7th May 2010 Hamilton House
Mabledon Place, London

"A great event"

50 delegates attended this highly topical event in central London to explore this technical and cultural challenge.

Martin Sepion from RSC London gave an introduction to the day:

Running a college is tough these days with a host of different funding, national and local government, and regulatory agencies to satisfy in addition to the most important of all - the learner. Is technology part of the problem or is it part of the solution? This event sought to explore how integrated systems could lead to better outcomes for all a learning providers constituencies. The focus was on how effective systems could improve the efficiency of the organisation and the experience of the learner.     

We have the experience of different approaches to this challenge including several outstanding colleges such as Lewisham, Newham and Kingston College. 

Link to Martin's presentation

This was followed by some group discussion activities exploring expectations of organisational systems and how we assess a leaners expectations of college systems. What are the benefits, challenges and issues with integrating college systems.  

Group discussions

As a user what are your expectations of systems?
• Available anytime, anywhere
• Avoid duplicity and have consistent data from one source
• Intuitive to use for regular and occasional users – appropriate and useful training needed
• Authentication of users must be achievable easily and effectively – technical perspective
• System should know who you are, what you usually want and where to get it – intelligent systems that learn
• Systems should be friendly and not alien from a users perspective
• Judge me on using systems – how good am I? – pressure of the quality regime - Lewisham – soft roll out of Mahara
• Responsiveness to upgrades, problems from vendors, developers etc
• Feeling of trust in the system

What are your learners expectations of college IT?
• Users / learners – we are all learners
• Don’t expect the things you expect them to expect!
• Email – old fashioned! Facebook could be good or bad because FB is their space
• Level of internet access is not universal
• Learners want to feel safe in the VLE or other systems
• Safety issues generally should be taken seriously – smart use of technology can address safety issues
• Students like to know how they are doing; parents also – already happens in schools – FE / WBL needs to catch up
• Systems need to be unobtrusive rather than in your face
• Devolved responsibility for certain tasks – address changes, etc –the extension of this is student responsibility for their own ILP
• People want things to be done straight away – immediacy and flexibility
• Chunks of activity – organisation of interaction and being able to do something with it – engagement and interaction
• Arrogant assumption that institutional systems are data accurate
• Mobile friendly systems for access – ulearning – lack of device dependency

What are the key benefits of systems integration?
• That’s the wrong question: why is the system split into separate bits and not one system?
• Accessibility to one central piece of information – quicker access
• Giving you access to more information in the format you want/need at the appropriate level
• Improve organisational efficiency – timetabling and MIS will lead to better staff deployment (example)
• Joining up different ‘organisations’ within one – crossing compartmentalised hierarchies and structures

What encourages / discourages integration?
• Encourages – linked in; identifying and correction of inaccuracies;
• Discourages – security, proprietry systems; loss of jobs if systems are streamlined; risk of overload: if system goes down it goes down everywhere; previous bad implementations put off willingness to do new things; doing things because the system says so; transfer of existing paper system to online without review or changing business process – lack of bigger picture; understanding the benefits vs the costs – who does this and at what level in the organisation?; Vision exists but no strategy of how to get there exists; more thought into what they already have rather than get yet another system