Barnsley College
Barnsley College, an early adopter of myday, set out to undertake a project to bring all of the college’s digital resources into one, easily accessible place for students to access the college services they need most from their smartphones. The digital campus is growing in popularity not only for students – but also for FE institutions like Barnsley, keeping students online 24/7 365.
Barnsley brought together a host of ‘external’ sites and an out-dated intranet and delivered it in a user-friendly format via one myday login. Students no longer had to remember multiple passwords for access to different services the college had to offer – they simply downloaded myday where those resources were already channelled.
Rob Whitehead, learning technologies manager at the college has been managing myday for a relatively short time, but he’s already discovered that myday is really easy to get to grips with and a simple intuitive platform to use. The college plans to explore the new functionality in myday and ensure that the available apps on the desktop are also accessible on the branded myday mobile app. It’s also very simple to customise tiles and deliver a branded experience which can make use of instantly recognisable logos like Google and Youtube (see screenshot below).
In particular, at Barnsley, myday has been put to use with the engagement of students and their work placements – specifically delivering the placement opportunities to students to choose from. The “All Together” tile brings into one place all the work placement opportunities in the area and the contact details relating to each placement.
This enables students to search for placement opportunities, as well as providing helpful links to health and safety and risk assessments. myday makes it so much easier for these students as everything’s now on one system. Students find it easier to identify opportunities and the college finds it simpler to deliver those placements to their student population – a win-win for everyone.
The BKSB tile also makes students’ lives easier and their transition to college more seamless, linking them into the digital campus at the earliest opportunity before they actually become a member of the student population. This tile provides initial assessments in literacy and numeracy that students need to take in order to study at the college, but the opportunity to ‘link-up’ with prospective students is a big opportunity for colleges.
Looking forward, Barnsley will ensure that each of the tiles from the desktop version of myday is deployable on students’ smartphones making the student population as mobile as possible – and delivering the digital campus. Barnsley is actively pushing information to its students via this channel of communication to ensure that students download the app and get online.
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