Open day 18 march 2014 lse presentation

The rapid implementation of Talis Aspire at LSE

Suddenly Last Summer

Michael FakeTeaching Support & Academic Liaison Manager

Context

Conversion

Advocacy

Outcomes

Context

Small university

50% postgraduate, 50% international

Social sciences, c.1,000 courses

Library central purchasing

LSE

In-house reading list system failing

Ordering backlogs

Moodle well established, but inconsistent

Poor student experience

Reading list problems

Simple user interface for editors

Consistent experience for students

Structured data for the Library

Talis Aspire

Conversion

Slow rollouts got stuck at pilot stage

Academics didn’t influence each other quickly

Pressure for fast solution

Goal: implement for all UG courses by October

Big bang

Could only persuade, not demand

Inputting lists from scratch still time-consuming

Had to make Aspire the obvious option

Decision: Library to pump-prime the system

Library conversion

Attempt to migrate data from in-house system

Data too old, too limited

No structure

Delayed manual conversion

Data migration

Production line

Take lists from Moodle

Replicate structure and notes

Guesswork!

Manual conversion

Teaching Support Staff (4.5 FTE)

Additional hours (1 FTE)

Temporary staff (7 temps, April – July)

Staffing

4 months, 513 lists, 91,440 items

Temps each added 138 items per day

c.10 – 13 pence per item

Library staff added c.70 items per day

Conversion in numbers

Temps are faster than Library staff

Need good quality control

Need a lot of motivation

Useful way of auditing VLE

What did we learn?

Advocacy

Awareness of the new system: Positive potential for them and their students

Commitment to use the system after conversion

Orientation and training

Purpose

Teachers and administrators

Generic emails unsuccessful

Individual approach much more effective

Emails and notices

Wary of this approach initially

Departmental meetings

Positive response

Presentations

275 individual desktop training sessions

Half hour orientations

No group sessions

Training

Short overview

Basic information

Assumption that Aspire was intuitive

Guides

Outcomes

Browser problems

Navigating long lists

Problems

93% of UG lists converted, 28% of PG

Contacted all academics again - 73% handed over

Handover

Remarkably uncontroversial

150+ lists created independently

9,000 unique hits on the first day

Success

Convert our remaining postgraduate lists

Implement DCM

Next steps

Michael Fakem.fake@lse.ac.uk

http://readinglists.lse.ac.uk

Thank you