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Cover Sheet
Project Information
Project Acronym
EAT-PDP
Project Title
Engaging Alumni through Personal Development Planning
Start Date
07/02/2011
Lead Institution
University of Kent
Project Director
John Sotillo
Project Manager
Steve Coppin, Learning and Research Development Manager
Project Manager
Contact Details
Information Services
University of Kent
Canterbury
CT2 7NF
Tel: 01227 824527
Email: [email protected]
Partner Institutions
None
Project Web URL
http://www.kent.ac.uk/is/projects/eat/index.html
Programme Name
Relationship Management: Alumni Engagement
Programme Manager
Simon Whittemore
End Date
27/07/2012
Case Study Name
Case Study Title
A Case study – Engaging Alumni through Personal Development
Planning
Author(s) & project role
Steve Coppin, Project Manager; Leo Lyons, Project Worker
Date
31/07/2012
Page 1 of 38 1. Project Overview Increasingly over the last decade a consensus has formed over the
importance of Personal Development Planning (PDP) to employability.
Since the 1997 Dearing Report into Higher Education, HEIs have
been committed to providing students with a means of ‘recording
achievement…..by which students can monitor, build and reflect up on
their personal development’. The EATPDP project questioned whether
we could extend this service to alumni. There is an increasing
recognition of the value of life long learning and an acceptance that
PDP should not terminate with the completion of Higher Education but
should form part of a suite of development approaches along with
CPD throughout the working life of an individual. The EAT-PDP
project aimed to facilitate and engender an on-going mutually
beneficial alumni relationship through the provision of a web-based
PDP and e-folio application (Mahara).
2. Challenge In an increasingly competitive ‘market’, particularly since the
introduction of higher fees and the resulting higher service delivery
expectations of their potential customers, HEIs need to maximize the
benefits for all their members and hence to enhance the reputation of,
and increase satisfaction with, their organisations. We felt that we
could offer more to our alumni and that improved employability
through continuing PDP would not only help our graduates but would
also increase our standing in the community and amongst our peers
and have many collateral benefits too.
Alumni may remain in contact with their universities for a variety of
reasons including social networking, mentoring, and a desire to ‘give
something back’. Building on the Logins for Life project we felt that the
university should be able to offer more practical and useful assistance
in the ongoing development of our graduates - not restricted to those
who were still seeking appropriate work - but for all who wanted to
continue to record and reflect upon their achievements, to identify and
tackle skill gaps and to be able to showcase their strengths.
In order to achieve the above we would improve the features and
interface of Myfolio (Kent’s instance of the Mahara PDP & e-folio
software) and extend access to alumni for at least one year. All staff
and students would benefit from these enhancements – we would also
make plugins available to the wider Mahara community. Myfolio is
owned by Kent’s Unit for Enhanced Learning and Teaching whose
input into the design and feature set of the application has been an
important part of the project. A robust and well used application
benefits the work of this department. One of the major enhancements
proposed by the project was the Student Catalogue (in earlier
documentation described as the Employability Catalogue) which when
implemented will provide prospective employers, Kent’s Careers and
Employability Service and others with a facility for identifying
candidates from amongst Kent’s students and alumni with a particular
skill set, qualification or experience.
Personal Development Planning is not new to the University of Kent
but with the introduction of Mahara (in September 2011) the university
is re-emphasising its importance and providing a secure on-line and
accessible application to monitor, store and showcase achievements
and experience. Prior to the project, alumni were offered little formal
guidance or assistance with continuing PDP. The Careers &
Employability service (formerly the Careers Advisory Service) has
previously acted as a broker between employers and graduates. The
introduction of the Student Catalogue will aid their work and will allow
Page 2 of 38 them to provide a more efficient and expedient search method for
prospective employers, companies seeking interns or offering work
placements etc. Prospective students may also find the facility to
browse portfolios of existing students and alumni might help them with
decision making processes.
3. Approach The University is already committed to Personal Development
Planning and the provision to all graduates of a record of
achievement. The project aimed to consolidate and improve this
service and in particular extend the service beyond graduation. The
aim was to allow individuals to augment and expand their portfolio of
skills and experience beyond the termination of formal full-time
education and to provide software that would allow our alumni to gain
a competitive edge in a difficult employment market. Myfolio gives our
alumni the opportunity to not only record their continuing development
but also to showcase their skills and experience in a multi-media
capable e-portfolio. Myfolio also provides tools to assist with skills
audits and to plan personal development. It also has a social
networking capability which could assist alumni to maintain links with
the informal support network they were part of whilst at University.
We began the project by recruiting twenty students to two focus
groups. These groups comprised students who would graduate at the
end of the summer term of 2011, or in the following year. We gave
focus group members a basic introduction to Myfolio and asked them
to create user profiles and to use the software in any way they felt
would be helpful to their studies or to PDP and employability. We
incentivized these students with Amazon vouchers to become familiar
with Myfolio, to record their achievements and to create a basic e-folio
which they might use in to enhance a job application. After some
weeks we re-interviewed the focus group members and also asked
them to complete an online survey on their experiences. This exercise
allowed us to judge what demand there might be for the services we
were proposing and to incorporate feedback into the improvements
and enhancement we planned for the interface and functionality of
Myfolio. This information was also useful to UELT as an adjunct to a
much larger trial they were running prior to the campus wide launch of
the software. Our Steering Group included senior staff from UELT, the
Alumni Office and Careers and Employability Service who helped us
to keep developments relevant and in accord with current best
practice in pedagogy and in keeping with departmental strategies. We
were keen to maintain a focus on the use of Myfolio as a tool for PDP
– a space that students would see as one over which they had control
and could use to privately self-reflect through the use of journals and
other tools. We noticed in some schools that tutors were ‘requiring’
their students to submit assignments and share work using Myfolio.
The risks involved in this were that students would not see Myfolio as
a space over which they had control and that this might inhibit honest
self-reflection. A lesser concern was that a student’s storage quota of
50Mb might be quickly consumed by course related uploads leaving
them unable to create their own pages. We were at the same time
aware that the promotion of the use of Myfolio even for purposes
which some considered it was not intended for, would have a positive
side to it – students using the application in any way requested by
their tutors would at least become familiar with the interface and
perhaps be more inclined to use it for PDP. The lesson learnt from this
was that we needed to reinforce the message to both students and
tutors that primarily Myfolio was a tool for PDP and e-folios and that
the ownership should be firmly with the students. Some stakeholders
Page 3 of 38 felt strongly that any other use of the application (eg not for PDP)
should be actively discouraged whereas the majority felt that not only
was this impossible to police but as mentioned, a wider usage could
have a positive influence. One of the issues this highlighted was
importance of users understanding that they had complete control
over who could see the artefacts they created within the application.
To an extent the control message could be reinforced by better design
of the Myfolio interface but this should be backed up by emphasis
during training. In particular, the creation and updating of a journal
could display (perhaps when edited/new content was saved) a
message confirming the current status of the document in terms of
other users’ ability to access it, for instance ‘ You are sharing this
journal with [Username or group]. Click here to change this’.
4. Technologies The primary technological decision affecting the project had been
taken prior to the commencement of the project. Indeed the trial and
proposed roll-out of Mahara campus wide was the catalyst for the
project. Mahara is open source software. Mahara was launched in
2006 and has been adopted by a large enough number of educational
establishments (hard to obtain precise figures but in the UK we know
of over fifty FEIs and HEIs using the software) for there to be good
knowledge base, a range of useful plug-ins and a user/developer
community accessible via on-line user forums. Mahara is built on PHP
which is a technology widely used in the university so we had
experienced coders in the department who could work on the
application. Mahara technical documentation is currently sparse but
the previous experience of our coders enabled rapid development
despite the lack of guidance.
Following feedback from the UELT Mahara trial and the project’s own
focus group members we were able to use our developers to create
additional plugins (eg the Skills Audit), roll-out a campus wide Kent
theme and to design and create the Student Catalogue. We used the
expertise of our stakeholders to inform the enhancements to Mahara
to maximize their usefulness and to make sure they were ‘a good fit’
with Kent’s strategies for PDP and employability. We worked with
Careers & Employability to design the Student Catalogue in a way that
would encourage users to provide the types of information that the
Careers Advisers knew to be of greatest interest to employers.
Our initial project plan proposed that the project would also deliver
integration of Moodle and Mahara. However, we intend to upgrade
Moodle to the latest version (2.0) prior to the first term of the 2012/13
academic year and felt that we should reschedule the integration until
then.
5. Implementation The greatest change to services as a result of the EAT-PDP project
was to get agreement from the Moodle and Learning Technologies
(MaLT) group that availability of the Myfolio application would be
extended to all Kent alumni for a period of, initially, one year post
graduation. MaLT comprises senior members of UELT and IS and
needed to consider a wide range of issues before agreeing to the
provision of Myfolio to alumni. These included
• input from the Infrastructure team on the impact on data
storage, server usage and on-line security,
• data protection issues,
• risks presented in giving access to a Kent branded public platform (Myfolio) to users over whom the university would Page 4 of 38 have less influence and sanction (alumni) than they would have over students. (see Exposing the Kent brand through
student blogging
Agreement was given and from the summer of 2012 all alumni will
have access to their Myfolio account. As Myfolio is ‘owned’ by UELT
the announcement of this enhanced service will be made by them
during the final 2011/2012 term.
In presenting our case to MaLT for this extended access we consulted
with staff with responsibility for IT infrastructure on the likely impact
the roll out would have. There is a large element of estimation in this
as data on the percentage of graduates likely to use Mahara and their
projected data storage requirements is not available. However using
data from Mahara on average take-up and data storage of current
students- and in consultation with other HEIs who are hosting Mahara
– we estimate that a relatively small number of graduates will be
active on Myfolio. (See Alumni Access to Myfolio - Capacity and
logistics)Extrapolating usage statistics from the UELT online survey
we estimate that less than 25% of Mahara users are in their final year
of study. Around 4000 students will graduate from Kent this summer
giving a figure of around 1000 active Mahara users. We estimate that
less than 50% of these users will be active on Mahara postgraduation. Average data storage of current Mahara users is
approximately 1.5Mb so the provision of Mahara to alumni is not
projected to increase necessary data storage requirements by more
than 750Mb. Obviously at this stage of the implementation there is
some uncertainty about these projections. The volatile and somewhat
depressed graduate employment market could also have a bearing on
Mahara use with increasing numbers of graduates feeling they need to
increase their employability. As a result we may see the use of
Mahara increase amongst graduates. The launch of the Student
Catalogue may also increase the numbers of graduates wishing to
‘showcase’ themselves via Myfolio.
Predictions as to how and where data is stored into the future is
difficult but with the increasing in popularity of cloud service and the
amount of ‘free’ space offered to subscribers as a loss leader I believe
there are plenty of areas to explore if the cost of data storage
internally should become an issue.
A further area for concern is the unmoderated provision of a Kent
branded public platform to graduates. Mahara by necessity allows its
users to make their web pages and journals (blogs) publicly
accessible (and search engine crawlable). Kent already has robust
procedures in place for reporting, and where appropriate taking down,
inappropriate, offensive or defamatory content but it is acknowledged
that fewer sanctions are available to manage alumni transgressors
than are available for those still in full or part-time education at Kent.
