Springboard Gives Norfolk TV Punch!

Posted on: 15 February 2012

The Website
The initial springboardtv.com site was built internally over a relatively short period as the web presence was required to coincide with the beginning of the new academic year in September 2009. Whilst the logo and colour schemes were designed and chosen by the learners and achieved a look and feel that was quite organic, initially the site was not fully in line with project expectations. The main elements of the site lacked control and usability as it was administered by way of a primitive Content Management System (CMS), which was not user friendly and thus was not inclusive, and learners could not get involved in the upload of their work. Furthermore once content was put onto the site its arrangement was difficult to organise.

In order to achieve more flexibility, in particular the ability to add pages, pictures and banners, a redesign was required. The preferred set up for the site was an established off the shelf CMS. This had the advantage of keeping development costs down but more importantly the college was not tied to any agency for costly support. Following a period of research and consultation WordPress was identified as the preferred CMS: it is well established, well supported, fully customizable, robust and there are already some excellent sites powered by the WordPress CMS in the marketplace. An external company, NDJINNEERS, was appointed to undertake the redesign of the site. The redesigned site went live in late May 2010 having achieved greater functionality, better accessibility and a more stable platform. The site is now robust, easy to use, can be regularly updated and the latest web technologies can be integrated; these are essential for the project in terms of relevance and sustainability. Of particular interest are recent links made to sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.

The production cycle that has been established for the production companies should end with learners uploading completed material onto the website. The internal management of the first website proved to be too opaque for them to be able to upload their material. However the second generation website is much more user friendly and towards the end of the academic year learners were able to be involved in this process.

As well as professional cameras for teaching film making, ZOOM cameras have recently been purchased. These enable students to generate reasonable quality footage rapidly. It is envisaged that other curriculum areas will benefit as their students will be able to use this simple and accessible technology easily.

In addition to the curriculum development days a number of ‘Golden Hour’ sessions were set up to develop delivery staff expertise in the use of digital technologies and to establish an on-line assessment mechanism which will allow learners to submit written work electronically, receive their feedback in a similar format and track their progress.

The results of ongoing meetings between the Project Channel Manager Ben Jackson and other stakeholders have informed the basis of the ideas for sustainability.