SPLASH

SPLASH is now live

Background / Context

The SPLASH project was funded under the Technology-supported learning environments: user-owned technology demonstrators strand of the JISC E-learning programme. The strand sought to “[adapt] personal systems to enable them to make use of services provided by institutional systems” and the SPLASH project achieved this by enabling the creation of student profile pages that feature widgets which bring in content from a range of University and external systems such as the VLE (Moodle, branded as Study Direct), student portal, Facebook and Flickr. The project employed the existing open source Zend Framework to leverage the web service APIs for key sites as well as employing the Netvibes web service where required.

The benefits of this approach were perceived to be:

An improvement in the student learning experience by creating new ways for classmates to communicate with one another;
An opportunity to harness the growing preference of students to communicate via online social networking and blogging sites;
An increased scope for sharing and re-purposing content in support of a less modular and course-based approach to learning
The creation of a widget based personalised dashboard and profile page which students and staff could use as a mash-up tool to draw in information they felt was relevant to themselves

The project team felt that the widget-centred approach outlined above could reconfirm individual and group relationships offline without the need to learn (and for institutions to develop) multiple new systems which may only be available to the student while they are a member of the institution.

The SPLASH project took as its starting point the fact that students entering higher education institutions spend increasing amounts of time online and interacting with Web 2.0 sites such as Flickr, YouTube and Facebook on which they have existing accounts. So whilst students are often already part of online communities when they arrive, until now there has been no way of allowing them to bring in content they have created in those spaces, either for personal and learning use or as a way of creating an identity within the University. By using such technology, content created for or in SPLASH whilst at the University will also be available to students when they leave.

The SPLASH project has therefore contributed to the outcomes and benefits of the overall JISC E-learning programme by utilising portal technology and exploring its integration into a flexible, personalised learning environment.

Please note that the public front page of SPLASH can be found at: http://splash.sussex.ac.uk/

Aims and Objectives

The points below explore the specific aims and objectives of the project which were designed to contribute to the eLearning Programme by providing a platform for staff to explore the use of Web 2.0 in their teaching and for students to personalise their interaction with institutional systems. The framework used is open source and provides a high level of flexibility in the software it is used to create.

The specific objectives are to:

Create student personal homepages based around portal/mash-up technology. Use mash-ups
Ensure that the content users will be creating, utilising and sharing that will have longevity. Keep content available
Increase the benefit to the user of having an investment in such a system. Find out what users want
Cater for students who have not used these technologies before. Find out what support users need
Introduce students to the benefits to be gained from the social interaction that blogs and other tools provide and the actual learning outcomes that can be achieved. Find out why users want to blog and what they get out of it
Allow students to use the tools provided to state personal goals, plan a project or essay and for self reflection. Provide useful tools that support learning
Allow lecturers to engage with students in new ways of learning and interaction. Make use of Web 2.0 style interactions in a learning context
Explore ideas around Web 2.0 approaches to online communication. Find out how and what users want to communicate
Explore ways of producing student homepages by utilising already existing data held within the MIS system. Generate pages automatically when users signup
Draw upon the previous JISC funded MINTED project, (http://www.sussex.ac.uk/its/minted/). Learn lessons from other projects
Provide a scalable, adaptable model for the automatic generation of customisable student homepages and for the automatic creation of user groups, friends and class lists. Make it easy to get started
Create homepages which are customisable in both template design and syndication with content. Support personalisation
Allow students to re-purpose existing content as well as continuing to develop new content which will still be available to them when they leave the institution. Enable the use of new and existing content.