Education Portal for School Leaders: Use The Key

Site	Education Portal for School Leaders: Use The Key
Industry	Education
Location	United Kingdom
Case study written by	Isotoma
Contact	Andy Theyers

Use The Key is one of Isotoma's most successful Plone implementations to date. Without the power and flexibility of Plone we wouldn't have been able to achieve a project of this scale and complexity ready as quickly and to the standard we did.

Background

The Key was initiated in response to feedback from school leaders indicating they were feeling crippled by information overload. Strict curricula and guidelines mean that running a school these days is a feat of time management and meticulous organisation. Being subject to Ofsted monitoring adds to an already rigorous schedule and long hours. School leaders needed a simpler way of accessing authoritative information when they needed it, in a form they could put to use straight away. Clearly it would not be possible for every school leader in the country to be given their own researcher/librarian, but if there was great commonality in the questions that school leaders asked, then an online solution could be effective.

Concierge services company TenUK Ltd specialise in providing personalised and highly diverse support to a variety of individuals. With their dedicated, expert support, they can offer to their customers that most coveted of assets - time. TenUK employ industry experts in as many areas as can be imagined so that their customers can delegate whatever they require, or simply desire, to make their lives easier and to allow them to get on with those things that cannot be delegated. Keen to expand new opportunities, and seeing the way in which their existing customers were benefiting from their support, TenUK came up with the idea of extending their services to benefit the country's education system - thus the idea for The Key was born. Alex Cheatle, MD of TenUK, said, "We understand the difficulties facing school leaders and saw how our expertise could help".

Using TenUK's team of skilled researchers and editors the service is constantly developing an extremely high quality knowledge base of well researched and regularly reviewed articles about all aspects of school life; from combating bullying in the playground, to school dinners, to hiring the right staff. School leaders are encouraged to search the on-line knowledge base first but, if they discover that the answer they are looking for is not available, repeated calls to action around the site also encourage them to call a telephone hotline (available 24 hours a day) where they can register new questions. New articles in response to these questions are then researched and written within 3 days, with the results being emailed to the original questioner. New articles are also posted to the web site and highlighted across the site so that they are brought to the attention of casual browsers. This process has already resulted in a service with well over 1,500 articles with extremely high feedback ratings and repeat use. Over 80% of respondents to an independent survey carried out by the TDA rated the service as "exceeds expectations."

On-line component

Whilst TenUK are experts in knowledge generation they felt that they needed expert assistance in developing the online knowledge management tools that would provide the interface between researchers, editors and school leaders. TenUK understood that the on-line element of the service was vital to the overall success of the project. If users were unable to access information easily they would either stop using the service or put too much strain on the telephone service, effectively asking researchers to point them at on-line documents that they should have been able to find for themselves. TenUK turned to Open Source Content and Document Management specialists Isotoma to assist them in developing the on-line component of the service. TenUK were aware of Isotoma's reputation and skills in key areas of the project - accessibility, usability, information architecture and Open Source content management - and felt that such a partnership would ensure the project's success. Isotoma were the ideal candidates for such a project:

• Technical expertise was required to create a system that could be rapidly adapted throughout the project's lifecycle to reflect the changing requirements of school leaders
• TenUK needed to know that the site would be completed when promised and within budget - it was important that expectations were met
• Agile development meant that a testable website prototype was available just a month after the project began, well before the graphic design or template build stages. This ensured that any initial uncertainty about the process could be easily met and resolved earlier than in more traditional processes

The logged out homepage - presenting strong calls to action

Technical Solution

Isotoma proposed the use of Plone as the underlying framework for both content generation and content delivery. The content management system was extensively customised to meet customer requirements, providing a visually rich and engaging experience for school leaders while providing a powerful and easy to use content management system for researchers and editors. Francois Jordaan of Isotoma said, "The flexibility of Plone means that very different content types are available - articles, questions, guides and so on. It also means that the design and accessibility are in no way compromised for the sake of technology".

End Users

The site has a whole suite of tools designed to help the regular user, such as tracking recently visited pages, pages that a user has commented upon or on which they have requested notification of changes. Isotoma always build websites to the highest possible accessibility standards; The Key was independently audited for accessibility and achieved double A compliance - quite an achievement for a content managed website and also an attainment that wouldn't have been possible without such a customisable CMS.

Link rich homepage for logged in users - user testing showed this to be the best approach

The site editor's job has also been made much easier by enabling text to be automatically reformatted so it can be immediately uploaded onto the public site. Importantly for the continuing efficacy of the site, school leaders can provide feedback directly on any article page, as well as on search results and can also request a call back at a time of their choosing. The topical content on the homepage and elsewhere is tailored to users' job profiles, based on information they provide about themselves and their school. This is also used to highlight particularly relevant search results, ensuring that users don't waste any time by navigating through potentially irrelevant information.

Researchers and Editors

Isotoma took the base Plone administration interface and built a number of key features on top of it to provide a richer and more efficient interface for the regular tasks of content generation and review:

• Preparation of Microsoft Word templates that allow for seamless cut and paste between Word and the browser based WYSIWYG editor
• Development of a range of complex workflows for individual areas of the site
• Delivery of a full check-out/check-in/review/publish workflow for already published documents
• Extensions of the standard content types to support the complete requirements of each site area
• Implementation of full text searching across the document corpus
• Delivery of reporting across a wide range of user interactions, to provide researchers with as much information about how users interact with documents as possible (for example, counting the number of times a document was printed, emailed to a friend, viewed, rated, bookmarked, etc etc)

Editing a document - styles are carried through from Microsoft Word and displayed within the editor exactly as they will appear on the site

Benefits

A lot of research went into creating the most informative and beneficial system possible - the information is underpinned by a taxonomy created by The Key researchers in consultation with school leaders. The site will evolve and grow in accordance with what is actually required by those who use it.

Viewing a document

A headteacher from a Maidstone primary school says "I value the amount and variety of information on there. It's good knowing what other school communities have done to tackle an issue, so we can learn from good practice, and hopefully in the future, give the benefit of our own experience".

The benefits of the site have not been affected at all by cost restraints. The use of the most adaptable and customisable of technologies has meant that The Key has achieved exactly what was required without having to place any pressure on government funding. An independent report shows that school leaders believe the service is saving them on average five hours per question asked.

A headteacher of a Salisbury primary school was one of the first users to get involved; she says "You could do the research yourself, but it would take forever. It saves me a lot of time... and they come back to you when they say they will. That's the most important thing."