Moderation prior to publication was not considered to be a viable
option so current guidelines and terms and conditions were reappraised to ensure that this new usage and class of website users
were adequately covered. It is not anticipated that there will be a
major problem with unacceptable use of alumni users’ webspace
however if inappropriate content be published there is potential for
considerable embarrassment as the pages are Kent branded and Kent
hosted.
6. Disadvantages Our biggest disappointment during the project was our failure to
continue contact with the alumni focus group. We incentivized this
group with Amazon vouchers and held several drop-in meetings and
discussions which were well attended and at which the participants
provided useful feedback. Our intention was to follow up these users
Page 5 of 38 at regular intervals after the participants had graduated to get
feedback on how (if) they had used Myfolio since leaving the
university. We offered further incentives for additional feedback and
got agreement from all participants that they would remain involved
with the project. However all attempts to get a response from the
participants once they had graduated failed and logs showed that they
had not used Myfolio. The major frustration of this result is that we
were unable to determine why the graduates had not continued to use
Myfolio – we could only make guesses. To put a positive gloss on
things it is possible that the entire group quickly found rewarding
positions in their chosen fields and decided that, for the time being at
least, they had no need to continue with PDP. The latest statistics
available show that around 90% of graduates do find employment
within a few weeks of graduation, however these figures do not give
us any way to measure the degree of satisfaction felt with these jobs.
Are all of these graduates in the area of work they would choose? Are
they employed at a level they believe commensurate with their skills
and qualifications? Is it possible that students particularly drawn to an
e-folio/PDP tool like Myfolio are likely to be working in a discipline that
has been particularly hard hit by the recession? I am thinking here in
particular of arts and media students. It is also possible that our focus
group members were using alternative methods to record
achievements and experience or even that they had not been
successful in logging in to their Myfolio accounts. We did make
considerable efforts to contact these individuals through their
University email (KentforLife) and through personal email addresses
they had given to the Alumni Office before leaving.
To be complete in our feedback we should also report that in the early
stages of the project relationships between team members and some
stakeholders were somewhat strained. It was perceived by some that
our interests and goals were not in perfect accord with the aims of
some of the other stakeholders. In particular, as mentioned elsewhere
in this case study, some practitioners were concerned that the work of
the project would steer users of Myfolio away from its primary purpose
as a tool for Personal Development Planning. Happily as discussion
continued and enhancements to Mahara were implemented common
ground was found and a more unified approach has persisted.
7. Measuring Success Our first act as a team once the general administration of the project
was in place was to recruit existing students to focus groups. Having
given brief tutorials to these users we asked them to create profiles,
Cvs, journals etc and followed this up with interviews and
questionnaires. We also asked more general questions on their
commitment and knowledge of PDP.
Mahara logs show that the Skills Audit plugin, developed and
implemented by the project team as a result of feedback from users is
being well used. More generally we are able to see from logs that the
number of users of Myfolio continues to increase and that these users
are creating artefacts at an even higher rate. In other words, users are
not just claiming their accounts, creating quick profiles and leaving it at
that. There is evidence that user are regularly updating their blogs and
PDP auditing tools. The EAT-PDP project cannot claim all the credit
for this but the enhancements, improvements and bug fixes which the
project has delivered have improved the service and therefore are
likely to have increased usage.
The success of the main focus of our project – engagement with
alumni – will be impossible to prove until the 2012 graduates leave the
university and begin work or looking for work or in some cases go on
to post-graduate education. However in recent surveys held in
conjunction with UELT, a majority of students indicated that they were
Page 6 of 38 likely to continue to use Myfolio to record PDP and to use links to
Myfolio personal pages in job applications and to evidence skills and
experience in connection with other activities such as gaining
accreditation to professional bodies and signing up to employment
agencies.
8. Benefits and Impact As already stated it is difficult for us to prove what benefits have
ensued from the project as our target group is not yet in the scenario
in which we are hoping they will benefit i.e. students who have
graduated. However we are confident that improvements made to
Myfolio will result in better student achievement and graduate skills –
and importantly an improved way to evidence these improvements –
and add to them - beyond graduation.
The Student Catalogue – currently at the proof of concept stage – has
been very well received by MaLT and by the Careers and
Employability service. The latter’s engagement with the business
community and with employers in particular lead to confidence that the
catalogue will have great appeal to these groups and thus is likely to
improve engagement. The facility within the catalogue for employers
to search for candidates using criteria which have the greatest
relevance to their field of interest came as a result of investigation into
what employers wanted. In addition, Careers and Employability staff
will save time by using the Catalogue to assist employers and others
in the identification of candidates. We believe this will result in better
involvement of employers and alumni in the service provided by
Careers and Employability.
If we are successful in engaging – and perhaps in the future reengaging – alumni through the offer of our online PDP tools –we will
improve, widen and extend our relationships with alumni. This could
lead to many benefits such as a wider pool of mentors and other
enhancements to learning (e.g. talks from alumni now in industry etc).
Offering services to our alumni leads to better Public Relations and an
enhanced reputation for the university and may lead to increased
donations.
A more controversial benefit which the university could explore is the
use of alumni personal data which Myfolio will provide to enable better
targeted communication with this part of the University community.
The benefits to learners’ personal development by the use of software
such as Mahara are well known. We are confident that our
improvements and additions to this software have increased these
benefits as well as broadening our knowledge of Mahara as a team.
Within, and external to the University we have also gained benefits
from new and improved relationships with colleagues. The clustering
of projects has enabled us to share our experiences with other
projects to our mutual benefit. Within the university we have
strengthened our links with the Unit for Enhanced Learning and
Teaching not only through their membership of the Steering Group but
also through regular informal meeting with Faculty Learning
Technologists to discuss Mahara related issues. This has resulted in
collaboration unforeseen at the beginning of the project.
Other impacts of the project might be an increase in server
infrastructure loading and a requirement for additional storage as a
result of an additional number of Myfolio users. The effects of these
additional users over the next year are not expected to be likely to
result in additional costs of a level which would be of concern to
Information Services. However projection of these effects into the
future is complex and the increase in the number of users will be
incremental. Based on current student numbers, we can predict
Page 7 of 38 somewhere in the order of an additional four thousand new graduates
every year. We will need to monitor into the future how a much greater
number of Myfolio accounts impacts on the department’s resources.
9. The Next Stage Over the summer of 2012 the L&RD team aims to consolidate and
build upon the enhancements made to Mahara. The Student
Catalogue is currently in a ‘proof of concept’ form – which was our
goal within the project. The plug-in is robust and well executed and
works exactly as was intended. However before we implement the
Student Catalogue we want to want to re-assess its functionality and
appearance and change some of the default behaviour it inherits from
the Google Search Appliance. We designed the current version of the
catalogue in consultation with stakeholders and are confident that we
have produced a useful tool. But we will seek feedback from users
after launch to explore whether we can improve functionality.
An important area yet to be settled in connection with the Student
Catalogue is that of what form communication between the external
users of the facility and our students and alumni who are using the
service to showca their skills. Currently, approaches from employers
looking for Kent graduates is brokered by the Careers and
Employability Service. It would be a good solution if this was to
continue however depending on the take up of the service there may
be resource implications for that department. If we were to head in the
other direction and allow direct contact between both sides there
would be implications for managing unwanted contact, for example
from employment agencies or organisations selling training, life
coaching and etc. One possibility worth exploring would be offering
direct access to selected partners in exchange for a number of
guaranteed internships or work experience opportunities.
We will continue to listen to Myfolio users and respond to suggestions
as to how we might improve the service with additional plugins.
Mahara is not the only e-folio software available and many students
choose to use other blogging platforms. If we are to compete with the
best that the web has to offer we need to improve some aspects of the
Mahara application - in particular the functionality for embedding
external media into some Mahara pages which currently does not
meet users’ expectations.
The first cohort of alumni with access to Myfolio will graduate this
summer (2012). Our surveys of current users and feedback from focus
groups suggest that there is demand amongst this group for the
services that Myfolio offers but will not have confirmation of this until
this group have graduated. We will need to design and implement
queries and reports on the Myfolio database to determine whether
users are active on the application beyond graduation and to examine
in what ways they are using the software. We also hope we can
further survey these users for feedback on how the application has
helped them with continuing PDP and in their job seeking endeavours.
As part of our dissemination effort we are currently working on a
brochure which will highlight our key findings from the project and
inform readers where they can get further details. The brochure will
include quotes from key stakeholders. We will also produce a video as
required by the project plan.
10. Summary The EAT-PDP project has resulted in an improved offer from the
university to our students and alumni. In particular we are proud that
we have made a successful case to extend access to Myfolio to
graduates and seen that recommendation implemented. By the
Page 8 of 38 autumn of 2012 around 4000 student will graduate from the University
of Kent. All of these graduates will continue to have access to Myfolio
for two years. At the end of the 2012/13 academic year a similar
number will be provided with post-graduation access to Myfolio. The
creation and proposed implementation of the project’s Student
Catalogue will improve the ability of employers to locate Kent
graduates and reinforces the importance of PDP to our students and
graduates. We feel confident that this will be seen as a significant
addition to the employment related services the university offers. We
also hope that the Student Catalogue will have a role in marketing as
it will enable prospective students to gauge the quality of tuition,
facilities and support we provide to members of the university,
evidenced by the records of achievement showcased within it.
Although we cannot take comfort from the continuing reports in the
media of the depressed jobs market we can at least take pride that we
are endeavouring to give our students and alumni the edge by
providing enhanced PDP and e-folio tools as a result of the project.
We are confident that the provision of these tools to alumni will
improve and extend the relationship they have with the university
allowing the university to use that relationship to mutual benefit.
We are also confident that the outputs and deliverables of the EATPDP project will prove useful not just to the University of Kent but also
the wider JISC community and to other users of Mahara.
