Abertay University

The Situation

Abtertay University is home to around 3,700 students and 500 staff and is situated in Dundee, Scotland. The university primarily used email to communicate with students and staff, which although functional, wasn’t engaging and was often missed or ignored. Students complained about having too many different systems to connect with and remember passwords for, in order to get the information they required daily to do their studies. They must go looking for information in many different places that was time-consuming and frustrating.

Abertay needed a solution that would work to bring communications together in one place and engage with its audiences across the campus. Being a university that often conducts ‘customer feedback’ surveys, the university knew that had to find a way to help students interact with the university’s online resources and find the most critical services they required to complete their studies. Similarly, staff were also complaining of the same user experience, or lack of it, that the students were highlighting. This was also a driving force for change.

The Solution

Abertay chose to deploy Collabco’s myday app to provide a gateway to delivering digital resources to the students and staff at the university. The app delivers an easy way to communicate with students and a ‘one-stop-shop’ for accessing all resources via one portal – no more remembering multiple passwords.

“myday was firmly on my radar as I’d heard about other universities using it,” explains Moriamo Oduyemi, head of corporate information systems, Abertay University.

“Probably one of the biggest reasons for choosing myday was the speed of its deployment to meet our needs as fast as possible and its ease of use. It’s easily configured, isn’t heavily technical for staff and provides a simple learning curve for users – and we wanted things to improve rapidly.

“Other technology looked like it had much more technical programming involved, and given our limited resources in-house, I simply couldn’t commit to that.”

Implementation began last December, but we decided with student feedback, that the right time to deploy it was post-exam period, so that gave us time to revamp our intranet so that myday would sit on top of improved content for the students to access. We usability tested with students and set the system live in May 2017. Student feedback was very much a part of the final decision making of which product to use.

The Benefits

myday is now the university’s default intranet dashboard through which all communication is channelled to students and staff. It provides the default browser on the university’s home page. Students see it first, and its providing a number of benefits.

• Push notification – if you’ve installed the app, you get notification of messages there and then. Students no longer need to access email to receive communication.
• If you’re a student or staff member at Abertay, you’re using myday.
• Key activities are being fed through it such as library resources for example – it all goes through myday thanks to the seamless login.
• Students and staff can customise it the way they like it. A bit like a social media app, it can be tailored for personal use.
• Up until recently, the university had poor response rates to surveys or anything that required student engagement. Students can now find the survey with ease and are more likely to engage.

“We look for regular feedback on our university services – the teaching and learning and how students are finding their courses. We’ve had the highest response rate to any survey in over three years at the university using myday – around 42.7% response,” explains Moriamo Oduyemi.

“A general industry benchmark is a response rate of 25%, so it’s an amazing amount of engagement – and it’s thanks to myday making it easier for students to fill it in online. “myday has been a winning solution for us.”

Would you like to learn more about how myday can innovate your digital campus?