We're on our way! Developing the next phase of the MyGlasgow portals
A couple of years ago, at the Davos conference, the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau observed, that when it came to digital technology; “The pace of change has never been this fast, yet it will never be this slow again.” The last couple of years has increasingly highlighted just how important it is for the University to ensure support and services are available digitally to both staff and students, and that these are created in a way that is both sustainable and flexible as demand and technological change increases.
Hopefully, you’ll know we already have a student and staff portal – MyGlasgow – that allows secure access to many of these services, and that last year we upgraded our portal technology to make sure it was fit for all the changes that were inevitably coming our way. However, recent radical changes in the working and learning environment has told us that our portals should play a much bigger role as a reliable place to go to support our staff and students.
At the same time, we have been running a new approach in developing our digital products in Information Services, tested extensively with the UofG Life App, and we are currently using what we have learned to address the changes we need to make to the portals. Like the App, we carried out extensive ‘Discovery’ work to understand the needs of students and staff, as well as assessing approaches that other Universities and organisations use. To enhance our thinking further, we also ran an exciting ‘Art of the Possible’ workshop where we used inspirational examples of how new technology could be harnessed to allow us to design future-state solutions.
It was clear from this work that there are enhancements we can make, especially when it comes to making it easier for staff and students to find and access support. It was also clear that there is a great opportunity to provide a centralised, easy-to-navigate home for important features, such as communications, induction or health and wellbeing services.
We have created a ‘blueprint’ for our next versions of the staff and student portals, and the team are already working with HR and Communications to make sure we can develop this new portal as rapidly as possible. We’re also looking at the look and feel, and even the name of the portal for students, and separately for staff, to make sure they are appropriate. But, whatever we build, like the UofG Life App, it has to be user-led – which means it has to meet the needs of our staff and students first.
And that’s where we need your help! Over the next few weeks, we’ll be running sessions to understand in much more detail how you want the portal to function, how to navigate it, and what it should be called. We need your participation and most definitely, your ideas! Look out for our next updates soon.
We’re definitely on our way to a making the portals a helpful and integral part of your life and work at the University!
