Lessons Learned

What are the lessons learned from the project?

Phosphorix was a project partner and not a supplier - deliberately - the expectation was that the portal would evolve as inspiration from other Phosphorix projects and other JISC eLearning projects was absorbed. However, this had to work alongside the focused demands of the users and this made balancing the development work difficult. With hindsight it may have been better to specify the system requirements at an early stage - as in traditional system development - rather than trying to implement a constantly changing system.

In the early stages a good deal of development time was spent on making the portal look attractive to users. One could argue that a pilot project does not need to look that attractive but there is no doubt that this had a positive effect on bringing the pilot institutions on board.

Deploying the portal on a single server meant that students at all three pilot institutions could see each others sequences. For a pilot phase this did not necessarily matter, but it would have made more sense to configure the server differently at the outset of the project.

Initial PDP sequences were quite long and, whilst functional, would need re-thinking in terms of re-usability.