“I can’t find it!” Kieran cries in frustration.

His teacher sighs and makes her way over to his desk. It is the fourth time that she has heard this refrain during this one lesson - and it probably won’t be the last.

Until recently, this was a familiar scene at Basingstoke College of Technology. In order to access their grades, timetable information or data about their attendance and progression, students were forced to grapple with numerous, dispersed and user-unfriendly information systems, often with discouraging results.

However, in early 2018, spurred by a wider college initiative to update our intranet, we decided to see if we could provide students with a better way to measure their own progress, set themselves specific and relevant targets and, in short, take greater ownership of their education.

All the data that our students needed was there; the problem was that they couldn’t access it easily. We needed to present it in a more useful and meaningful way.

So, what did we do? The obvious solution was to buy a ready-made platform. There are plenty of options on the market, boasting a variety of impressive features - yet none of these ticked all the boxes for us.

We realised that if we wanted an intuitive, accessible system that students would find genuinely useful and easy to use, who better to help design and build it than the students themselves?

Building the tool in-house would not only allow us to get exactly what we needed, it would also provide an excellent opportunity for CPD by helping to upskill our staff and give them a sense of ownership in something that would be integral to the smooth running of the college.

So, a small, cross-departmental team at the college began work on a system to replace the old electronic individual learning plan (eILP), which would realise the potential of the data in our management information systems (MIS), eliminate the current information silos and provide staff and students with the insights and overview they needed to identify interventions to improve teaching and learning.

“We started with, ‘What does the student want? What does the learner need? What information do we want them to have access to that will make their life better and easier at college?’ Then we built up from there,” explains Neil Shoulder, our director of teaching, learning and quality improvement.

This was no small task.

The project started with an exchange of ideas led by our digital innovation specialist, Scott Hayden, and head of information services and exams, Greg Devereux-Cooke.

Based on this, staff put together rough wireframe drawings, which were then shared with students across the college.

This helped to get the project rolling, and allowed us to start gathering feedback from students on everything from the information they would find most useful to how they would like to be able to personalise their profiles. Over time, these inputs from students helped to bring the tool to life. Each iteration took us closer to what we have come to call Dashboard.

Working in this collaborative way, across departments and continually informed by student feedback, was not easy. It required staff to be flexible and adaptable to help keep the project moving.

As the project evolved, so did the team, and lines between typical roles were blurred until each person could contribute at every stage, representing a truly collaborative process.

The collective aspiration - of creating something truly student centred - and the coming together of diverse skill sets and experience were perhaps the key ingredients for creating what has become such an impactful and well-received end product.

For example, learning technologist Holly Hunt is a graphic designer by trade, specialising in communication design. She usually works cross departmentally, making everything from learning resources to infographics for staff when requested. For this project, Hunt was able to use her artistic flair and user-centric design skills to bring students’ ideas and feedback to life as eloquent concept designs.

Senior web developer Kevin Badland and web developer Kuan Tan then worked from Hunt’s designs to realise the functionality and intuitive user experience that students were asking for in their feedback - for example, ensuring that the platform was mobile friendly - and eventually developed a product that was ready to go live in September 2018.

So, what does the finished product look like? Dashboard sits on the college’s own server and auto-opens on the first browser tab for students and staff. Front and centre, there are three colour-coded doughnut charts, representing the student’s key performance indicators: unit achievement, work experience hours and enrichment hours.

“The circular dials signify a continuous cycle of learning and developing, rather than merely a journey from A to B, while the colours - red, amber and green - present easily recognisable metrics of achievement, motivating students to beat their own ‘personal best’,” explains Hunt.

Students can easily view their timetable and attendance data and review targets, comments and assignment records. They can also quickly navigate to frequented sites, such as Google Classroom and their student email from shortcuts nested in the sidebar.

What do students think of the bespoke package? Overwhelmingly, they have welcomed the visual design, noting how easy it is for them to understand how they are doing and what they need to do to progress.

This positive feedback has been encouraging, but we have continued to keep listening and adapting. Since the launch, many changes have taken place. For example, students remarked that they didn’t like seeing their photo on the homepage, so Badland and Tan introduced an option for students to hide their photo from view.

And this was only the beginning. So far, 205 feedback changes have been logged since the project began, from students and staff alike.

The key focus now is to build more bespoke functionalities for teachers and managers. For example, staff requested the development of a “demo mode” that replaces sensitive data, such as names and contact details, with randomised information. This new mode allows us to run training sessions and demonstrate Dashboard to external visitors without violating General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

A new staff landing page, capabilities to run reports, and the ability to use the Dashboard as a lesson plan repository are among a few of the other developments in the pipeline.

The idea of building a new system in-house may seem daunting, but the results we’ve seen have proved the time and effort worthwhile. We can quickly add new functionality as and when ideas are brought up, with a Google Form embedded on the Dashboard platform to encourage this.

When college closures were announced, for instance, we worked quickly to embed the Google Meet links for students’ remote lessons directly into their timetables, minimising the friction in transitioning to remote learning by building it into a system that students were already familiar with.

Having the control to make changes at such short notice, as was necessary in this time of emergency, is an undeniable benefit to an in-house solution.

Introducing new systems is never easy; with the best will in the world, these upgrades can often cause confusion and frustration among staff and students alike. Through this collaborative venture, though, we have created a system in which every user is a stakeholder. It is a platform built by people with real experience and understanding of the organisation’s structure and needs. And that’s something that no off-the-shelf model, no matter how impressive, will ever be able to match.

Sky Caves is a learning technologist at Basingstoke College of Technology

This article originally appeared in the 5 June 2020 issue under the headline “Together, we’ve built a platform for success”