Stage 1 - user engagement cycle
This page provides access to some of the outputs from our user engagement activity that was carried out prior to putting in our bid to JISC for funding under the Users and Innovation stream.
The key stakeholders for this project are:
- Students - representatives from the University of Sussex Student Union (USSU) are enthusiastic about the project and its potential to support students
- Career development advisors - the Career Development and Employment Centre (CDEC) are fully engaged with this project
- Teaching staff
- Academic office - supporting the process of creating skill tags for courses within the SkillClouds pilot
- Student and Academic Services - overall responsibility for improving the student experience
- Potential students
We started to develop our ideas for the SkillClouds project in May 2007. This is an early diagrammatic representation of the SkillClouds project:
Click the thumbnail to load: SkillClouds project overview, May 2007.
We then had a number of brain-storming activities around evolving the project, and have uploaded some of the sheets into Flickr for sharing:
www.flickr.com
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A significant development evolved as we discussed the project with stakeholders, particularly students. We realised that if the SkillClouds incorporated activities from students' personal development, then it would be an even more powerful idea. This is a revised plan of how the project would work:
Click the thumbnail to load: SkillClouds project overview with student generated content, September 2007.
This is a summary of the kinds of personal development activities that stakeholders such as students and career development advisors are keen to include in the SkillClouds project:
Click the thumbnail to load: Brief description of stakeholder views on student activities.
We worked with the stakeholders to generate a set of scenarios describing the different ways that some of the stakeholders would participate with the SkillClouds pilot.
Click the thumbnail to load: Scenarios for the way that various stakeholders would participate with the SkillClouds pilot.
As we worked together, the idea emerged that we could use an existing social bookmarking service to enable our administrators and faculty to generate and validate the skill tags needed for each course. This would rely on the fact that all our Sussex courses already have a set of pages descriptive pages available from the University of Sussex site. We could use the APIs offered for social bookmarking services to "pre-seed" entries for all relevant courses within the pilot, and then support the use of the social bookmarking service within the University.
The thumbnail screenshot below shows the "My del.icio.us" page for the Sussex Skills user. As an example, a few pages from the Sussex Course Directory have been tagged with some example skill tags (the skills are purely for illustrative purposes).
Click on the image to navigate to: The courses that have been tagged by user "sussex.skills" in social bookmarking service del.icio.us.
This was demo-ed as part of the User Engagement cycle for the SkillClouds project.