I did my first degree at Coventry University — Communication, Culture and Media — which I really enjoyed but the social aspect was a really big thing for me. I could never really understand why people would want to study alone, at a distance, in their own time. I wanted to get a feel for it all as I was designing websites for people who this kind of study appealed to. So I learned more about all the support the OU gives to students than web design. It was intriguing meeting other students online who proudly listed all the courses they’d studied in the email signatures.

The course was assessed by a number of electronic assignments and I didn’t really have interaction with the course tutor but it all rolled along nicely and I got a certificate at the end to add to my portfolio. I’ve been tempted to take a few courses in the last four years but have never got round to it. We have course materials for everything in the OU library and I’ve leafed through endless excellently produced materials just for fun. The OU lets it’s staff do courses for free. So why don’t I just crack on and do some study?

Well.. I just feel I’m too busy. I find I have little free time as it is to socialise and enjoy my new son. Oliver. Maybe when things are less hectic I’ll dive in to the veritable glittering delights.

I do have one big advantage over other people in my team though — I approach each new project from the point of view of someone who is new to OU study, rather than a seasoned OU pro. So for my latest project — Student Induction and Orientation — I’m forced to do some proper research (focus groups, user testing) with Students to find out what both new undergraduates and new postgraduates need when they are wondering what the OU is all about.

So maybe you have considered studying with the OU. What has stopped you so far? And maybe you have recently begun studying with the OU? What would have made it easier for you to get started? What support and advice would you have wanted to receive that you didn’t get? I’m very keen to hear.

Induction web sites (for both undergraduate and postgraduate students)

My team first created induction websites for students way back in 2001. Back then they had grand plans of creating reusable chunks of XML code to be splatted onto various different course sites using XSLT. These grand visions never really worked as planned as the OU never did get their CMS of the time, Tridion to work properly.

I’m heading up the project to create an offering for the largely ignored postgraduate students as well as those undertaking undergraduate study. As you’ll imagine, the stakeholders are wide and varied for this one but I’m hoping to get some some social web stuff in the sites from the get go. OU staff want to buddy up? Students with ideas? What should we be doing? Let me know.

Study at the OU (phase two)

We launched the latest version of the online prospectus earlier in the year. Now we have the opportunity to finish the job. Expect a new and more exciting homepage, better designed and functioning course descriptions as well as some refinements to the information architecture.

Student Services Intranet

This site is getting so old and creaky now. The Dreamweaver/Contribute workflow still works remarkably well and seems to suit the staff. However, it would be nice to evolve into using a proper fit-for-purpose CMS like Drupal where we could properly separate the content, design and development layers to make technical updates less of a headache.

We’ve got the opportunity to do some decent guerrilla usability testing with staff in order to truly establish their needs in the various areas of the OU that call upon Student Services.

Services for Disabled Students (redesign)

A site that ought to be a shining example of the OU’s approach to web accessibility. At the moment it falls a little short of the mark with it’s confusing navigation systems and lack of respect for basic design principals. We’ll be sorting out the information architecture, giving it a fresh coat of pain and getting the Plain English folk in to address some of the institutional gobbledygook.

OU web standards, styles and guidelines website

Something that I’ve been working on sporadically as time has allowed. So far we’ve got a wiki which details basic requirements of all OU websites from a business, accessibility, usability, SEO and brand perspective. It covers things like the standard header and footer, fonts, colours, grids, photography, illustration, writing for the web and the like. We want to encourage more people from the OU to get involved in this so if you’re up for it, get in touch.

Aside from a few bits and pieces here and there, that’s me for the next few months. I’ve decided that I’m going to report my progress on the projects here now that I’ve retired my OU blog (too restrictive for me I’m afraid). I’m hoping I might be able to encourage some comments here and there so don’t be shy.

I had recently attended the first Future of Web Apps conference in London and had been fired up by Tom Coates‘ talk about the future of data mashups (owning ones own data and reusing it in various contexts) and was looking forward to building on this philosophy. Of course my main problem was that a massive institution such as the Open University is was very wary about sharing data and integrating with third-party applications and the project seemed to want to recreate apps like Flickr and Delicious rather than use their API. Hitting this brick wall was a bit of a setback but I soldiered on regardless with the design, hoping that the aesthetic approach might rub off on the development side and push the boundaries of what was possible with an ePortfolio.

Rather than document my progress here, I started posting to my OU blog instead. We went through various iterations of the design, building on user feedback and testing. The biggest problem was that ‘user’ was defined as the course teams who would prescribe the software in their courses rather than the students who would use it. So the whole thing was designed and built by committee and I ended up a little dispirited by it all. I still have some conceptual design work that I hope might be used if the project is ever revisited in the future. For now, MyStuff is available to OU students and it will be interesting to see how they cope with it.

I was also involved with many other interesting projects at the Open University. I was asked to find out how the OU could support students using mobile phone channels such as SMS and the mobile web. I undertook some research and carried out a pilot SMS alert service with a small group of 450 students. The reaction was very positive and I’m now looking into the ways in which the OU can adapt to provide a similar service to all students given its rather complex business model.

I worked on the redeveloped OU online prospectus, Study at the OU, with my ex-colleague Stephen Turvey. We were asked by the Head of Online Services, Ian Roddis, to create a fresh, usable and accessible design that could be user tested to death in order to create an experience that would help recruit and retain students in a era where government funding for students doing a second or equivalent degree was being withdrawn. We came up with something minimal and easy to apply to the complex existing systems. The project is ongoing and we’ve yet to move into the second phase where rich media and interaction is applied to the course descriptions but we’re certainly moving in the right direction with this very rewarding project.

Stephen and I also worked on the OU Careers Advisory Service website redesign which earned the award for AGCAS HE website of the year. We put a lot of hard work into developing a subtle yet appealing design with intuitive information architecture.

My ongoing work at the OU is now to create a community of practice for online web standards. The OU is a huge community and there are many web designers and developers. Until early this year we were a rather fragmented bunch but Twitter has brought us together. Not only web designers and developers but librarians, academics and support staff across the main campus and the regional and national centres. I’m talking to people in departments I didn’t even know existed and hearing about many interesting and exciting projects. I honestly think that we now have a critical mass to do some truly innovative projects. Take SocialLearn and OU View on YouTube as two examples of where the OU has now finally moved away from wanting to control all aspects of data, design and production. Even the non-official OU Facebook apps are gathering steady momentum and are seen as being useful student support channels. It looks as though 2009 might even see the OU drop the in-house bespoke web Content Management System for the open source goodness of Drupal. There’s an interesting time ahead at the OU that I’m really looking forward to getting stuck into on my return from paternity leave next week.