And there's more! User experience for groups on campus

As a follow-on to this project, we're going to be undertaking a study of group management user experiences for an institutional group management service, with the goal of creating designs for a group service user interface which matches genuine academic and scholarly behaviours and needs.

Background

The MEAoT project explored two teaching administration tools - the teaching load database (allowing departments to track how teaching tasks are allocated across staff and research groups) and the Student Choices module. Both the main academic departments in the project had separately developed teaching administration systems in house, to support organisation tasks around teaching, and on closer analysis these were functionally ways of creating and managing groups of people, and then doing things with the groups (assigning tutors or lab sessions, emailing them, sharing files with them, and so on). The teaching load and student choices systems also had strong groups themes. We realised that tasks around groups of people were key to a variety of teaching administration, as well as other academic tasks, and that group management software might be the right common foundation for creating other specialised interfaces to support activities like teaching load, without the backend services burden we had in our project systems.  We are interested in taking this forward by exploring and investigating in more detail the ways in which faculty, administrators and students think about the tasks they undertake which involve groups (even indirectly), and creating designs for systems which exploit group management to deliver powerful end user functionality.

There is a broader interest in the UK HE community around group management. One tool which has been proposed in this space is Internet2’s Grouper.  This is a groups management toolkit which enables project managers, departments, institutions and end users to create and manage institutional and personal groups. It puts control of a group in the hands of its steward and enables the person to manage the membership and what resources it can access. Groups can then be used in all kinds of other applications, including teaching administration (as explored by our project), research management, and so on.

The Grouper toolkit is developed by the Internet2 Middleware Initiative, and is supported by funds from Internet2, the University of Chicago, the University of Bristol, the NSF Middleware Initiative, and JISC.

Like any group management suite, Grouper fits alongside an institutional identity management system and access management; it is an institutional level system and requires stakeholder buy in throughout the university to deploy, as policy and business rules must be established and agreed, as well as resources to implement. These are areas of increasing interest and engagement in the sector in the UK. We are aware of UK deployments of Grouper (e.g. Newcastle University), but we haven’t seen a user-friendly administrative interface for self-service by end users.


Grouper is middleware, meaning there is no “public face” - no user interface which enables university decision makers to properly understand what it could do for their institutions.  We intend to undertake user-centric research to explore the underlying needs of university academics, students and administrators around groups, and to prototype designs which would provide attractive and user-friendly potential user interfaces for Grouper. 

The availability of an attractive UI is expected to significantly increase the understanding among academic decision makers of the potential for Grouper as a key enterprise service. Greater adoption will make group services available to those promoting Service Oriented approaches in their institutions.

In addition, our work will provide outline designs based on real academic needs for other groupware solutions, and group-oriented systems. These designs will stimulate debate and discussion within the sector and within institutions around the critical functions of group and identity management, and will provide a truly user-oriented focus, which will be of value in ensuring deployed solutions are usable and beneficial.

In addition, they could form the nexus of new systems (similar to those of our MEAoT project) built using light weight development principles, to deliver novel end user functionality on top of campus-wide group management suites. This may also allow us to further develop our “simple software” tenets, which we uncovered during MEAoT, which if followed enable those who are not software specialists to maintain and modify useful (and possibly niche) tools.

Benefits to the Institutional Innovation programme and to the sector

Our focus on group management reflects the growing use of centralised IT services within institutions, and supports existing and ongoing institutional-level strategies around identity management and its application to IT services around and across the university.

We address two key areas of ICT concern in HE today: how to support academics and students engaged in teaching, learning and research with emergent and social technologies including self-service systems, and e-administration; these are two of the four areas targeted by the Institutional Innovation programme.  Group management is a recognised cross-departmental and cross domain problem with core applications in each of these areas, which fits within the e-Framework for Education and Research (being based upon open standards and service oriented approaches), and is where appropriate technology and processes can support people by allowing them to make a greater contribution to the core business of their university.

Academics and students expect more from their institution’s ICT provision, as they become used to more engaging, interactive and social user interfaces in their personal web and technology use.  They increasingly demand the easy to use self-service systems they have encountered elsewhere within their ICT at work and study; the question of how these emerging practices may be supported within institutional IT systems is a critical one addressed by our proposal, and others in this programme. We will explore how these interfaces can be integrated into groupware, which will work in conjunction with other IT platforms within the university environment, using service oriented approaches such as those of the e-Framework. The ideas of group formation and using groups of people for access control and organisation of information - on an institutional scale and across institutional systems and departmental systems - also naturally encourage reuse and remixing of data (groups, who is in them and what access they have) within different systems.

As well as being a strong match for the key concerns of the programme, our plan fits well within the Institutional Innovation project types, in that it investigates and explores a potential technology solution, including engaging, interactive and user friendly user interface designs. It is a relevant follow on to other user interface work in the Users and Innovation (U&I) programme, and the more recent Institutional Responses to Emergent Technology pilots under the e-Administration programme, which addressed individual and institutional aspects of next generation technologies.

Our work will lead to further technical prototyping and pilot projects, which will enable universities and the sector to trial systems with their users, and demonstrate that this area offers value to make it worthwhile to move into larger scale pilot programmes.  The output designs of this project will help senior stakeholders and decision makers to start to appreciate and understand the value of ICT investment in the area of groupware and related systems.

Group management systems are also often critical for delivery of powerful e-administration tools, which attempt to coordinate and control business process information within academia, for greater efficiency and effectiveness.  Access control and authorization for university data creation, access, management, archiving, disposal etc is a key part of e-administration, and group-based controls are ideal for these functions. Groupware also supports the diverse range of resources being created and managed by various parts of institutions, including libraries and departments, and enables easier management of remote access to these resources.

Outputs

This work will help us build upon the nascent expertise from our JISC Institutional Innovation Academic Social Networking project, as well as increasing the resources we can share for others in the sector to reuse in the area of user-centric design within HE.

We anticipate working with JISC to disseminate our final designs for exemplar group management user interfaces, which will apply to Grouper backend services as well as other groupware solutions. These designs will act as a focal point for debate around group management solutions in HE, as well as a powerful starting point for innovative development of user interfaces for them. We will also share our learnings online during the process of the project, around user-centric design and group management within HE.

As a result of this work we will produce a set of user interface designs which will allow other projects and institutions to explore, prototype and pilot user-friendly group management systems on campus, with a substantial kick-start from our user-centric design work. Alongside this we will create and distribute “sales” material which will explain the designs and their significance to senior management in university IT, administration, teaching and research, enabling their institutions to discuss and evaluate groupware in a more meaningful context. Other projects and institutions will be able to take our learning and designs to give themselves a headstart (avoiding the challenges of understanding real user needs in this tricky area) in investigating and deploying group management tools.

the MAW of HEFCE

Prof. Peter Barrett writes in the 27 May TES about a HEFCE-funded project on Managing Academic Workload, led by him and Lucinda Barrett at the University of Salford and involving 20 partner institutions.  The project has recently published a report; "Management of Academic Workloads: Improving Practice in the Sector".

It is interesting to see such a rich analysis of the benefits of 'confidently transparent' workload allocation and of being 'roughly right not precisely wrong'.  Also notable is that despite having developed an institution-wide system, the report nevertheless affirms the importance of leaving workload allocation decisions in the hands of departments, in whose management staff are more generally willing to place some trust.

MAW has open-sourced a spreadsheet-based system originally developed by Prof. Barrett and now used by all departments at Salford University.