Excellence Gateway
Published: 27 May 2008
This case study was produced by JISC RSC (Regional Support Centres) South East on behalf of the Excellence Gateway.
Sector relevance: Further education colleges, Sixth Form colleges/schools
Keywords: Learner support, 14-19, management of teaching and learning resources, management of ICT infrastructure, ILT strategy, management information system (MIS), virtual learning environment (VLE), improving teaching and learning, improving responsiveness to learners, improving institutional effectiveness
As learning providers across the country continue to develop their management information systems (MIS), organisational intranets, virtual learning environments (VLEs), email systems and websites, so the need to combine this wealth of disparate data grows. This case study highlights how Esher College has made excellent use of MS SharePoint to achieve quite remarkable levels of integration.
Esher College, based in Surrey, caters primarily for full-time 16-19 year-old students during the day, when approximately 1,500 students from over 100 different schools follow individual learning programmes relevant to their aspirations and ambitions. Alongside this, the College also runs a wide range of activities and courses focused on the needs of adults, businesses and the wider community, mainly taking place in the evenings, at weekends and outside of normal term time. The College delivers a first class ICT system and is a Beacon College with an ILT strategy built around Microsoft products.
As colleges across the country continue to develop their MIS,organisational intranets, VLEs and websites, so the need to integrate this wealth of disparate data grows. Increasingly, educational organisations are trying to amalgamate all of these often isolated building blocks into a seamless, consistent, web-based environment that can be accessed both internally and externally by staff and students alike.
At the moment, learning providers are either adapting their VLEs (eg Moodle) to integrate as much information as possible, or organisations are customising their own websites to interface with their various data sources. The third way is to use Microsoft's SharePoint, a program specifically designed to integrate with MIS databases, data repositories, email systems, internal networks and web portals.
Since upgrading to MS SharePoint 2007 last year, Esher College now has one of the finest examples of a tightly integrated web-based portal, allowing single-point access to all necessary information. Managers, tutors, admin staff and students can now access the following information from any location using a consistent interface:
Before the introduction of SharePoint, the College possessed and processed a wealth of data which sat in discrete systems, could only be accessed on campus and could not be shared easily. Resources were hard to find, duplication prevalent, and the interface was impersonal and not very user-friendly.
When planning and developing the new system, Esher established a clear set of priorities. The SharePoint implementation had to:
The student database is synchronised with the College Active Directory twice a day, which means that all changes to the student database are automatically updated in the Active Directory. Active Directory Organisational Units have been established and these feed into the SharePoint system in the form of: Permissions and Security, SharePoint Audiences and Exchange Mail Groups. The use of Audiences allows the College to make certain items only available to specifically defined groups. The system incorporates a comprehensive and powerful search facility right across SharePoint, allowing searches to be made on both title and content, whilst obeying permission restrictions.
The present configuration of Esher's SharePoint system allows individuals, classes, courses, tutors, administration staff, managers and the public to communicate through a single point. Such communications can be via email, SMS, collaborative sites, news, shared calendars and the college website. Using the standardised interface, staff can manage the curriculum, departments, courses, staff, teams, resources and the MIS. All administration tasks - from application, admission and enrolment through to finance and estates - can now be successfully executed via the SharePoint system.
Image 1: My Site for Students - a student's homepage
The system is configured as four overlapping portals: My Site for Students, My Site for Staff, the College Portal and the Staff Portal. Personal sites include timetable, files (in various views), assignments, student's own record and banner advertisements disseminating the latest College news. Although the interface is consistent throughout, colour coding for the different portals is used to orientate the user.
Student records include:
Students have access to all of the above, with the exception of the correspondence log. The timetable on a student or staff personal site is linked to the College MIS. If it is changed - even temporarily - all other linked timetables will be updated automatically. The progress and summative assessment areas are particularly effective, utilising colour bar graphs and “instrument gauges” in the target-setting screen.
The College Portal contains Subject Areas, College Services and Student Activities. Each department has its own site, which it can customise. Teachers have read and write permissions whilst students have read-only rights, with the exception of a collaboration area, which is subdivided into departments, committees, etc.
Image 2: Subject areas on Esher College's portal
The Staff Portal comprises five areas:
Not all the facilities provided within the Esher system are native components of SharePoint. Some modules - such as assessment, target-setting and marking records - are customised add-ons, although they do feed back captured data through SharePoint itself. SharePoint does include Learning Gateway and other assessment tools, but the College felt they were inappropriate for its purposes.
Esher now has a college-wide system which has significantly improved its infrastructure. Staff and students now use SharePoint technology to support themselves in teaching, learning and administration. They have better access to curriculum content and targeted information, which means that they only receive what is relevant to them. The portals have a consistent corporate look and feel resulting from a clean and simple site template.
Another key benefit is offsite access to SharePoint document libraries. Staff and students can work from home or indeed anywhere across the globe with online access to external resources. Now students have a single place of reference for their timetables, college announcements, resources and assignment data - wherever they are geographically.
The College developed the system with a phased approach. It ran a pilot for one and a half terms involving as many staff and students as possible to improve feedback and increase the level of ‘buy in'. Initially, the College asked for all assets on the system to be meta-tagged, which proved to be prohibitively time-consuming, and was discontinued. As it turns out, the SharePoint search facility has proved so successful, the lack of meta-tags have not been missed. The SharePoint system is very scalable and its tight integration with Office 2007 provides even greater functionality.
The next stage of development for Esher is to replace the website with SharePoint in order to gain greater flexibility and to develop its digital portfolios.
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