(The Beacon)
By Jenny Walsh, Guest Commentary - walshj@up.edu
Do you ever ponder PilotsUP? About the ways you use it? Do you ever wish you could change a few things? Maybe find information more easily? Maybe do more?
PilotsUP is the University portal. A portal is a powerful web tool for people who learn and work together to access and share information around a common purpose and unique identities.
The current version of PilotsUP is essentially 5 1/2 years old. Much has changed at the university and on the web over that time. Google, Facebook and YouTube have exploded and settled onto the scene. Almost 5,000 students have graduated and gone on to change the world. Well, we think it is time for PilotsUP to get moving too.
It might be surprising to learn that PilotsUP can do quite a few rather amazing and, unfortunately, rather little known things (e.g., document collaboration, YouTube video posting, blogging and virtual community building to name a few). Getting that message out has been difficult and the way portal information is arranged makes these handy features hard to discover. I, and my department Web and Administrative Systems (WAS), want to share these neat, hopefully helpful tools with students, faculty and staff. We want to reorganize the portal so that it's easier to explore and use. We want to add tools that make sense. However, we are painfully aware that many "great" web ideas die on the vine because no one else thought they were useful. WAS's eager development team could spend time and energy honing tools, tying it into single sign-on, and reorganizing and exposing information only to find we'd focused on the wrong ones. We'd rather not.
This is why we need you. Tell us what you like and don't like; what you wish you could see and wouldn't want to see. If you do, you will have a better chance of liking the changes. We hope that if students, faculty and staff share their opinions and experiences about PilotsUP, WAS will make informed, better decisions as we build a fun, useful, flexible PilotsUP. Together, we can improve PilotsUP. Alone, there is a chance we won't.
To help bring the campus together, WAS is reaching out. We are hosting five Town Hall Meetings through spring that we hope will pull people in at a grassroots level. The next meeting, focused on the topic of academic collaboration, is Wednesday, Feb. 16 at 2:00 p.m. in BC 163. Please come! There will be cookies!
If you can't make a town hall meeting, you can join in a virtual community called PilotsUP Ahead (pilots.up.edu/group/portalredesign). You can blog your ideas, comment on others, track recommended outcomes and view meeting schedules.
If town hall meetings and online posts don't seem inviting, let me meet you where you are. I will be meeting with campus committees, groups and departments where they already gather; at academic and staff committees and with deans, divisions, and directors. If you would like me to talk with your group, please e-mail me at walshj@up.edu. I want to hear your ideas and add them to the growing picture of how much better PilotsUP could be.
The campus is busy learning, teaching and working and I know asking you to make time to critique the portal probably falls somewhere beneath hauling your compost over to the SLUG (a good idea by the way!). And, to top it off, PilotsUP works pretty well already. However, we think learning, teaching and working online could get easier, more intuitive, and maybe a little more fun if you share a few of your ideas with us. I really hope to hear from you!
Jenny Walsh is the director of web and administrative systems. She can be contacted at walshj@up.edu
