The South West spoke of the National HE STEM Programme required a dedicated online environment to allow staff from many education institutions across the South West to share and collaborate on various projects running as part of the programme.
Each project and it's team needed a central online space to share resources, to facilitate discussion and to build a web-based record of that project through information pages and chronological records of milestones and achievements.
Activity in first 9 months:
- 39 education institutions
- 161 staff collaborating
- 41 active projects
- 484 resources shared
- 194 timeline posts
Our approach was to listen to those involved in the projects and to understand their real-life requirements of this new resource. It became clear that the evolving nature of each project would require a system that could scale with their own growth. And a system that was extremely easy to use was vital.
In response to these requirements we developed a bespoke collaboration tool that caters for the specific functional needs of University staff, which is built to scale as the number of projects increase. The tool has been developed to allow public information from each project to be dynamically pulled from the private area and integrated with the public facing website, allowing project information to be accessed by everyone.
Response from staff using the resource has been overwhelmingly positive and the numbers from the first 9 months of usage back up the fact that the tool is now central to their project development strategy.
Core tasks are made easy
First of all, we listened. Then we developed a system that made sharing and communication really easy.
- 1Unlimited projects
The ability to create new projects and new sub-projects is firmly in the hands of staff. This is their dedicated resource to use as necessary. - 2Unlimited staff accounts
There is no cap on the number of staff accounts. Project collaboration is the core of the tool and the resource scales to accommodate usage. - 3Full edit history
The project collaboration tool is built with a comprehensive historical audit trail, so it is easy to see at a glance who last updated a page, and when. - 4Easy file sharing
Sharing files is extremely easy and fully functional with the ability to group in folders, attach descriptions and upload new versions of a file. - 5'Drag and drop' page editor
All web pages within the tool can be edited via an extremely easy to use 'drag and drop' page editor giving scope to add video, images or any type of file to a page.
- 6Project timeline
Staff can post project summaries and milestones to the project timeline, allowing all members of the project team to see the project's scope and achievements at a glance. - 7Comment and discussion
Commenting on timeline posts is built in, allowing discussion to evolve between the project team around key, project-specific topics. - 8Instant group emailing
Project leaders can easily and instantly send group emails to all staff in the project team, as well as sending single emails to individual staff members for extra privacy. - 9Custom pages
Building up a 'mini-site' of web pages for each project was a core requirement, and the tool allows staff to easily add new pages, sub-pages and custom resource pages. - 10Public and private pages
Projects can remain private and only exist in a secure password protected environment. However pages can also be made public and dynamically feed into the public website.
The results
We're really delighted with it - it's great both for promoting our projects externally and for enabling our project teams, who are spread across a wide range of different universities across the SW region, to work collaboratively together."
Dr. Frances Laughton, HESTEM SW Regional Director, University of Bath
Want to know more?
Please get in touch with us. We'd love to discuss a project with you.
