Start date: 19 May 2008
End date: 30 April 2009
Funding programme: Institutional Responses to Emergent Technologies
Project website:
http://reach.mmu.ac.uk
JISC theme(s): e-Administration
Committees: JISC Organisational Support committee
E-Administration has joined e-Learning and e-Research in the spotlight of JISC assisted activity
to reflect growing recognition that education institutions, like other large organisations, can use IT
to make business process efficiency gains that enable:
- resources to be deployed more effectively to enhance the core business, in this case:
learning, teaching and research; and
- administrative services to be transformed to meet stakeholder service expectations
set by an increasingly e-enabled, self-service society.
Members of the REACh project team members are actively involved in e-Administration projects
that have demonstrated the:
- value of action-research interventions designed to enhance processes within and
across institutions;
- importance of an acute sense of audience when contemplating administrative
interventions as change can be interpreted differently by different groups; and
- pportunities for using blogs, special interest groups and development forums to
build communities focused on ensuring interventions deliver maximum institutional
benefit.
The REACh project will continue MMU's capacity-building work, blending existing JISC
experience with specialist expertise in Java development, mobile learning and student experience
evaluation, in a university-wide multi-disciplinary team, comprising both staff and students.
Project team members have already established a provisioning service from MMU's Student
Records System to its (Blackboard Vista) Enterprise Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). IMS
Enterprise messages posted to the System Integration Application Programming Interface (SIAPI)
enable areas to be created within the VLE for learners from one or more courses or modules.
Over 1,000 staff use the VLE regularly to interact with over 16,000 learners, and many make use
of its announcements feature to communicate administrative information, such as reminders of
submission deadlines and timetable adjustments. Currently, learners can only read these
announcements by logging in to the VLE, which is only accessible via a web browser with a Java
Run Time Environment.
The REACh project will build on this work, using web services exposed by the VLE to develop
open source software to publish personalised ATOM/RSS feeds and integrate with MMU's SMS
(text messaging) gateway to push urgent messages to mobile numbers that learners supply
through a web-based subscription management service.
Interestingly, the e-Framewor's Messaging Service Genre has not yet considered SMS
messaging, so there is a clear opportunity for contribution from this work and the Completion
Report will be written with this in mind.
Crucially, the aim of the project is not only to develop a piece of software for which there is
considerable interest from the Blackboard Vista VLE user community, but to publish research on
how diverse student groups respond when administrative information is made available via these
new “emergent technology” channels.
Exploratory work already undertaken with MMU‟s Computing students has confirmed interest
amongst students in accessing administrative announcements using emerging technologies. The
work has also alerted the REACh project to practical issues that will be explored further through
action-research and dialogue between learners, tutors, service providers and university
administrators, such as the frequency with which students change their mobile number, privacy
agreements and the importance of charging mechanisms that fit with institutional cost centres.
The work proposed is aligned not only with the JISC's high level e-Administration goal of
promoting creative, community-informed standards-based solutions to institutional process
problems; the prototyping and evaluation work fits directly with MMU's drive for user-centred
assembly of institutional information resources within its Managed Learning Environment (MLE).
The action-research dimension of the REACh work is mutually informing with a current PhD study
on m-Learning innovation in UK HE that will ensure rigorous and sustainable knowledge
outcomes, which will extend the depth and scope of the findings beyond the JISC-funded activity.