11. Further Information Reports:
•
•
•
•
•
Report on the development and implementation of a
searchable Student Catalogue within the Mahara e-folio
application
Exploring opportunities and risks for targeted alumni
contacts
Exposing the Kent brand through student blogging
Capacity and logistics
Analysis of two online surveys into the use of Myfolio
EAT-PDP Project blog
Page 9 of 38 EAT-­‐PDP Project Alumni Access to Myfolio -­‐ Capacity and logistics For the purposes of this report the terms Mahara and Myfolio are interchangeable as Myfolio is the University of Kent ‘branded’ instance of Mahara application The Eat-­‐PDP project proposes that access to the Mahara application, branded at Kent as Myfolio, be extended to alumni for a period yet to be decided. A trial period of one year access post-­‐graduation has been agreed for students graduating in the summer of 2012. It is hoped that this period can be extended and ideally for as long as alumni wish to use it. Obviously this presents resource issues and this document aims to explore some of these issues. Mahara – fit for purpose? Mahara is open source software and the University of Kent is currently running version 1.4.2. branded at Kent as Myfolio. Currently all students and staff have access to the web based application – potentially this gives access to more than 20 000 users. At the time of writing, March 2012, slightly more than 4300 users have claimed and used their accounts with a maximum of 220 being logged on at any one time. Mahara uses a MySQL database. Effectively a MySQL database does not have limits to table size which are likely to be a problem for the university’s use of Mahara. Mahara documentation does not quote any limits on the maximum number of users. As stated Mahara is open source software so there are no on-­‐going support or upgrade costs beyond development and implementation resources from our own IS staff. There is a growing worldwide Mahara community forming a useful knowledge base with access through the Mahara.org forums. Mahara is built on a PHP framework. Information Services’ developers at the University of Kent include experienced PHP practitioners. The Learning & Research Department and Web Team developers have developed enhancements for, and worked on improvements to, Mahara. As a result of this work, some of it generated by the EAT-­‐PDP project, we already have considerable expertise within the department on the architecture of Mahara. Up until middle of 2012 the update schedule from Mahara has been between 9 and 11 months. However Mahara.org has now announced that the developers intend to go to a regular six monthly update schedule. Obviously this does have an impact on both UELT who need to assess the impact of any changes from the point of view of the user and on Learning and Research Development staff as they have to implement the upgrade having confirmed that it will not break any plug-­‐ins or other enhancement s that have been applied. On current experience this does not result in more than a few hours of staff time and the downtime for an upgrade is normally scheduled between 8am and 10am to minimise disruption to students and staff. In summary we do not anticipate issues with the choice of software and database. Hardware Mahara is currently run on two Solaris instances hosted on Sunfire servers with 4Gb RAM. In theory, there are no concerns from the server Infrastructure team about performance issues with this set up Alumni Access to Myfolio – capacity and logistics Version 1.0 (Final) Author: Leo Lyons Page 10 of 38 EAT-­‐PDP Project with usage at current and anticipated levels. However the current installation of Mahara often runs at the limit of acceptable speed – this despite their rarely being more than a dozen concurrent users and often much less.A support ticket has been issued to investigate the cause of this performance issue. If use of Mahara continues to grow as hoped then the university may need to upgrade the infrastructure available to the application within a few years Data storage Currently Myfolio users are using a minimal amount of storage – the Myfolio stats report slightly over 1mb per users. However we know that a large number of Myfolio account holders have not actually created a page yet so the average disk usage is not an accurate reflection of how much disk storage we would need for active users. Similarly a lot of users have not uploaded files. If alumni claim their Myfolio accounts they are more likely to use the application to create e-­‐folios and to continue PDP so we could reasonably assume that their disk space will be higher. It is difficult to predict by how much data storage is likely to grow until Mahara has been available for the typical whole student cycle of three years. It maybe that usage of Myfolio for PDP will increase in the second and third years of a course as the advantages of an e-­‐folio, in particular, towards and beyond graduation, become more relevant to students. Embedding of artefacts from video and digital image repositories such as Vimeo, YouTube and Flickr will continue to be popular and contribute only negligibly to data storage but increasingly students are creating their own images and video which they may wish to upload directly to Mahara. Currently usage and uptake of Mahara at Kent seems to be in line with the experience of other HEIs – somewhere around 25% of current students have a Myfolio account though somewhat less are deemed to be active. Many current students use no more than a minimal part of their provided storage (50Mb) – which might suggest that they have explored Myfolio but are not as yet using it as a tool for PDP or to create an e-­‐folio. Of our 4000 users only around 25% have uploaded files to Myfolio. It is difficult to predict whether this percentage will rise – in part this may be dependent on the discipline being studied and also may be influenced by technological developments. Increasingly students use mobile technology within their learning. Mahara has plugins – available but not currently promoted at Kent – which allow direct upload of files – such as images or videos – to the application. Promotion of this facility may increase upload of files because of the convenience it brings with a greater resulting use of file storage. Mitigating this is the fact that most students will also have an account with other file sharing/ image storage sites such as Facebook or Flickr. Where the habit is already established there may not seem an advantage to change image upload to Mahara – especially as the ability to easily and instantly share these images with an already established circle of friends does not exist within Mahara. In terms of avoiding excessive storage costs associated with increasing use of Mahara this obviously works to the university’s advantage. External factors External factors may also affect data storage and usage. Some analysts have detected a slight upturn in the graduate employment market but there is little disagreement that the jobs market is still very difficult. As a result, graduates are employing diverse and varied methods in their attempts to gain Alumni Access to Myfolio – capacity and logistics Version 1.0 (Final) Author: Leo Lyons Page 11 of 38 EAT-­‐PDP Project an employability advantage. Services such as Myfolio are likely to become increasingly attractive. Until the end of the summer term this year (2012), alumni access to Myfolio is limited to a very small focus group. With around 4000 students graduating from Kent each year it is likely that there will be a reasonable uptake of Myfolio by our alumni – particularly those who have not been able to find work at an acceptable salary commensurate with graduate status or not in their chosen field. The development of the Student Catalogue within Myfolio (see report on this) will further increase the advantages of a Myfolio account. The Student Catalogue has been developed as a proof of concept but not yet launched. We know from Kent’s Career’s Advisory Group (recently renamed Careers & Employability Service) that employers who have already recruited Kent graduates are interested in recruiting more. The use of the Student Catalogue, either internally by Careers & Employability staff liaising with employers or directly by employers, allows fine-­‐grained searching for suitably qualified and experienced graduates. The search result links to individual Myfolio webpages created by the graduates to showcase their skills and experience. To offset this, however we need to consider that there are rival services available which some alumni may choose to focus on. In particular LinkedIn has the biggest market share in business networking tools. LinkedIn does not offer the same versatility in creation of multi-­‐media e-­‐folios, nor does it have the same emphasis on PDP, as Mahara but as an established networking tool many alumni will already have an account there. Some may even link their LinkedIn and Myfolio accounts. Tuition on how to link a Myfolio e-­‐folio to LinkedIn should be incorporated within the general Myfolio training and included in help files or tutorial videos. LinkedIn and Myfolio provide related but different advantages to the user and using both applications can be beneficial to the users and the university. If the University wishes to capitalize on the number of students -­‐ and eventually alumni -­‐ using our in-­‐house Mahara rather than an external service we need to promote the advantages that Myfolio brings. Foremost amongst these advantages are perhaps the areas of trust, control and motives. A Kent Myfolio user should have confidence that the University provides the application primarily for PDP purposes and to provide assistance with both education and employability. The data entered into Myfolio remains private to the author unless they decide to share it with other users. It is important that this face is stressed to users in training sessions and guidance to preserve the value of Myfolio as a tool for PDP. Similarly, if a Myfolio user decides to remove all data from the application this is easily achieved and the user can have trust that copies of the data are not retained and they have not had to sign away any rights which allow the university any sort of use of their data either during their time at college or after they have graduate. The above is not to claim that the University of Kent has no interest in the value of Myfolio data as a resource for planning, promotion and marketing – indeed this is precisely one of the areas the EAT-­‐
PDP project has looked at. But we can give guarantees that we will take no action with users’ data without specific declaration of that intention and without also providing an option for our users to opt out of any such scheme. Many student and alumni will also see an advantage in being able to ‘publish’ electronic resumes and blogs etcunder the umbrella of the Kent brand. This in turn promotes the sense of belonging for Alumni Access to Myfolio – capacity and logistics Version 1.0 (Final) Author: Leo Lyons Page 12 of 38 EAT-­‐PDP Project alumni. The implications of all this however are that if we are successful in persuading our alumni to use Myfolio then part of the price of that success will be an increased demand on our servers and the staff who support them. In the long term, if access to Myfolio is extended to alumni for a much longer period – perhaps even for life – the University will have to consider putting in place procedures to retire accounts and delete or archive data. Decisions on how long to retain data belonging to apparently inactive users will be as much influenced by the Data Protection Act rules on storing data as on the storage costs for this data. Data storage costs have recently risen as a result of damage to the manufacturers’ plants caused by flooding in the Far East but in the long term, costs will probably continue to drop. However data storage costs are only part of the picture. The hidden costs of the management and storage of large amounts of personal data are well known and do not need to be rehearsed in this document. The university will need to draw up policies for how they propose to manage Myfolio data and accounts into the future. These policies will need to be incorporated into Terms and Conditions of Use of the Myfolio product by its members. If, in agreeing to Myfolio T&C, users agree to the long term storage of personal data by the University, the University will need to consider safe procedures for identifying inactive accounts and for deleting data. Procedures to identify inactive accounts could put the responsibility on the account owner to confirm their interest in the account by clicking a link in a confirmation email. Even if an account is deemed to be inactive, a period of grace may be considered appropriate before data is deleted. Contact details for alumni do ‘expire’ and as explored elsewhere there are no guarantees that alumni will continue to check their kentforlife.net email accounts in perpetuity. The Alumni Office does receive updates for alumni contact details so a request to that department for such information to be passed on should be considered. Currently Myfolio does not require a personal email address but does use the student’s kent.ac.uk email address when the account is claimed. Part of the Terms and Conditions for continued access to Myfolio beyond graduation could be the provision of a secondary personal email address and an agreement that the University may close account s and delete data if no response is obtained following reasonable attemtps to contact users Much of the above is estimation and projection and it will be interesting to see what the actual take up of an alumni Myfolio service will be. The best course must be a commitment to a review of these issues following a suitable period of use by alumni, perhaps in the early part of 2013. Alumni Access to Myfolio – capacity and logistics Version 1.0 (Final) Author: Leo Lyons Page 13 of 38 EAT-­‐PDP Project The Development and Implementation of a Searchable Student Catalogue within Mahara Background Mahara is a web application designed to be used as a Personal Development Planning tool and for other purposes such as the creation of multiple shareable webpages featuring resumes/e-­‐portfolios, journals and etc. Mahara is an open source PHP application originally developed in New Zealand and launched in 2008. It is being adopted increasingly across the HEI and FEI sectors in the UK and more widely across Europe and the United States. At the University of Kent, Mahara – re-­‐branded as Myfolio, was trialled by around 200 students in 2010-­‐11 and rolled out campus wide in September 2011. Currently all students and staff have access to the application. Students graduating in the summer of 2012 will have continued access to Myfolio as alumni for at least one year. Approximately four and a half thousand Kent students have claimed their Myfolio accounts and uploaded or created artefacts. As part of the JISC funded EAT-­‐PDP project the Learning and Research Development team have developed a plug-­‐in which we have termed the ‘Student Catalogue’ within Mahara. The Student Catalogue utilises the Page creation and sharing feature of Mahara to allow users to compile a webpage featuring mixed media artefacts and text to promote themselves to potential employers and other interested parties. The Student Catalogue is an opt-­‐in service available to Kent students and alumni. As the Student Catalogue publicly exposes the personal data of those who choose to use it, the university will provide guidance on its use and safeguards to protect users’ confidentiality. We will ensure that only data for which the owner has given consent will feature in the Catalogue, by creating a Page template specifically for this purpose with additional functionality to guide the user and provide checks against accidental publication. This process will require the user to make an active choice to expose their data and will default to all data remaining private to the user. The University of Kent uses the Google Search Appliance to index the data of users who have subscribed to the catalogue. This data is then made available to external and internal users via a Google type search page on the Kent website. Results from the search are faceted and an advanced search facility is available. Students and alumni may withdraw from the Student Catalogue though there may be some delay in the removal of the data from the search index. However the user’s page is instantly removed. To clarify, for a short period after a user has made a previously public Student Catalogue page private, that page may still appear in the Google Search appliance results but attempts to drill down to the page which has been indexed will fail as soon as the user makes the change. Method We proposed adding a Student Catalogue entry to the Pages tab under Portfolio. The Student Catalogue would include some blocks featuring recommended or mandatory information to improve the usefulness of the catalogue to those searching it and to ensure consistent faceting. These standard fields take the form of free text, or where the data is of appropriate consistency, selections from drop down lists. The user will then add any other artefacts they wish to the page using the drag The Development and Implementation of a Searchable Student Catalogue for Mahara Version 1.0 (Final) Author: Leo Lyons Page 14 of 38 EAT-­‐PDP Project and drop facility provided by Mahara. By default the resulting page will not be visible by anyone other than the user. We wanted to assist the user to create a dedicated Student Catalogue page. Our criteria were that the Student Catalogue should: •
