Bridging the Gap: Intranets as the link from Connected Learning to University League Tables in an Open World

The internet offers great flexibility to tutors in the way they interact with their students; Open Educational Resources provide a myriad of ways in which learning can take place outside the classroom; social media provide new methods of interaction; innovative peer and group assessment provide evidence of skills needed by business and academia.  These are some of the components of connected learning in an open world. On the other hand, sophisticated corporate Management Information Systems (often more than one in the same university) store student progress, match it to student data and implement complex algorithms approved by academic councils to provide aggregated grades which then become statistics to funding agencies and to a variety of university league tables. The challenge for universities is to provide a funnel that takes all this innovation in learning and assessment and bridges the gap to produce a single grade for each student at the end of their programme of study that reflects their achievement, and to be able to justify this to external examiners, auditors, regulatory bodies, and, increasingly, appeal committees and the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (Behrens 2013).  Different ways of bridging the gap have evolved in different universities, but many of these are labour-intensive and paper-based.  Off-the-shelf Managed Learning Environments are not available; Virtual Learning Environments are good at individual course/module level, but lack appropriate high-level reporting tools; ePortfolios provide the facility for students to curate their own work, but do not authenticate it; custom-built intranets provide some good functionality for data gathering and aggregation, but many are poorly supported and are often seen as "feral systems" by central IT services; portals are designed to link these disparate systems together, but many are also hybrid intranets that are difficult to navigate. Intranets are crucial to organisations wanting efficient business processes.  Many major companies and authorities have invested heavily in intranets, and the benefits are clear (Nielsen 2014).  In universities, however, intranets are often poorly resourced.  They are often a neglected part of a university's website with a poorly structured mixture of content for both internal and external audiences, and little functionality (Robertson 2013). This presentation will demonstrate the intranet systems that have been developed in the School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences (CMS) at the University of Greenwich in an attempt to bridge the gap. Top Task Analysis (McGovern 2010) has been used to prioritise development.  The moderation of coursework and examinations, the handing of plagiarism and extenuating circumstances, feedback to students, personal tutoring and the supervision of projects are just some of the top tasks that are supported for over 2,000 students and over 100 academic and administrative staff.  The infrastructure and roles of staff will be explained, workflows will be demonstrated and the quality controls and quality assurance measures in place will be illustrated.  Integration with the University's MIS systems and its external examiner's online reporting site will be shown, and the intranet's role in recent accreditation events (eg by the British Computer Society and the QAA) will be highlighted.  Progress towards the development of Managed Learning Environment in CMS (Stoneham 2012) will evaluated. Lessons learnt from the CMS Intranet development are now being used in the even bigger challenge of bridging the gap between Connected Learning in the CMS's Collaboration Centres and Partner Colleges around the world, and the university's MIS systems.  Progress on this, which involves over 30 centres and 3,000 students, will be reported and evaluated.