Effective communication isvital for students on work placements. As students move around, they must have access to the information and up-to-date contact details they need. NapierUniversity in Edinburgh worked with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Silversands to develop a pilot project under the Rapid DeploymentProgramme using new features in Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 to enhance its student portal.
Document published November 2006
Business Needs
NapierUniversity in Edinburgh is committed to improving its use of information and communications technology (ICT) to support teaching and learning. It has developed a student portal to deliver a unified managed learning environment (MLE), which gives learners a single point of access for information spread across several internal systems, including the university intranet, WebCT e-learning platform, and library information system.
Additional refinements to the portal are informed by an ongoing review process, incorporating feedback from employees and students—with areas for improvement identified by the IT department. One of these is to improve support for first-year students on clinical placements, which are required by several degree programmes in the School of Nursing and Midwifery.
The university needs to ensure key contact details, such as current postal address and contact telephone number, are accurate and up to date. This is particularly important when students change locations frequently for work placements. This data, held by university administrators in the SITS student records database, is not easily accessible through the MLE.
Course leaders also wanted to give placement students a single point of access for all their course details. Students access the university portal while on placement and need to be kept informed of relevant notifications and useful information. This includes reference documents about the placement process containing useful support information, announcements, and reminders for submitting related coursework and other important documents.
Students are on different degree programmes across the school. The challenge is to ensure they only receive information relevant to their programme, rather than have to sift through content that isn’t relevant to them.
Solution
Silversands, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, was providing Napier with strategic advice and high-end consultation on developing the student portal. After meeting with course leaders, Silversands immediately saw a way to consolidate course information for students.Neil Wells-West, Information Worker Specialist, Silversands, says: “The University needed an easy hook into SITS to pull out the required personal information. We suggested the Business Data Catalogue (BDC) feature of Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 could be the answer.”
Silversands suggested Napier could implement a pilot using the new software by enrolling in the Microsoft Rapid Deployment Programme (RDP), which gives customers partnering with Microsoft the opportunity to use and then provide feedback on pre-release products. Scott Walkingshaw, Student Portal Project Manager for NapierUniversity, says: “The RDP programme presented a perfect opportunity to explore what looked a very promising solution.”
A scoping exercise was carried out in March 2006 and accepted by the university the following month. A proof of concept was built by mid May and piloted with a group of 120 first-year nursing students. Walkingshaw says: “The nursing students were a perfect choice for the pilot because they have several placements in different hospitals for eight-week periods. They need easy access to practical information about forthcoming placements—the type of hospital, patients, and specific holiday dates vary between institutions. Students need to know this in advance.”
The university had to schedule the RDP project around work for the existing portal, but completed the pilot investigation and scoping work in 20 days. Server installation and infrastructure development took another 10 days, followed by a further 20 days of development work. Wells-West says: “My developers worked on developing the BDC functionality using data from SITS to make the most of the new portal components in SharePoint Server 2007.Silversandswas on hand to escalate specific queries to Microsoft and give additional assistance as required.” This included customising the search facility to help students search for employee details such as role, location, and contact details.
Benefits
The pilot went live at the start of August 2006 and has been a great success for developers, teachers, and learners. Developers could access information on the SITS database more easily and use this to improve the student portal:
• Development time is faster and easier with BDC “no-code” tools.
• Server load is reduced, improving overall system performance.
•Enhanced personalisation capabilities help deliver key information more effectively.
• Students can ensure contact details are up to date.
• Easy-to-use interface for lecturers.
Wells-West says: “The BDC functionality of SharePoint Server 2007 gives developers a set of out-of-the-box tools that can be used without the need to write specific routines for applications such as SITS. One of the Napier developers spent months developing a Web service limited in scope and functionality. Any changes would need further development time. BDC offers what is, in effect, a no-code solution—freeing up developers to refine solutions more quickly and easily.”
This has also improved overall system performance. Walkingshaw says: “The Web Part we developed pulled information from SITS for each user session, which had an impact on our back-end systems. BDC supports more efficient caching and is much more scalable. We are now much more confident we can add to the portal functionality, giving students an improved service.”
When nursing students log on to the new portal, they can easily review their contact information and notify the university of incorrect details. They also have improved access to the information they need, which employees can update from a single point of access. Walkingshaw says: “Most lecturers are not technology experts, but found the new system easy to use—they were up and running after a 10-minute training session. Course leaders are unable to have as much contact as they would like with students on work placements. The new portal helps give better support to everyone when they need it most.
“Feedback on the pilot has been superb. Administrators feel this is a much better way of communicating with students compared to the existing system. Posting information and documents is now quick and simple, and setting an expiry date helps ensure the information is relevant and up to date. Students like fast access to relevant information through a single sign-on. We can now put other great ideas into practice and use them across school and programme levels.”
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.Document published November 2006