New College Durham
| Contact Details: | John Widdowson, Principal & Chief Executive, john.widdowson@newdur.ac.uk Lynn Bertram, Executive Support Manager, lynn.bertram@newdur.ac.uk Alan Race, Assistant Director IT and Purchasing, alan.race@newdur.ac.uk |
| Type of Project: | New Build on existing site. |
| Start/End Date: | Started work on site January 2003 with a year's design work previously. Build completed September 2005 |
Technology
The emphasis with technology is to provide a robust infrastructure that can allow the College to move forward on a number of fronts. The infrastructure includes wireless networking throughout and VOIP. Technology is now all pervasive and any room can be a computer room.
The College is investing heavily in ILT staff development from induction of new staff to refresher courses with ILT featuring in the annual staff development week. They are however wary of pushing ahead too quickly with new technologies that have a significant learning curve for staff and have not, for example, adopted interactive whiteboards to any great extent although they are experimenting with technologies such as voting systems and podcasting.
The emphasis is strongly on better learning and teaching rather than technology for its own sake and the College is about to create a senior level post of Head of e-Learning and Learning Technology to provide leadership in this area. Its approach is exemplified in the review of material on the VLE to move it beyond being a repository for power point slides. The College has identified pockets of enthusiasm for e-learning in areas such as catering and hairdressing.
The College describes itself as having a 'pragmatic' view towards ILT with the confidence that the infrastructure will allow them to go as far as they like. The job now is to understand how best to use the capacity they have. The College offers some remote access and online services and notes that HE level learners are much more amenable than FE to using web services. They do not believe that remote access capability will be a significant enabler for FE provision until more services can be provided via mobile phones and digital TV.
New College Durham has found that the technology in the new build has enabled it to make significant changes to its business processes. Their approach to business systems is similar to that with regard to learning technologies in that they do not want to find themselves as early adopters beta testing systems. They describe themselves as 'enthusiastic but cautious' about the opportunities afforded but were nonetheless amongst the first FE colleges to adopt a full Records Management system. They try to take a whole College view of business processes and to base them around technology where possible. They now have online enrolment on campus, computerised timetabling and computerised attendance registers.
The first step towards computerising attendance registers was not a success as it relied on staff completing records that were then fed into an IT system and loss and errors occurred. The College realised it had been a mistake to think that staff would be too technology adverse and they should have taken more of a leap so they moved to a system where tutors fill in records online in the classroom and this is working well.
They note that staff have to be very confident of the infrastructure to move from paper.
IT infastructure was kept out of the main contract with the architects. Desktop and network support has been outsourced to Fujitsu. Staff turnover was a factor in deciding to outsource but application development and support has been retained in-house as this is 'too close to the core business'. Hardware procurement was excluded from the outsourcing contract as the College believes it got a better deal by separating the two. Most equipment such as servers and end user equipment is leased. The planned replacement cycle is:
Servers - 5 years
Laptops - 5 years
PCs - 4 years
There is a rolling programme of replacement rather than a 'big bang' approach.
Adding Value
The College believes that the pervasiveness of technology and the integration of systems makes the partnership between the College and its staff and students more direct. The downside is of course that so much of it is now mission critical should it ever fail.
The Assistant Director of IT and Purchasing notes that his role used to be firefighting whereas now it is finding ways to enable people to do the new things they want to do.
The CCTV with 360o cameras has been very successful in creating a secure environment and protecting vulnerable students e.g., tracing students with learning difficulties if they become lost. It has also helped reduce the 'iterative theft' of PCs whereby thieves start with a mouse then take the keyboard and so on.
