Student Union to ‘Champion’ the customisation of StudentNet, to meet the bespoke needs of individual students with special needs. It is also envisaged that this feedback from the Student Union will provide future enhancements. It is further envisaged that accessibility issues of this nature will work in concert with the ongoing curriculum developments to compliment traditional methods of teaching with electronically delivered content on StudentNet.

What approach is being taken? A project approach, overall institutional strategy?

The College is currently undertaking a series of Strategic reviews to ensure that the various user groups in place throughout the College help to in-form the overall Information Services Strategy.

The GIMIS Steering Group comprising of the Assistant Principal (Business) acting as Chair, Assistant Principal (Academic), Head of Further Education, an independent (non educational) representative and the GIMIS Project Team, will continue to discuss how and where GIMIS may benefit the College pedagogically as well as operationally in the future. Demonstrating a clear commitment of the senior management of the College, agreeing and committing to the continuing development of GIMIS following the cessation of JISC funding in June 2003.

Clearly GIMIS is instrumental in helping to shape future strategic direction of the College, enabling the College to leverage and deploy the extraction and manipulation and dissemination of information and data, previously unavailable or at best an ideology.

What changes are being made to enable this to happen?

The College has now made the two temporary members of the GIMIS Project Team permanent members of staff, previously on a two fixed term contract for the JISC funded period.

StaffNet and StudentNet respectively are the information portals from which students and staff can gain access to institutional information e.g. Policy & Procedures. Additional information is constantly being added e.g. all of the Quality Assurance Agency inspectorate information will be published via this medium. Prior to the inception of the GIMIS project staff or students would have had to visit various departments or refer to Notice Boards, to access the information.

A number of legacy PCs unable to support the technology i.e. Internet Explore 4+ or are not fit for purpose have been replaced with new PCs.

Organisationally: Staff roles? Departmental roles?

The GIMIS core engine gives tremendous organisational flexibility to allow the College to extract Management Information Systems (MIS) data near instantaneously, which previously would have resulted in a series of additional process steps in order to extract the same information over a protracted period of elapsed time.

Information can now be disseminated either within departments or across the College as a whole, especially when data needs to be exchanged and manipulated with our Sister College Shuttleworth, as this can now be done dynamically.

This permits staff to have their present roles enriched, as a number of manual process have become redundant as a result of becoming automated as part of the data extraction and manipulation of the underlying data presented to users. This enables Managers to assign or be able to take on additional workloads.

Ownership of departmental data and information is now devolved down to the departments, to ensure that information is accurate and fit for purpose. By devolving accountability down to the departmental level, institutional confidence in the information has risen, as staff now begin to trust the information, having previously doubted the information due to known discrepancies.

Administratively? – new systems? Roles?

A number of system management screens are currently under development, to simplify ongoing administration and publication of material on StaffNet and StudentNet, now that GIMIS is fully deployed throughout the institution.

With the advent of GIMIS, staff are now able to become highly mobile, as they are able to access the information via an Extranet. This is particularly useful when colleagues are on the road attending for example recruitment fairs, they are now able to present information to potential students, as though they were on campus.

In future, as part of the procurement policy, any new systems that the College wishes to procure as a prerequisite will have to compatible and be able to integrated with GIMIS. This helps to reinforce the commitment of the College to have a fully integrated system.

Publishers of online material are sent a system generated email to advise that their publication is about to reach the stated expiry threshold for publication (the maximum being one year), they are requested to re-authorise the material via the management screen and the information will be republished or the information will no longer be presented (the content is not deleted it simply will not be visible).

Various enhancements have now been added to StaffNet to allow staff to use the elements of the functionality to produce for example labels directly from StaffNet, which previously required MIS intervention to extract the raw data from the Student Record System to populate the labels. Notwithstanding, the improvement in efficiency and throughput of work, associated cost drivers become redundant year-on-year.

Teaching and learning?

At the next revision point, the College’s Learning & Teaching Strategy will be amended to incorporate the pedagogic functionality that can now be deployed operationally via StudentNet.

Academic staff are now actively encouraged to publish their learning material on StudentNet, which is now taught as part of the curriculum under Learning Methods.

Part of the ongoing curricula developments will include the provision for Virtual Learning, which will work in concert with GIMIS acting as the Managed Learning Environment element.

How are staff and students being brought on board?

Below are the methods deployed at the College are used to introduce in the first instance staff and students to StaffNet and StudentNet respectfully.

• Staff
  • Staff Inductions;
  • Staff Development Sessions;
  • News & Events;
  • Telephone Support;
  • Online Comments;
  • Provision of Data.
• Students
  • Induction;
  • Learning Methods;
  • Course Tutors;
  • Learning Support;
  • Student Union;
  • Telephone Support;
  • Dis-Tribute Project.

  Ongoing training and development group sessions or specific one-to-one advice and guidance are offered throughout the year.

What development issues do have at the moment?

There are no specific development issues that the community would benefit from, that have arisen to-date.

What advice/lessons do you have?

To carefully manage expectations of users, as additional functionality is added, as users only see in their minds eye what they require, the developer sees the programmatic issues arising. This in some circumstances can require quite complex processing to compute the outcome.

Dealing with the limitations of the technology being used in a web context e.g. HTML not supporting rotating text i.e. 90° as supported in Excel, requiring lateral thought on the part of the developer to provide an adequate compromise and not ‘cheating’ by displaying the text as a graphic.

Creep scope, is very difficult to manage as all too often a developer can become side tracked into developing additional functionality over and above the basic functionality originally anticipated or requested.

Prioritising work-in-progress balanced against the needs of the request being made, whilst at the same time not seen to be favouring one department over another and being sucked into the politics of the institution.