Feature some standard fields to give the search results some consistency and guide the users as to what sort of information users of the catalogue might find useful. To compile this list we talked to colleagues in the Careers Advisory office (now the Careers & Employability Service) to ask what sort of enquiries they received from employers; •
Be easily editable to include new data or change existing data; •
Be created using the standard drag and drop features used in Mahara page creation to re-­‐
use artefacts and add new ones; •
Be easily toggled between being private to the owner and publicly available and indexed by the Google Search Appliance. Once the list of recommended fields had been drawn up we decided that these blocks of data should be treated as separate artefacts as there was potential for their use in other pages the user might want to create. We then decided to subdivide these fields as some information such as course names and finish dates should ultimately be fed straight from the Student Data system. Although this was not achievable in with our test installation of Mahara, we did separate this data under its own tab, Course Details, within the Content section of the program. Also under Content we added a Student Catalogue tab. This tab launched a block with fields for the data we are recommending that all users include in their Student Catalogue. These fields included: •
•
•
•
Type of work the student/alumni is seeking (select from Full-­‐time, Part-­‐time, Internship etc), Previous work experience, Locations they would consider working in; and Free text field for a brief paragraph highlighting the strengths and skills of the person. In order to create a Student Catalogue page the user is asked to supply data for both these artefacts in the Content section. As with other entries on this list the user will be able to edit the page by clicking the pencil icon in the right hand column of the list. Choosing this option will display a default Student Catalogue page featuring blocks with recommended data that all students/alumni should include in the catalogue. During development it was decided to separate the completion of the Student Catalogue block from the completion of the actual Student Catalogue page. This was because it was thought that the information within this block could be used on other pages too so could be made available with the other blocks such as cv or journals. We also added a contents tab to hold data on the programme of study and the expected finish date. In our prototype this takes the form of a drop down using an export of course data from the Student Data System but eventually this could directly pull the appropriate information from Student Data System linked the username as a key. The Student The Development and Implementation of a Searchable Student Catalogue for Mahara Version 1.0 (Final) Author: Leo Lyons Page 15 of 38 EAT-­‐PDP Project Catalogue block data fields will be a mixture of free text blocks and drop down lists. In addition to the default block, the user will be able to add any artefacts they wish to the page, re-­‐using existing artefacts from their journals, skills audits and plans and embedding images and videos as appropriate and creating new artefacts as desired. The user will be able to theme their Student Catalogue page as with any other user created page though there might be an argument for recommending a consistent theme throughout the catalogue. All pages created by Myfolio users remain private to the user until he or she decides to make it public. Unlike other pages however the user will only be able to make the Student Catalogue page private or public – there will not be the option to make the page available to only friends or to a group or to time limit when the page is available to those individuals or groups. When the user clicks the ‘Make this page public’ icon they will see a page with guidance and terms and conditions. Guidance will include advice on avoiding making inappropriate personal details public eg Mobile Phone numbers or Home addresses. Terms and Conditions will point out that any of the data added to this page will not only be available via the University Student Catalogue Search but will also be accessible to third party search engine crawlers. We have a duty of care to our users to make sure they are aware of the risks of exposing personal data but beyond this, users can include whatever they wish to the Catalogue. Some existing users of Myfolio do knowingly include personal contact details on their public pages – the reasoning being that they want a prospective employer to be able to contact them immediately and directly should an opportunity suddenly arise. The Student Catalogue at the University of Kent uses the Google Search Appliance to index data. The Google Search Appliance (GSA) is a hardware/software solution providing a Google-­‐like Search facility running on Dell hardware. GSA is configurable and customisable but by default gives the user the type of experience they would recognise from Google’s web search pages. Results pages are faceted in a sidebar and results can be sorted by relevance or date and synonyms and keywords utilised. GSA creates indexes from URLs it is pointed at. Development The project developers successfully created a working prototype of the Student Catalogue on a test installation and configured the University’s GSA to crawl and index the relevant URLs pointing to test data within the Student Catalogue. Overall, the developers found developing within Mahara a straightforward procedure without any major design issues blocking the goals of the project. However, the lack of developer documentation available did seriously hamper progress with the result that creation of the artefacts took a great deal longer than would have been the case. Essentially, developers had to examine previous coders work line by line to establish what they would need to do to add their own artefacts to the application. The documentation on the Mahara.org website, where it did exist was thought to be very good. Unfortunately there are many areas where documentation does not exist. Locally, the developers will endeavour to create documentation to help future developers and the project will explore whether resources exist to make this documentation available more widely. The lack of documentation for an open source application is a thorny problem as no-­‐one wants to point the The Development and Implementation of a Searchable Student Catalogue for Mahara Version 1.0 (Final) Author: Leo Lyons Page 16 of 38 EAT-­‐PDP Project finger at the developers who usually will have dedicated hours of their time to working on the product will little or no reward. However the lack of documentation might be considered to be working against the adoption of Mahara as widely as it could be as development becomes more difficult than it should be. The developers found the configuration of the GSA to be straightforward. The view presented to the user will only show results from the indexes specified for that view. In other words only the data provided for the Student Catalogue by opted in students will be available to the search engine. Faceting can easily be configured within GSA by setting categories and links in a GSA variable. In our prototype the faceting is a static list but creating dynamic faceting from metatags is easily achievable. Minor improvements which could be made include dealing with the default behaviour of GSA which results in similar results being ‘hidden’ behind a clickable message, viz ‘repeat the search with the omitted results included’. This happens because GSA sees that all results are artefacts from the same Myfolio folio and so assumes they are similar. Screenshots Student Catalogue User Entry Screen 1 The Development and Implementation of a Searchable Student Catalogue for Mahara Version 1.0 (Final) Author: Leo Lyons Page 17 of 38 EAT-­‐PDP Project Student Catalogue Display Screen 1 Student Catalogue Search Result 1 The Development and Implementation of a Searchable Student Catalogue for Mahara Version 1.0 (Final) Author: Leo Lyons Page 18 of 38 EAT-­‐PDP Project Exposing the Kent brand through Student Blogging Introduction Among the stated aims of the EAT-­‐PDP project is an intention to obtain ‘Greater understanding of the broader issues involved in students publishing blogs etc under the University of Kent brand.’ This is relevant to the EAT-­‐PDP project as the project aims to achieve its goals in a large part by encouraging the use, by students and alumni, of Mahara based software to assist with the PDP process. Mahara (in the case of Kent, branded as Myfolio) gives users the opportunity to present multi-­‐media artefacts to their chosen audience – which includes making these artefacts public. Mahara/Myfolio includes a blog facility (recently re-­‐named journals) which users are encouraged to use as an aid to self-­‐reflection as well as a way of reporting on academic progress, work experience, field trips etc. However the relevance of this to this report is that the author has fine-­‐grained control over who and when he or she shares the blog or journal . This allows complete freedom for the user to share their own and embedded content to the general public if they choose to do so. Electronic portfolios created within Myfolio can be shared in a similar way. The concerns this report aims to explore revolve around the difficulty (and wisdom) of monitoring blog posts and other articles which might be published by students and alumni via the Kent branded Myfolio application and what consequences might ensue from unwise or even malicious publication of opinions/data/images etc by members of the student body – or indeed staff and perhaps in the future, alumni. It may be worthwhile to briefly examine why Kent should want to allow students to publish at all. It is worth re-­‐iterating that the provision of a public platform for students is not a driving factor in the rollout of Mahara/Myfolio, rather it is a feature of Mahara that some students may wish to use1. However it is probably fair to assume that some e-­‐folio owners will consider a public resume to be a good idea. In the same way that many individuals choose to blog via Tumblr, Wordpress and Blogger we can assume that some will choose to publicly blog via Myfolio. Additionally, Myfolio (Mahara) makes it very simple to include parts of, or an entire, blog or journal on an e-­‐folio webpage. Some of the positive aspects of encouraging students to blog and make their blogs available to other users or more widely, include: Kent’s willingness to give its students a public voice demonstrates the university’s confidence in the service it provides, the quality of our students’ work, the maturity and responsibility of its students and its commitment to openness. Positive well written journals and web pages enhance the reputation of the University (though it should be pointed out that not all academics are of the opinion that blogging is a wise career move for post –graduates – once published blogs can exist forever). The primary intention of the provision of a blogging/journal facility, within Myfolio, to our students is not to give them a means to publish theses, research and opinions on their area of study but more as an aid to improving employability and aiding personal development planning. The journals are seen as primarily a tool to assist with self-­‐reflection. 1
The implementation of a student employability catalogue would have an influence on this as de facto it will only be of limited use if it is not on a public platform. Exposing the Kent Brand through Student Blogging Version 1.0 (Final) Authors; Leo Lyons, Stewart Brownrigg Page 19 of 38 EAT-­‐PDP Project •
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•
•
Good content improves employability and increases the likelihood of recruitment which in turn enhances Kent ‘s reputation If – as is hoped – access to Myfolio is extended to alumni, this could help to keep channels of communication open and helps the university’s awareness of the progress and career paths of its alumni. The act of blogging/journal writing improves not only writing skills but when self-­‐reflective is also an important aspect of personal development planning. Some studies have found that students who may have shown some reticence to join in discussions during tutorials were much more comfortable with contributing comments to blogs. This may be particularly the case for some students for whom English is not their first language or who have dyslexia or similar disabilities. Public blogging raises the profile of the university to employers, mentors, donors and potential new post-­‐grads, under-­‐grads and staff. How student blogs may compromise the Kent Brand Alongside the advantages of the introduction of Myfolio and its potential as a public platform we should consider the possible problems it could also introduce. Listed as they are below, this might seem like fear mongering so it should be stressed that these are worse case scenarios and not expected to be issues frequently encountered. However such occurrences will become a possibility. It should also be noted that existing University Rules and Regulations, Terms and Conditions do already cover many of these scenarios. Additionally it should be pointed out that many of these threats will exist without the provision of a public platform by the university – individuals can easily use other public platforms for the same purposes. This list is not exhaustive. •
