Friday, April 29, 2005
BCIM Website Development Plan for 2005/6
I proposed the following plan yesterday, and Geoff E. approved it today. The placement post is now being advertised.
Terminology: "BCIM Website" = "WWWsite" + "StudentWeb" + "StaffWeb".
The BCIM Website Team...
- Martin B. - 2.5 days/week
- Mike C. - 1.5 days/week
- James P-K - 1 day/week
- John H. - 0.5 days/week
- Placement Student - full-time
Objectives for 2005/6...
- Ongoing maintenance of existing BCIM Website
- Stylistic re-design of the StudentWeb and StaffWeb to match our new WWWsite
- Stylistic re-design of existing/old-style websites for BCIM research centres, the Language Centre, the National Bakery School etc. - provided the owners of those websites agree
- Conduct a usability study of the BCIM Website
- Enhance BCIM Website attractiveness by incorporating more images
- Undertake selected development projects (see below).
- Creation of a Web-Based Virtual Notice Board (VNB) System for use by Course Directors and Course Administrators to post announcements for students. Each course to have its own VNB. Announcements to include lecture cancellations, coursework deadline reminders etc. This project will involve not only development of a suitable system but also user training.
- Creation of a BCIM course database to support dynamic generation of various course-related web pages, such as the listing of Course Directors and Course Administrators, listings of courses per Dept, full listings of all our undergraduate and postgraduate courses, and possibly also listings of units per course (but see note below).
- Creation of a facility to generate a set of student photos per class, based on the University's PhoneBook database (which contains student photos) - for use e.g. by tutors and in examination boards.
- Other projects as and when needs arise.
Before these new development projects are undertaken we will need to explore the University's new Student Records System, and in particular how we can/should build interfaces with it. We need to be careful not to duplicate functionality that is already provided by this new system.