During the first few weeks of 2017, teams in IT Services have been reviewing the main initiatives we are aware of for the upcoming year, and looking at how and when these are likely to be scheduled alongside the current portfolio of projects and business as usual. Some of these initiatives are quite clear and already starting, however, others are much more unknown.
Within this, there are a number of projects around teaching and learning such as:
- The next phase of Automatic Lecture Capture where a pilot of the Panopto lecture capture has taken place, and this will now inform future decisions on what role lecture capture should play at the institution. The subsequent short term and long term plans are being assessed by a working group led by Kathy Armour.
- There will be a project around Attendance Monitoring which has originated from the UKVI audit where the details of this are not yet known
- Our Plagiarism Detection Software will be reviewed to assess alternatives that might improve the quality of the service available to staff and students before a change in TurnItIn functionality takes place in July.
- The Personalised Timetable project will be extended to include the implementation of the Scientia Publish software, which provides students and staff with personalised timetables that can be delivered to any device.
There are also a number of planned initiatives around our student systems, these are:
- The continuation of the Banner XE Transformation program which is a ‘student visioning’ project to identify the University’s expectations of the ideal student record system and where a number of key themes have emerged.
- The start of the Grade Point Average work, which will calculate the new numeric grade point average score for the exam boards in June 2017. This will calculate this in BIRMS and display it on the exam board reports but this will not be displayed to the student nor on the transcript until a future rollout
- The full initiative around Module Evaluation which will review the way forward for our module evaluation system to address current issues around performance, usability and reporting. This will run alongside a wider review of the purpose and benefits of module evaluation and undertake an options appraisal and procurement project to evaluate the best product to meet our needs
- The start of the Student Placement project to implement a new University-wide student placements system from Quantum IT, where phase 1 will be for MDS and LES and Phase 2 will be the full rollout
There are a number of build projects that will impact IT Services, with some of the key ones listed below:
- The three Data Centre projects and associated system migration projects required to deliver the new Park Range Data Centre, the new Selly Oak Data Centre and the refurbishment of the existing Elms Road Data centre.
- The CTL Phase 2 project to support the new CTL build of a shared learning space with full utilisation of teaching space.
- The IT initiatives required around the new Hotel
Alongside this, there are a number of other initiatives including:
- The starting of the full project to implement and roll out the HR work Tracking module in Service Now, which is a key enabler of the transforming HR programme from both an operational effectiveness, customer experience and performance reporting perspective.
- The start of the Open Data project to implement the ePrints user interface and Arkivum archive storage solution for research data. An important initiative because the management and archiving of research data is required by several funders including the EPSRC and H2020 and failure to comply with these requirements could result in the loss of research funding.
- The initiative to replace our old Telephony infrastructure and enable the delivery of new collaborative services to improve the student experience/journey and enhance learning and research.
- A project to migrate the existing Raiser’s Edge functionality that holds the majority of the University’s supporter data including alumni, industry, and donors, to the Blackbaud CRM system
Further information on these projects will follow.