About:
The Durham Centre for Academic Development (DCAD) focuses on enhancing teaching, learning, and research practices across the University of Durham.
The centre offers a range of services to support students and staff, including workshops, one-on-one consultations, and resources to help students improve skills like writing, research, critical thinking, and time management.
The challenge:
The University took the initiative to move its academic training management to a new solution after difficulties with the existing system.
Among other shortcomings, the incumbent system had a poor search functionality, meaning users struggled to find and navigate DCAD’s provision. This was impacting engagement rates, which decreased over time as the system was in operation.
Maintaining the backend of the software was an intense burden for DCAD’s team and was time consuming when uploading courses into the complex system. To add to these issues, DCAD had very little data on their users, making planning and development of the training offering and difficult.
After an initial search of the market, it became clear that a Higher Education-focused solution was required: one purpose-built to improve user engagement, reduce administrative burden, and provide actionable insights from data.
A phased approach to a new platform roll-out
DCAD partnered with Inkpath, a professional development platform designed for students, researchers, and professionals to track, plan, and manage their skills and career growth. Working together, they implemented a phased approach to overhaul DCAD’s training and development platform, putting researchers front and centre as the initial audience.
As part of phase one, DCAD looked at the number users signing up to the training programme, and how easy students found using the new platform once they were in the system. DCAD planned to monitor and review activity on a weekly basis.
Within eight weeks, DCAD went live with the new system, which included a event booking functions, and soon saw the benefits of a platform that was more fit for purpose. Within the first three months, sign ups jumped from 600 to 1,000.
It became clear that users were able to quickly log in and easily find relevant information. From an administrator point of view, the team found the system simple to set up and very user-friendly.
Inkpath now asks attendees to evaluate each workshop upon completion. Because of this new approach the evaluation rate grew from 4.2% to a staggering 84.6%, providing DCAD with data it had never had before.
“This new, more streamlined platform has enabled us to be much more forward thinking, as we now have more time to plan our programmes in advance, and we can make the programmes more coordinated,” said Paul Finlay, Digital Learning Advisor, Durham Centre for Academic Development.
“We’re now able to make the core programme available at the start of the year to everyone, which has given people a lot more foresight,” he added.
Looking to phase two and beyond
With the ability to use data driven insights to plan its training provision, DCAD have since embarked on phase 2 of its training and development overhaul. Phase two focuses on attendance and conversion rates (the number of sign-ups converted into actual attendance) and reviewing the range of workshops and sessions on offer. DCAD also plans to create a data dashboard for senior management.
After seeing the transformative results for researcher training provision, the academic skills centre and the university library will now roll out the Inkpath platform. Learning provision in Inkpath was previously aimed at post graduate researchers and academic staff, but it will now also include opportunities for undergraduates and postgraduate taught students.
Paul Finley concludes: “Higher Education professionals know that there is a significant engagement challenge across the sector, yet Durham appears to be bucking the trend, and part of that I believe is our commitment to using data-driven insights to evolve our training and development offering. Phase two should allow us to gather even more data to further improve and evolve our training programme for students and staff.”
Results recap: