As a small/medium sized FE College which obtained a Grade 2 at the last OFSTED inspection, we are looking for ways to become "outstanding". One area of concern is that of staff communication and the use of technology in teaching and learning. One aspect of this being researched is our use of an intranet to communicate knowledge and collaborate with staff.Currentlt we have a very basic tool that links staff to information regarding teaching and learning, Management systems, Quality issues etc. My personal feeling is that staff do not feel engaged with such an approach and a recent survey amongst staff confirmed that they are not impressed with this sort of approach. Consequently I have explored staff needs and find a tremendous shortfall in what we consider is an "intranet". For example: staff would like a web based facilty that allows them to access outside college. They also would like simple access to forms such as absence reporting, holiday booking etc. Other requirements indicate that the college is definitely not providing the correct service to staff.I would appreciate comments from other organisations on how they have tackled the issue of intranets and staff communication.
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You've hit on a subject that's close to my heart - many organisations seem to think that purely by posting information onto an intranet site, it will be read, understood and retained.
I'm in the process of desgining our internal/external site now - I hesitate to call it an intranet as the word itself holds a lot of bad connotations for the staff I am trying to connect with.
The best piece of advice I can give you is to plan what you want by doing your research into what you find enjoyable about sites you learn from. Is the LSG site working for you - or do you have another favourtie site out there? Find a few of them and note down from a communications point of view what actually appeals to you - is it the colours, the layout, the sections or the content? It will likely be a mixture of all these things but thats when you start to decide what is the most important to your organisation. You take the ideas you now have and match it to what people have already told you through the survey. If you find the survey hasn't given you the information you need on this, why not run a focus group? If people are as disengaged with this as you believe, they may not have responded to a computer based survey.
Once you have the information you need, you then need to look at how you're going to make it come about. And this is where the features come in - what exactly do you need to make it work for you? Do you need control over who comes onto the site or are you happy for the whole world to see everything? Have you got a budget to spend to invest in some software or do you need to find a free alternative - there are many out there, all with different benefits and disadvantages.
Now you have the software, and you know what you want on and where, its time to write the content - and it should be noted that writing for the web is different and yet similar to writing paper copy. The best place to learn about web writing is probably with newspapers - the notion of a headline and tag line can be enough to get someone to click through - but if you just go for a paragraph of plain text, nobody will want to read it.
The last piece of advice I give for now is to make sure that your front page looks as engaging as possible and don't let it be a scrolling page - one of the most annoying things for me on a website is having to really search for the information I want from the first page.
That's a lot of brief ideas to get you started (if you haven't already) - I'd love to talk to someone else who's in my arena in trying to market IT and learning together.
Email me direct or post back - I'd love to know how you're getting on.
Replies
You've hit on a subject that's close to my heart - many organisations seem to think that purely by posting information onto an intranet site, it will be read, understood and retained.
I'm in the process of desgining our internal/external site now - I hesitate to call it an intranet as the word itself holds a lot of bad connotations for the staff I am trying to connect with.
The best piece of advice I can give you is to plan what you want by doing your research into what you find enjoyable about sites you learn from. Is the LSG site working for you - or do you have another favourtie site out there? Find a few of them and note down from a communications point of view what actually appeals to you - is it the colours, the layout, the sections or the content? It will likely be a mixture of all these things but thats when you start to decide what is the most important to your organisation. You take the ideas you now have and match it to what people have already told you through the survey. If you find the survey hasn't given you the information you need on this, why not run a focus group? If people are as disengaged with this as you believe, they may not have responded to a computer based survey.
Once you have the information you need, you then need to look at how you're going to make it come about. And this is where the features come in - what exactly do you need to make it work for you? Do you need control over who comes onto the site or are you happy for the whole world to see everything? Have you got a budget to spend to invest in some software or do you need to find a free alternative - there are many out there, all with different benefits and disadvantages.
Now you have the software, and you know what you want on and where, its time to write the content - and it should be noted that writing for the web is different and yet similar to writing paper copy. The best place to learn about web writing is probably with newspapers - the notion of a headline and tag line can be enough to get someone to click through - but if you just go for a paragraph of plain text, nobody will want to read it.
The last piece of advice I give for now is to make sure that your front page looks as engaging as possible and don't let it be a scrolling page - one of the most annoying things for me on a website is having to really search for the information I want from the first page.
That's a lot of brief ideas to get you started (if you haven't already) - I'd love to talk to someone else who's in my arena in trying to market IT and learning together.
Email me direct or post back - I'd love to know how you're getting on.