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Defamation – a student might feel sufficiently upset about some aspect of his or her education that he or she makes untrue statements about a member of staff. There may be a fine line here between fair comment and opinion (‘my tutor is a poor communicator, is difficult to understand in the lecture theatre’) and actual defamation (my tutor was behaving inappropriately with a friend of mine). Students can defame other students too and although this is perhaps less likely to result in legal action it is also perhaps more likely to occur. It is an area that the university should have policies for, regardless of whether the author has made the comments public or only available to other users of the system (which can still in theory amount to up to 20 000 users.) Any other member of the public could be defamed and in particular celebrities and public figures. Bringing the University into disrepute by publishing extreme views on religion, sexuality, race etc. Publishing material which may be helpful to, or be deemed to be encouraging, terrorists. Using Kent’s website to promulgate unacceptable political views or to recruit to banned or marginalised political parties (Current examples would be the English Defence League or Hizbollah). Inclusion of unacceptable imagery in journals and blogs. Exposing the Kent Brand through Student Blogging Version 1.0 (Final) Authors; Leo Lyons, Stewart Brownrigg Page 20 of 38 EAT-­‐PDP Project •
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•
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Damaging the reputation of the University as a high quality academic institution by publication of sub-­‐standard information. This could take the form of poorly conducted, biased research with poor analysis and conclusions or simply reports and articles with poor legibility, bad grammar, spelling mistakes etc Compromising the security of the University systems by publishing usernames, passwords, protected URLs etc Violation of the Data Protection Act by the unauthorised publication of personal data Attracting claims for damages for unauthorised use of copyrighted materials (images, quotes from publications, music etc) Intention It is possible -­‐ some would say inevitable -­‐ that some students might want to deliberately compromise or damage the reputation of the university due to real or imagined grievances they may have with any aspect of their relationship with the university or its staff. It is to be hoped that such occurrences would be rare. Instances where students unintentionally expose the University to legal or social risks are much more likely. This may in part be a consequence of the ease with which Myfolio artefacts can be re-­‐used. Something originally written purely for personal reflection could be subsequently included in a public page – Myfolio offers a drag and drop facility by which entire blogs as well as individual blog post can be added to a page which can then be made public. Some students may be unaware of legal restrictions on the use of materials owned by others. Within social networking sites such as Facebook, users link to, copy and embed images, videos and text seemingly without knowledge of, or concerns for, their right to do this. It is difficult to find definitive views on the legality of this but I think it is fair to say that for a great deal of on-­‐line users the idea of checking whether permission is required before using on their own web pages, materials they have not originated, is not foremost in their minds when using Facebook etc. As use of copyrighted material in this context would not be for commercial gain it is to be hoped that the likelihood that the university would find itself liable for compensation against lost revenue is not high. However, a principle is also at stake here and it is incumbent upon the university to make its users aware of these issues. Prior to uploading a file to Myfolio, a user has to tick a box confirming that they are conforming to any copyright restrictions on the material they are about to upload. Users do need to be made aware of the issues. Users can also link to material elsewhere, using html for instance or by embedding YouTube videos which will not require confirmation that they have rights to use the linked artefacts. Text and/or images used by one person may be deemed offensive by another. Similarly comments which the author considers being innocent and without prejudice may be seen to be offensive by the person about whom the comments have been written. So who decides if a post is defamatory or not? In reality, I suspect most organisations will err on the side of caution and avoiding legal proceedings by taking down any comment or statement about which they have received a complaint. This may be no great loss to the wider academic community but it does make some sort of statement about openness and freedom of speech. Exposing the Kent Brand through Student Blogging Version 1.0 (Final) Authors; Leo Lyons, Stewart Brownrigg Page 21 of 38 EAT-­‐PDP Project Some establishments do publish guidelines specifically on defamation (eg Coventry University Defamation Policy). JISC have also published Legal Guidance for ICT Use in Education, Research and External Engagement which includes sections on various aspects of computer misuse. There is also a JISC document which gives guidelines on the facilitation and use of social networking sites, primarily Facebook. Defamation, and other proscribed behaviours, are covered in the University of Kent’s IT guidelines which all users of the university’s systems are required to comply with. The availability of Myfolio to all users – and eventually perhaps alumni too – provides greater opportunity for witting or unwitting violations of the guidelines by a greater number of people. In the case of alumni it is more difficult to bring to bear effective sanctions on those who choose to violate the regulations. Although the current Kent regulations state that infringements will be investigated they do not mention any appeal process – should the university accept that students have a right to use the facilities provided to level criticisms at their courses, facilities or tutors? Is there a level of gravity which would automatically trigger sanctions or does a complaint need to be made? Is context ever relevant? Is it acceptable, for instance, for a student to criticise some aspect of their course or tutors as a reason for not being where they wanted to be in terms of personal development or academic progress? Is this acceptable if only published to other users (in effect all members of the university) or does it need to be have been made public to be an infringement? Does it make any difference if the ‘defamatory’ statement is true? As the JISC guidance points out: Opinions vary on whether uncontrolled internet access from within an organisation represents a significant legal and security risk. Similarly opinions vary on the extent of an institution's legal obligation to protect its staff and students and computer systems from exposure to illegal and inappropriate electronic communications. Unlimited and predominantly unmoderated access to a publication platform for the World Wide Web sets enormous challenges for organisations trying to remain within the law, endeavouring to avoid possible accusations of defamation, and avoiding hosting inappropriate content. It is more than likely impossible to draw up guidelines which would guarantee the university’s on-­‐line publications are always acceptable to all parties in all regions, even if it was possible to guarantee adherence to the guidelines by its users. The practical course is more likely to be an assessment of, and attempt at reduction of, risk. Websites do not always remain static – not least because external links which they may feature are beyond the control of the University’s web authors. Additionally there are many grey areas -­‐does an embedded link to copyrighted material on another site constitute theft of intellectual property? It is a common perception, though of course erroneous, that linking to anything on YouTube and elsewhere breaks no rules. Often the copyright owner may perceive a benefit by allowing such links – free publicity might be one way of describing this. However in law an infringement could exist. Guidelines published by the university even when coupled with appropriate training will not eradicate such grey areas from students’ webpages. In reality, legal redress for infringement of intellectual property rights is only likely to be sought where the copyright owner perceives that 1. a court will agree that financial losses have been incurred as a result of unauthorised and unpaid for publication of the copyrighted material and; Exposing the Kent Brand through Student Blogging Version 1.0 (Final) Authors; Leo Lyons, Stewart Brownrigg Page 22 of 38 EAT-­‐PDP Project 2. there is a realistic chance that reasonable recompense for that loss is likely to result from the court action. The risk of this happening is also mitigated by the provision on each webpage of a 'Report' function and a mechanism within the organisation to react to such reports. If it is deemed that the University rather than the individual is ultimately responsible then the likelihood that the conditions of point 2 are more likely to be met. However even though financial penalties may not ensue, adopting the attitude that an attempt by the injured party to get legal redress is unlikely to succeed, does not leave the university morally ‘clean’ and a belief that this was the university's approach could be used to denigrate the university’s reputation. Educating our users to be aware of the law regarding copyright is the University's responsibility and to my mind this should extend to courtesies such as crediting the author of any work used regardless of the licence under which it is used. In reality , I believe it has to be accepted that turning all our users into experts able to make the correct judgement on not crossing the many fine lines that exist between fair use and fair comment and the infringement of rights, is not an achievable goal. This is compounded by the fact that when our users begin using our systems many of them are likely to be already 'guilty' -­‐ yet totally unaware of -­‐ many such 'infringements'. Reach The vast majority of information entered into Myfolio application by Kent students is likely to remain visible only to the author or to other registered members of Myfolio or a subset of these chosen by the author. (It should be noted that as from October 2011, there will be up to 18 000 users of Myfolio and this number will increase if access is extended to alumni). If users of the application create t e-­‐folios within Myfolio to enhance their job applications or use the application to submit assignments to tutors or seek comment from their peers, then the expected audience will increase but probably only marginally. A small percentage of users (it is not possible currently to put an estimate on this figure) will decide to make some of their Myfolio information public. However even when considering the case where information has been made public it is unlikely, in most instances, that this information will reach a wide audience unless the author decides to publicise its existence. Information held in Myfolio, which has been shared publicly may be discoverable by Google and other search engines but this does not mean many people will be searching for the specific words or phrases that would place the Myfolio content near the top of a page of search results. Of more concern, because of the potential for abuse of such information, is the fact that search engines like Google will allow ‘trawling’ of all public information within Myfolio if the appropriate search terms are used. If a blog post did attract attention and gain notoriety because of its content it would be reasonably easy to locate it via a search engine if the author had made it public and particularly if links had been made from other websites. Exposing the Kent Brand through Student Blogging Version 1.0 (Final) Authors; Leo Lyons, Stewart Brownrigg Page 23 of 38 EAT-­‐PDP Project Nature of risk & potential consequences Risks to the organisation could be both financial and damaging to the University’s reputation and standing in the community. Ultimately this could affect Kent’s ranking and result in reduced student numbers. These are of course worst case scenarios. If a prominent public figure felt they had been badly libelled by a Kent student and that a large number of people had read that blog or seen the offending statements repeated by the media, they might feel inclined to sue the University for Damages. Reporting functions on published webpages might mitigate this risk but also might compound it if they had been used and the complainant felt appropriate action had not been taken or expedited. In the case of offensive or inflammatory information being published under the Kent name, the reputation of Kent as a good place for all sections of the society to consider as a suitable place for study may suffer. Members of staff could also find themselves held responsible by the courts for allowing such information to be published under the Kent name. (Note: the legal position needs to be clarified in such a scenario) If Rights Managed material is used by a student without permission and agreed payments the University might find it is liable for damages as recompense for lost revenue. Mitigating the risk Where there is an intention to cause mischief there is little that can be done within the current framework beyond the threat of sanctions. A thorough exploration of the consequences of intentional abuse of Myfolio should be covered within a training program – this is necessary and an obligation even though by exposing this risk to all our users wemight in fact make exploitation of that risk greater. The University of Kent publishes comprehensive Rules and Regulations for the use of its IT Facilities and users are required to agree to adhere. The University might also want to consider: •
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•
Monitoring/vetting publicly accessible content. This could require considerable resources. Mahara could be modified to issue an email notification to an appropriate administrator when a page was made public. Quarantining content which is made public until a moderator has approved it (again this could require considerable resources). It should be noted however that where measures such as this and the one above are taken the institution would then be considered to be an editor of the information and therefore to have greater liability than if they instead published ‘take down procedures’ which could be activated in the case of a complaint being received. Opting to make a page public could trigger a pop-­‐up which re-­‐stated warnings covering intellectual copyright (this already happens when users upload content to Myfolio), gave warnings about defamation and inappropriate use etc. This pop-­‐up could be configured to require confirmation of acceptance of T&C before it could be dismissed. Ensuring any additional issues or increased risks brought about by the introduction of Myfolio/Mahara are covered by training and introductory sessions – in many ways this is the most important way of mitigating the risk but it is difficult to be certain that all students Exposing the Kent Brand through Student Blogging Version 1.0 (Final) Authors; Leo Lyons, Stewart Brownrigg Page 24 of 38 EAT-­‐PDP Project •
