I attended the very enjoyable UCISA Conference in Manchester this week and gave a presentation on how we are focussing on the student experience with our mobile strategy currently. Incidentally, the rumour going round was that Lady gaga was staying at the same hotel as the conference – I think I went up in the “cool” stakes accordingly as far as my kids are concerned!
In my presentation I talked through how w
e had started tactically with JISC funded projects to drive our pilot service for students – see http://m.bristol.ac.uk/ for example and feel free to try it out on your phone’s browser. Following lots of user feedback and some requirements-gathering workshops run by our Usability consultant, we then began to create a Mobile Strategy using an Enterprise Architecture approach. This involved defining principles to underpin our strategy, working on our information model, developing our vision of where we are now and where we want to get to and devising a roadmap to get us there. This is encapsulated in a business case for the senior decision-making body to evaluate and approve, watch this space!
Thank you to those who gave me useful feedback and discussed their own related work (for example a similar initiative at St Andrews University) and this blog post by John Townsend: http://jwt23.wordpress.com/2011/11/18/ucisa-cisg-day-two/
I found other presentations on the Student Experience very useful, for example a thought provoking presentation by Paul Taylor at the University of Warwick, who described the notion of the Student as a collaborator as opposed to a consumer or a learner, and how physical and online spaces can be created without layouts that dictate a sense of hierarchy or constraint in terms of how learning may take place. Very interesting thoughts on how the design of the physical and online environments can affect opportunities for co-creation in HE.