The calendar presents as a small box (portal module) on the studentcentral (Blackboard) homepage when you log in:
(the calendar is that blue stripy one in the middle)
On it's own, it looks like this:
What this is showing, in a colour-coded way, is all the student facing upcoming events from across the university. And when I say "all" I really do mean it. This calendar incorporates the academic calendar, study support, health, Sport, Students' Union, Alumni, Volunteering, Wellbeing, Careers, IT workshops etc. By getting everyone on board (for which I can in no way take the credit) it means that it becomes definitive for students and immensely useful. Every department wants to be included, because all the other departments are...simple!
The technology behind this I did have a hand in suggesting, and if you've been following this blog for a while I suspect you've guessed - it's Google Calendar. This gives us an easy way to set up multiple, publicly viewable calendars, devolve access to only those responsible for each set of data and then overlay them in various ways to present the results.
Below is part of the screen in Google where you can set the presentation options. You can see here which calendars I am overlaying (remembering not to include my own diary of course!). This is 'agenda' view, but you can choose to present it in a more usual weekly or monthly grid view.
Students can click each item to get fuller details, or subscribe to the calendar(s) by clicking the Google button at the bottom.
You can take a closer look and explore the calendar yourself on the Student Services web pages.
Note: In an ideal world we would find a technical solution that integrated with our existing student email and calendars (Live@Edu) but hope to achieve this in the future. Once everyone has good habits of keeping their calendars updated then the platform can change over time.
0 comments:
Post a Comment