have received and understood this training. Access to Myfolio is determined only by the provision of a valid LDAP authentication. Clear guidance on the ease with which any internet user can find ‘public’ webpages via search engines and explanation of the laws governing intellectual property rights, creative commons licences, rights managed media etc should be readily available, perhaps from links within Myfolio. (Myfolio does already require that the user confirms that they have permission to use any files uploaded to the application. Myfolio also contains links to the University of Kent’s IT regulations). It is preferable to establish an agreed mode of conduct with users rather than to try and apply sanctions after an ‘infringement’ has occurred. Users should be encouraged to think of how their posts and journals might affect others. Again this may be influenced by how the university 'sells' Myfolio to the user community. Specifically that it is a tool provided for and effectively owned by the users and should be respected as such. Its primary purpose is to aid students and alumni to be self-­‐reflective within the PDP framework. On the other hand Myfolio does have other uses, including its role as a social communicator and as a public showcase for whatever audience the user chooses. Too stringent a control on its uses would likely lessen its adoption and be restrictive, particularly within forums and public blogs. It is possible to frame criticisms whilst still avoiding hurtful and personal remarks but this is a skill that not all users may possess. It is important to involve tutors and other staff in this guidance as they could be the subject of a user’s criticism. There is no universal solution for this. Remarks that one tutor may be happy to brush off as harmless or reasonable may cause great offence to another. The university will need to think about how it will handle complaints from members of staff that a student has posted unflattering comments about them within Myfolio. This is probably a more likely scenario than a ‘member of the public’ being offended as there is a greater likelihood that users will share journals with other users than with the public at large. Kent’s responsibility to protect its users and their data The University should also consider the consequences of someone abusing information which has been inadvertently published by a student through Myfolio/Mahara. Obviously the greatest concern here is avoiding harm – psychological or physical – to our students which could result from someone, for example, obtaining personal contact details from Myfolio pages published on the web. In other areas of the University’s website we are very careful to protect the personal data of students and staff. Although exposure of this data is in the gift of the users we do need to make sure that we cannot be accused of negligence. Are we sure that our users are aware of what they are exposing when they click the Make my Profile Public button? We may need to consider modifications which will remind users of the potential consequences of taking this action or even require a tick box to be completed to confirm that the user understands what is being made public. Update: Following discussion of these issues a decision has been taken to remove the option to make a profile public from the version of Mahara provided to Kent students. It was felt that it was too easy to make a profile public – by clicking the button at top right of the profile page whilst in edit Exposing the Kent Brand through Student Blogging Version 1.0 (Final) Authors; Leo Lyons, Stewart Brownrigg Page 25 of 38 EAT-­‐PDP Project mode. There was felt to be a danger that some students would either misinterpret the term Public, believing it to mean only public within the Kent Myfolio community, or feel that they were expected to make their profiles public. This is understandable as one could question the point in creating a profile page if it is not to be shared with people who might be interested in the author as a potential employee. It is still relatively easy for a user to create a view/page which contains the same information as the profile page and then to make that page public but it was felt that this was only going to happen as a result of a deliberate decision to do this and that the additional time and effort needed to achieve this would give time for reflection on the content that was about to be made public. This report retains the original discussion as it may be of relevance to other HEIs and the wider JISC community considering introduction of Mahara or similar applications with a public face. To clarify the current situation with Kent’s students making Myfolio artefacts publicly visible. Practically anything that a user uploads or creates within Myfolio can be shared publicly, to groups and to individuals, or can be kept private (within Myfolio groups the situation in keeping artefacts private is a bit more complicated). Sharing artefacts with the general public via the internet can only be achieved by including the artefacts in a page created by the user, and setting that page to be shared publically. Pages which have been made public can have permissions edited to make them private again though this is no guarantee that the data has not been copied and published elsewhere by others or available from an internet archive service. Data Protection It is difficult to find specific Data Protection guidance on data stores associated with applications like Mahara. Obviously if the university wishes to use personal information held in Mahara for marketing purposes then we will need to get consent for that from the user. But other parts of the data protection act state that an organisation should only keep data for as long as it needs to complete the process for which it has been collected. This is a difficult principle to apply to data held in Mahara databases. Even though the users are supplying the data themselves and are free to supply as much or as little data and detail as they wish, it must be assumed for the purposes of the act that the university is the data holder. If we are intending to use the data as a contacts database and marketing tool directed at our students once they have become alumni this would seem to suggest we could keep the data in perpetuity – or at least as long as we considered it useful to keep targeting that alumnus. However in order to use the data in this way we should be open about our intentions before we start to collect it. In supplying Mahara to new students we have not done this. Is it acceptable, at the point that students graduate, to redefine our purposes in retaining the data we have collected on our students (and data we may collect on them in the future if they continue to use Mahara as alumni),if we inform them of this intention and get their consent? This could be in the form of Terms and Conditions that alumni need to agree to in order to continue to have access to Mahara beyond graduation. Notes: There seems to be some evidence that a number of students who are using Myfolio are choosing to blog externally, that is they are bloggin using other platforms even though they could do it from with Myfolio . There could be several reasons for this – blogging sites like Blogger, Tumbler, Wordpress Exposing the Kent Brand through Student Blogging Version 1.0 (Final) Authors; Leo Lyons, Stewart Brownrigg Page 26 of 38 EAT-­‐PDP Project are well known and may seem ‘cooler’ places to blog. They have a greater choice of themes and by default are public blogs. Blogging via one of these sites joins the blogger to an online community which may be more desirable than that offered by Myfolio. Can we do anything about this? How do we encourage our students to blog on Myfolio? Is this a different type of blog? Should we provide a wider variety of themes? One area where Mahara differs from web-­‐based SNS such as Facebook is in the control the user has over their data and artefacts – though this is dependent on how Mahara has been configured. If a user deletes their account then their pages are no longer visible and their artefacts are deleted from the server. Only contributions to forum discussions are retained and they become anonymous. However we do not currently offer our users the opportunity to delete their account. When a student graduates, if we are not going to offer continued use of Mahara or if the individual requests that their Mahara account is deleted, to comply with the Data protection Act we can no longer retain their data. A further thought occurred to me on what else users might use Myfolio for, bearing in mind that it gives alumni a free public webspace. I suppose some might take the opportunity to advertise a service or business bearing in mind that it will be free and might appear to have some endorsement from the University of Kent. The amount of webspace available is not huge and similar amounts can probably be obtained for free from many hosting sites but this will be an advert free space, a fast service and not likely to generate spam. This is expressly forbidden without prior written agreement in the Regulations for the Use of Information Technology (IT) Facilities at the University of Kent A less troublesome but unwelcome usage might be as newspage for personal use or for a small organisation such as community group or specialist interest group. This is not likely to become a big problem as most users will realise that the university will take down such pages if they are discovered and so would not risk hosting any form of mission critical website under Myfolio. Prohibition of use of Myfolio webspace for anything other than PDP and e-­‐folio use2 should be part of the Terms and Conditions which users will need to agree to in order to continue access to Myfolio. As well as not wanting to encourage this sort of usage there may also be an implication for traffic if the business/service was popular. 2
We need to be careful not to 'shoot ourselves in the foot' here. There may be other uses for Myfolio which would encourage usage by alumni and thus be of benefit to the user community and to the university. Alumni group s around the world may want to create Myfolio groups and use the platform to publicise events connected with that group. Again this would need careful consideration as to the impact on the core purpose of Myfolio but certainly should not be dismissed out of hand. Perhaps a clause in any agreement that states ‘other uses will be considered on application to the university’. Exposing the Kent Brand through Student Blogging Version 1.0 (Final) Authors; Leo Lyons, Stewart Brownrigg Page 27 of 38 EAT-­‐PDP Project Analysis of two online surveys into the use of Myfolio by University of Kent students Introduction At the beginning of the EAT-­‐PDP project in the spring of 2011, we recruited two focus groups to help us assess the usefulness of Myfolio to their employability and the Personal Development Planning process. The focus groups were given brief instructions in the use of Myfolio and asked to create e-­‐
folios and to use the application for their personal planning and for recording achievements and creating journals. In May of 2011, the focus groups with a total of eighteen members were invited to complete a short online survey on their initial experience with Kent branded Mahara, myFolio. In February of 2012, the Unit for Enhanced Learning and Teaching launched a survey on the use of Myfolio by University of Kent students. The survey incorporated some questions asking users views on how useful Myfolio had been with employability and whether students would continue to use it after graduation either for further PDP or to enhance job applications. The EATPDP Myfolio Online survey The survey consisted of eight questions with a ‘radio button’ system of responses numbered 1 to 5. All questions also invited free text comments. The full questionnaire can be viewed here: Thirteen users responded to the survey and thirty five comments were contributed. A summary of the response can be found here: Survey summary Analysis of responses to individual questions Getting started with myFolio
Most users coped well with myFolio from the start with no one reporting great difficulties. Some users commented that the interface was a little confused and crowded and that it was difficult to remember which headings had the options they were looking for. Other suggested that more video tutorials would help and that a sequential step-­‐step start up wizard would help a great deal. Controlling access
Most users were ok with this aspect of the software but again felt a video tutorial would have helped. Other evidence from outside the survey suggested that the users had not well understood the concept of controlling access so there is definitely a case to be made for reviewing the usability of this feature and adding additional help. This is an important issue as confidence in controlling access to Mahara artefacts will likely affect the application’s usage. If a user is not confident that she or he is able to limit access – even to only themselves -­‐ it may discourage them from using Myfolio as a tool for self-­‐reflection. Analysis of two online surveys into the use of Myfolio Version 1.0 (Final) Author:Leo Lyons Page 28 of 38 EAT-­‐PDP Project Linking to external data
Most users found this either easy or moderately easy with only one reporting that they had been unable to achieve this. Users of popular social networking tools such as Facebook and MySpace will already be familiar with importing, linking and embedding to external sources. Using myFolio in a Job Application
All respondents thought that they would at least consider using myFolio in a job application however the comments showed a wide range of views. Not all users were confident that prospective employers would be willing to accept information in this form, others thought that other applications – such as YouTube channels -­‐ served their purposes better. The application did receive very positive feedback from some users who said they thought it a valuable enhancement to a more ‘traditional’ CV or application form. Using myFolio for Personal Development Planning
There were a wide range of responses to this question but the underlying impression was that PDP was not something firmly embedded in the plans of the students. Some saw a value in being able to look back at their contributions to Myfolio but others again misunderstood the purpose of the software and seemed to believe that everything they entered would be available without restriction on the internet. Myfolio as an aid to finding a job
Surprisingly when put alongside the response to the previous question , nearly all respondent said that Myfolio would be a useful or very useful tool in finding a job – some because they thought the PDP aspect would help them to perform well at interview, others because they thought being able to display all their achievements using multiple media in one place gave them an advantage. Others expressed concern that not all employers would bother to look at an online e-­‐folio. General comments
