A New Beginning

A new beginning
What do I do for a living, and what I get up to in the outside world?
I Work in a UK university as an Application Manager and my team are responsible for our student facing systems. We look after and develop applications. Our aim in these applications is to try to ensure our students and staff’s time at University is as productive as possible. Be it in the public or private sector large organisations tend to gather useful data in silos and the gatekeepers tend to guard their data jealously. Our aim is to unify this data and present meaningful information to our students and staff. We do this via a mixture of technological solutions and bridge building. It would be fair to say at first it hard, but once we had the first two or three integrations department saw the usefulness to staff and students and came up with their own ideas.
Below is a list of systems we have developed/support; each of these systems is personalized to the student by retrieving relevant information from a number of University systems   

·         Moodle VLE

·         Mobile App (based on Ombiel’s CampusM product)

·         Student Portal

·         A file repository system based on Equella

·         A video repository system based on Kaltura

·         A number of web services that tie our systems together and allow the students to see as much as we can a seamless approach

·         The Internal Student Survey that is run three times a year

·         PC Availability

·         Learning Technology (Technology for smarter working e.g. tablets, AR, QR codes with Learning Innovations)

·         Photo Upload as part of Self Enrolment

·         Student exam results on line

·         Student Resit results

To give an idea on usage our student portal had 4 Million login events during the first two terms on the 14/15 academic year and it had 98,840,954 hits.
To give an idea on how many different devices our students use the portal was contacted on 501,960 unique IPs addresses.