These were in the main very positive but with constructive critical points on the need for improved design and functionality, on-­‐line help and some additional features. The UELT Myfolio Survey Overall the number of respondents was slightly disappointing with only 182 completed surveys however this was still enough to give a reasonable idea of how Myfolio was being received. Responses for the question ‘Why did you decide to use Myfolio?’ showed that PDP and improving employability were strong reasons but neither was mentioned in the comments with ‘joining a group’ being the most common comment. When asked to explain how Myfolio helped with these processes there were few negative comments with many saying it helped them with self-­‐reflection and with recording achievements? Many also like the collaborative and sharing aspects of the application. Analysis of two online surveys into the use of Myfolio Version 1.0 (Final) Author:Leo Lyons Page 29 of 38 EAT-­‐PDP Project There were more first year students responding which may in part be explained by Myfolio being represented at the Fresher’s Fayre. Second and third year students were reasonably well represented (25% and 22% respectively). It will be interesting to see whether the first year students stick with the product for PDP. Overwhelmingly (75%) users found Myfolio easy to use. Over half of respondents thought that they were moderately, very or completely likely to use Myfolio to help with seeking employment with slightly less wanting to use it as part of a formal job application. Similar numbers thought it would be useful to evidence CPD or seek accreditation or to apply for post-­‐graduate courses (slightly more). Only 40% thought they would link from LinkedIn or similar. Approaching 60% of respondents said they would be moderately, very or completely likely to continue to use Myfolio as an alumnus with PPD and evidencing achievement being the most popular reason for its continued use. Summary The results from both surveys gave a generally encouraging snapshot of attitudes to the provision of Myfolio. We are still a couple of months off having had Myfolio available for an entire academic year and many of the current Myfolio users may not yet be giving serious thought to employability and PDP. However it was clear that most users saw the value in Myfolio. It is clear that some of the functionality of the application needs to be improved and on-­‐demand training aids such as videos could help users to find their way around Myfolio. Some users felt that the landing page of Myfolio was a little confusing although improvements have been made in recent weeks. The concept of using an on-­‐line multi-­‐media augmentation to a formal job application has not yet become an accepted part of the recruitment process. Understandably therefore fairly low numbers of users thought this likely to be a way in which they would use Myfolio. Acceptability of this type of usage is also partly dependent on the discipline the student is following. Those studying subjects where a strong visual representation of course work and projects could be useful – architecture and fine arts for instance – were more willing to consider the use of a Myfolio webpage in a presentation to a prospective employer. Similarly other subjects – for instance Pharmacy – incorporated the need for a journal of progress and experience so Myfolio leant itself well to this usage. The surveys can only give projections of how Myfolio might be used and it is only when we have had a few years of alumni use that we will be able to say for definite how much and in what ways the application is being used. The results of these surveys do give us cause for optimism. Analysis of two online surveys into the use of Myfolio Version 1.0 (Final) Author:Leo Lyons Page 30 of 38 EAT-­‐PDP Project Exploring opportunities and risks for targeted alumni contacts In the first term of the 2011/2012 academic year, the University of Kent made the Mahara PDP and e-­‐folio application3 available to all students and staff. During that academic year, following representations from the EAT-­‐PDP project team and UELT to the Moodle and Learning Technologies group, it was decided to provide continued access to Mahara/Myfolio all students after graduation for, initially, one year. With this decision made, and assuming that alumni continue to use Myfolio beyond graduation, the university has an opportunity to contact a cohort of its alumni in a much more targeted manner than previously. Potentially data from Myfolio will allow us to identify alumni by their interests, the employment sector they work in (or aspire to), geographical location and etc. However a proposal of this nature is not without controversy. The provision of Myfolio to alumni will increase the period of engagement with our members – currently for two years post graduation but we hope this will be extended. Hence we have an improved and extended chance of being able to contact alumni. But Myfolio is not email or Facebook or Twitter. It is not likely to become something that alumni use every day. More likely they will use it when they have something to add to their PDP or when they are looking for employment or improved employment. Or possibly to try and hook up with old colleagues or just for an update on what is happening with the alma mater. In other words Myfolio might not be an efficient means of urgent contact with alumni. But it is important to grasp that this is not an either/or situation. We all utilise many different applications -­‐ and devices -­‐ for different forms of communication with different groups and in different contexts. Increasingly we also enable interaction between those devices and applications -­‐ when I blog for instance, Wordpress sends a tweet to inform my followers. So we need to explore how we can integrate the Myfolio functionality with other applications -­‐ with an emphasis on social networking. Some of this is straight forward and only needs to be -­‐ indeed should be -­‐ implemented. For instance there is no technical reason why we should not have a Kent Myfolio page on Facebook. The more difficult and perhaps delicate part of this is getting our alumni to bring us into their circle of Facebook users so that they can be prompted to log back in on a regular basis. The nature -­‐ and indeed the tools -­‐ of social networking and online communication change with quite surprising rapidity. A few years ago, when MySpace seemed the dominant player who could have predicted the rapid rise of Facebook to one of world-­‐wide penetration? Even more so who could have predicted just how deep the effect on our personal lives, on our communications and on the business world would be as Facebook gained a user population larger than that of some countries? In other words it is not possible or sensible to asset that Facebook will always retain its dominance. Additionally, the feature set of these applications changes as the needs of the users and the advertisers change or are fine-­‐tuned. Facebook users can create circles of friends and decide what they share with these circles -­‐ Google + offers a similar feature. Evidence at the moment is that 3
Branded at the University of Kent as ‘Myfolio’. Exploring Opportunities and Risks for Targeted Alumni Contact Version 1.0 (Final) Author: Leo Lyons Page 31 of 38 EAT-­‐PDP Project they are not much used but this may change if Facebook becomes more of a hub for all forms of communication -­‐ educational and business as well as purely social. In the current version of Myfolio, by default users receive an email notification when users send them messages or when there is a system message but the user can switch this off (messages still arrive to the users’ Myfolio inbox but no separate email notification is sent). Kent alumni who are Myfolio account owners will also have a KentforLife account which might be a more efficient form of communication. However recent evidence suggests that there is little use of the KentforLife service – and possibly for any other email service -­‐ by recent alumni. That is not to recommend that we cease to supply a lifel ong email service for our alumni. As the Logins for Life concept becomes embedded, Kent forlife email may gain greater significance and use. However , at least for the moment it might be prudent to request that graduates supply their ‘normal’ email address. Some industry experts suggest that social networking applications (primarily Facebook) have become the favoured – and in many cases the only – vehicle for electronic messaging other than SMS. I think this is overstating things. Certainly there have been declines in the usage of email among certain sectors of society – mainly teenagers. And of course they use social networking applications for the same purpose that they once used email. But applications like Facebook do have many advantages over email to this group – not least that the message is likely to be received more swiftly than if it was sent by email. However I think it is a mistake to extrapolate these findings and make the same predictions for this group of people as they progress through higher education and employment. Young internet savvy users are very good at using tools for their own purposes even if that was not the original intention of the authors. They are also perfectly used to having a whole box of tools for different purposes and making those tools talk to one another. Work emails may be reserved for professional communications, and other email accounts such as Hotmail and Gmail may not be checked as often as Facebook but they are not likely to go away anytime soon. Having said that there may be – no let’s face it – there is -­‐ value in the creation of a Kent Myfolio users group on Facebook and Twitter feeds too. We should also give some serious considerations -­‐ again referring back to the conclusions of the Logins for Life project -­‐ to enabling logging in to Myfolio with Twitter or Facebook logins (Is OpenID still a runner?). It is not unthinkable that in the future the act of publishing a page or journal in Myfolio to the public or to a Myfolio group might trigger a status update in Facebook. So what added value for the University will the extended use of Myfolio by alumni provide? To varying degrees depending on usage and types of usage, the Myfolio database will store a great deal of personal data on users. Including alumni. This data could provide a detailed profile of an alumnus and represents a novel and powerful opportunity for targeted communication. For obvious reasons this type of proposal – in common parlance known as data mining -­‐ is controversial. Let’s be clear what we are talking about here. We are proposing to use software – or an agency -­‐ to analyse all data – or possibly a subset of data-­‐ entered by students and alumni into Myfolio so that we can learn what their interests and affiliations are and hence use this intelligence to our advantage. This proposal is distinct from the provision of the Student (Employability) Catalogue though data provided in that way may have multiple uses. Some considerations: Permission We would need to have permission to gather data from user’s information held in Myfolio. It would be morally indefensible (and in most cases illegal) if we did not make it very clear that we were going to do this and state explicitly for what purposes we might use any data we had Exploring Opportunities and Risks for Targeted Alumni Contact Version 1.0 (Final) Author: Leo Lyons Page 32 of 38 EAT-­‐PDP Project gathered. We would have to offer an opt-­‐out to avoid accusations that we were only supplying services for our own purposes. Data Protection Act All our activities will need to be verified as not contravening the Data Protection Act. This includes an obligation to: •
•
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be transparent about how we intend to use the data, to give individuals appropriate privacy notices when collecting their personal data, to handle people’s personal data only in ways they would reasonably expect. The obvious fat end of this wedge is that we do not, for example, sell the personal contact details of all our alumni to stair lift retailers when they reach an arbitrary age. But what about the thin end of the wedge – is that out of bounds too? Can we allow the internal organisers of a fund raising concert of St Matthew’s Passion know that we have a database of alumni who have mentioned ‘listening to Bach’ in their list of Likes? And although we are won’t necessarily divulge the details of these individuals to the concert organisers we could send on an email to them. Methods What are we going to look for and where will we look for it? Some of the information within Myfolio is kept in data fields and although not necessarily validated, is likely to be predictable and will be easily queried. Data stored in this way will increase with the introduction of the Student Catalogue though not all users will choose to use it. Information we might expect to find stored as discrete bits of data might include location, qualifications, employment, employment history and group membership. Data which the Student Catalogue will prompt for is yet to be decided but again, though recommended this will not be mandated. Perhaps the more interesting data would be found in free text entries in the application – in journals for instance or on wall posts and photograph captions. And what about in messages to other users – should we index this as Google do? This would require more sophisticated and complex searches to find useful data. It would also present more likelihood of error. Users may enter information as part of a c.v. or they might continue to post journals or use the goals and plans areas of the application. Sophisticated search algorithms would be needed to avoid errors. A simple example of a pitfall might be where a user had stated, somewhat improbably, in a journal that they ‘would love to see all racquet sports coverage removed from UK tv screens’. If we envisage a scenario where the university is wishing to promote, or trying to raise funds for, a new indoor tennis facility they might be interested in identifying alumni with an interest in this area. A simple search for the words ‘love’ and ‘racquet sports’ might identify this individual and lead one to assume that this user would be a good target for a mailshot when in fact the reverse may be true. In this case, there may be no great importance to the individual being wrongly identified but other scenarios could cause annoyance or embarrassment. The user can ignore any mailshots received but the university would wish to avoid accusations of ‘spamming’ its alumni, hence accurate targeting is important. For reasons such as these, the use of data mining to any great extent would probably need to involve external agencies with expertise is this area. Which would in itself increase the necessity for and importance of clarity around what we intend to do with our alumni data and adherence to strict rules on security and governance. It should be noted thought that increasingly sophisticated Exploring Opportunities and Risks for Targeted Alumni Contact Version 1.0 (Final) Author: Leo Lyons Page 33 of 38 EAT-­‐PDP Project software has become available which uses powerful algorithms to extract useful 'profile' type information from user data if this task was to be kept within the university. Boundaries It would perhaps reassure our users if we were to set boundaries not only for what we would use data for but also for where we would search. An obvious limitation we could set would be only to search data in Myfolio that the user had opted to make public, or if we wanted to be less restrictive, data that had been shared with Myfolio friends lists. A more restrictive approach would be to limit our ‘data-­‐mining’ to those users who had elected to make themselves discoverable through the Student Catalogue. It is important that we give users the assurance that they can use the application for very personal and honest reflection without fear that this data will be used to target them. Although it is inconceivable that the university would target people based on highly confidential information – eg sending users who had expressed dissatisfaction with their levels of literacy, information on courses which might help with this – the perception of the users is perhaps more important. Employees of the university may be completely confident that the university maintains very high ethical standards but this is not necessarily the view of all its students. We live in a world where Big Brother is perceived to be even more omnipresent than Mr Orwell could ever have imagined, where academics are accused – even by establishment figures – of being part of a global warming conspiracy, where rumours -­‐ mischievous or just misinformed, take flight and become fully formed conspiracy theories in a few clicks of the mouse. We must be careful not to give our users the impression that our activities are in anyway nefarious or underhand or even that we are in purely commercial arrangements with advertisers and suppliers. In my opinion this is one of the biggest barriers to the implementation of the proposals in this document. The stakes are high -­‐ the reputation of the university as a safe custodian of the personal data of its students and alumni. But as already stated it is important to stay in touch with the zeitgeist. If the university does decide to limit the areas of Myfolio which can be legitimately mined for data , the design of Myfolio – or rather the open source software on which its sits – Mahara, may be a limiting factor. Much of the data stored in myFolio is by default not visible to other users. This includes cv data, skills audits and journals. A user can choose to make any of this data public by incorporating it in a view or page but it seems alumni would have little motive for doing this. I f we decide only to mine public data this may well limit the usefulness of the data we can look at. One approach to mitigate against this limitation would be to encourage alumni to blog and make it public. Perhaps key to the success of this would be to first try to establish use of the social networking aspects of Myfolio by alumni. Currently we have no alumni using Myfolio (except for a small focus group) but it would be possible to create groups related to disciplines and/or year of graduation and to automatically place graduating students in those groups. This would allow any user to post photos and journals to that group and have them seen by all members of the group. It is not easy to predict what level of success Myfolio might enjoy in the coming years but if we assume for one moment that it becomes a hub of communication for students and alumni, that the value of Myfolio as a PDP and e-­‐folio tool becomes celebrated due to an increased visibility leading to better alumni employment rates then we have opportunities for different modes of provision. Provision of Myfolio has a cost and whilst this is currently predicted to be affordable in the near Exploring Opportunities and Risks for Targeted Alumni Contact Version 1.0 (Final) Author: Leo Lyons Page 34 of 38 EAT-­‐PDP Project future, things would change if the number of active users increased rapidly. If the product became desirable we could consider a paid option with perhaps more storage. We could also offset this by offering discounts for users who were willing to have their data used by the university for the targeting of promotional and maybe even commercial offers. The official view From the Information Commissioner’s Office website: Put simply, a solicited message is one that is actively invited. We accept that this invitation can be given via a third party. An unsolicited marketing message that a subscriber has opted into receiving is one that they have not invited but they have indicated that they do not, for the time being, object to receiving it. If challenged, you would need to demonstrate that the subscriber has positively opted in to receiving further information from you. And further: It is true that you need to have a positive indication of consent, but it is not true that this must be obtained by the individual ticking a box. Recital 17 of the Directive on which these Regulations are based (2002/58/EC) gives the ticking of a box on an internet site as an example of an ‘appropriate method’ to give consent but it is only an example. It is not the only method by which consent can be obtained. Directive 95/46/EC (the Data Protection Directive on which the UK Data Protection Act is based) defines ‘the data subject’s consent’ as: ‘any freely given specific and informed indication of his wishes by which the data subject signifies his agreement to personal data relating to him being processed’. In our view, therefore, there must be some form of communication where the individual knowingly indicates consent. This may involve clicking an icon, sending an email or subscribing to a service. The crucial consideration is that the individual must fully understand that by the action in question they will be giving consent. Bearing the above in mind the university will need to ensure that alumni who are given continued access to Myfolio post-­‐graduation are aware of how we might use their data and that we can prove they have signified that awareness. One of the outputs of the EAT-­‐PDP project is the Student Catalogue which will allow third parties to search indexed data on Myfolio users in order to identify candidates appropriate to their needs eg employers seeking individuals with specific qualifications and experience. This will be an opt in service and may present a logical convergence point for obtaining permission to include data not only in the Employability Catalogue but also for the University to process in other ways including to send appropriate and targeted promotional material. Exploring Opportunities and Risks for Targeted Alumni Contact Version 1.0 (Final) Author: Leo Lyons Page 35 of 38 EAT-­‐PDP Project Current attitudes to targeted advertising Anyone who uses a browser or a social networking site is likely to be already targeted by advertisers. Attitudes towards targeted advertising do seem to be shifting in the direction of there being less objection 4 – or even a preference amongst some users for it -­‐ as against random advertising. However there are still a large number of people who do object to targeted advertising and would opt out of it if they could. There may be a difference between an objection to the actual advertising and the methods used to obtain the data used in the targeting. There may also be a difference in attitude towards a social networking site such as Facebook and software provided by an alma mater. To an extent users feel that in using a ‘free’ application like Facebook they are accepting that the pay back will be advertising. It is unclear how many users are aware of exactly how websites gather the data they use for targeting. For some the reality may be worse than the assumption but the reverse is also true. I don’t think we should underestimate the emotional response to this sort of data mining. With a few seconds thought most users realise that data mining involves, amongst other things such as profiling, searching for key words. A completely impersonal, automated process using powerful and sophisticated algorithms and incorporating varying degressof protection and anonymity for the users. But for many it is hard to completely exorcise the image of an unknown person poring over your every status update, comment and photograph. Having your university carrying out this same task may be even more disturbing for some users – if only because the scale of the operation is going to be so much smaller and ‘personal’ than the equivalent at Facebook or MySpace. There are other difference with Facebook too. Depending on the method used, a University should be able to assure its users that only anonymised data is used to send targeted emails. Facebook already gives its users this assurance. But the fact that Facebook has half a billion users makes this assurance both less and more important. It is more important as the idea that users’ personal data could be sold on to other companies on such a vast scale does ring alarm bells. On the other hand such a huge amount of data does also give one a comforting feeling that no individual within the organisation is likely to be seeing anything about any given user. Universities are more likely to be dealing with at most tens of thousands of users – somehow the connection seems more intimate. This data is being processed by an organisation which for a number of years was an important part of the user’s life -­‐ their home even. For many years, even decades some of the same personnel will still work at that site. I am not trying to suggest that any of these ‘fears’ are in any way likely to be grounded – but I am suggesting that the relationship between a university and its alumni is likely to seem a lot closer and more intimate than that between a user and a global social networking site. Perceptions and emotional responses are important when an organisation is seeking permission. This important difference whilst perhaps requiring very careful consideration of how we use Myfolio data and how we present these uses to our alumni and students, is also one of the applications strongest selling points, Myfolio is not Facebook. It is not an enormous world-­‐wide entity with over half a billion users. It is a much more intimate and one would hope, more trusted and trustworthy offering from one's alma mater. The nature of any advertising and who is doing the advertising is also important to the user. There is likely to be a different response from Myfolio users to advertisements for events related to the University or for offers of a cultural or educational nature than there would be to advertisements for 4
Consumer Attitudes about Behavioural Targeting Exploring Opportunities and Risks for Targeted Alumni Contact Version 1.0 (Final) Author: Leo Lyons Page 36 of 38 EAT-­‐PDP Project consumer items or commercials for fast food. Similarly there are likely to be more objections to the university selling data to third party advertisers than there would be to the university using Myfolio data to send out advertisements itself. Opting out There is no question that the university will need to be completely open about anything it intends to do with data gathered from an alumni’s use of Myfolio. The fact that we admit we wish to use their data to target them will not go down well with some users. It is important that we stress that we intend to use the data in a mutually beneficent way. If we wish to raise funds for a new music venue we may want to contact alumni who have expressed an interest in music or who studied music. This benefits the university but could also be seen to benefit the user as it keeps them informed of the addition to the university’s facilities. Here the ethics may get a bit muddy but we could also argue that we are giving the users an opportunity to purchase things which, though no doubt benefitting the university may also present a purchasing opportunity to the user which they would not otherwise have had and which they may welcome. The chance to dedicate a seat or name a brick might be examples of this sort of purchasing opportunity. One way to make sure we do not alienate our users would be to offer the choice to opt out of any marketing mail outs. Obviously we do not want our users to opt out so we need to make it clear to users that our intentions are ‘honourable’ and reassure them that they will not get their inboxes flooded with lots of poorly targeted emails. We could also set a limit on the maximum number of mail outs we would send in a year Conclusions and further development The idea of using alumni personal data mined from the Myfolio application is currently only a concept which we are exploring. The provision of Myfolio to our alumni presents an opportunity to strengthen the University community. Universities cannot survive without funding and currently this comes from diverse sources. Alumni offices have always had a role in seeking donations from alumni to ensure the university continues to thrive and can offer excellent facilities to further generations of students. The idea of using personal data to target communication with alumni does not introduce new sources for fund raising but does refine the process. Aside from the opportunity to target our alumni for donations there are other mutual benefits from developing and extending the relationship between the university and its alumni. Alumni who continue to feel part of the Kent community are also more likely to want ot act as mentors, to be willing to come and speak to current students. They are good PR for the university and encourage their children and toher people they meet to consider Kent as a choice for higher education and as a source of good quality graduates. We can learn a lot from the success of social networking applications. Facebook uses the connections between users – real and strong connections such as relationships in the real world and more tenuous, ethereal connections which may be as simple as liking the same post or product -­‐ to create the impression of a living, active forum that draws its users to visit time and time again. Myfolio is not going to rival Facebook but we can incorporate some of its features to increase its Exploring Opportunities and Risks for Targeted Alumni Contact Version 1.0 (Final) Author: Leo Lyons Page 37 of 38 EAT-­‐PDP Project profile and make using it more dynamic. We need to do this to persuade our alumni to become regular users of the application which in turn reinforces their sense of community. An interesting suggestion is that we adopt something similar to the ‘Facebook Like’ feature as an effective way to tell friends what you have done, where you are, what you like etc. Myfolio could also incorporate a flagging feature so that an alumnus who has donated to the university could have that pop up in a news feed –Josie Generous gave back to Kent with a donation! Or if that is considered to be too personal and immodest a cumulative figure could be displayed -­‐ 475 alumni gave a donation to the university this month. This could also be filtered for targeting – 200 Architecture alumni gave a donation or 100 International students gave back to their university. Obviously alongside links to easy ways of giving. We could also apply Geographical Analysis to Myfolio data and represent this data on maps to all our users. This in turn builds links between users and encourages networking. We can use this as an effective way to tell the story of how Kent alumni have spread throughout the world. This is turn encourages other users to supply their geographical data. Geographical data analysis has many uses for the university – including the role it can play in targeted advertising. To remain relevant and useful to alumni and students, the Mahara application will need to continue to develop. The University needs to listen to and respond to Myfolio users to ensure that these users will judge Myfolio to be the best tool available for PDP and e-­‐folio creation and sharing. The provision of the Student Catalogue is certainly a significant selling point for the application providing a University of Kent branded showcase which is easily discoverable by employers. The success of Myfolio is dependent on its popularity amongst our students and alumni. To ensure this we not only have to provide a good product but we need to increase awareness of the importance of PDP and of the ways in which Myfolio can assist with the process. Learning technology is no different to other technologies in the beginning of the 21st century – it is subject to rapid change and development. To remain the PDP application of choice for our students and alumni Myfolio must keep pace with these changes. Exploring Opportunities and Risks for Targeted Alumni Contact Version 1.0 (Final) Author: Leo Lyons Page 38 of 38