WROCaH

Caryn Douglas from WROCAH

With Caryn I created Google Forms and Apps Scripts to support their PHD application process. 

Applicants filled in the application form, and the data from the forms was put into a Google Document. The Google Document created was then shared with the staff who would rank the application at three different institutions, York, Leeds and Sheffield. Once marked, the documents then went through another round of marking.

At each stage, the Documents had an "Assessment Sidebar" so that the different cluster teams could add the relevant grades and opinions actually "in the document".

With hundreds of applications, Caryn then needed to create different views on the data for lots of different people involved in the process. She started using Awesome Tables, a Gadget that you can add to a Google Site. The advantage of Awesome Tables are that you don’t have to give full access to the spreadsheet and the data displayed can easily be filtered by the user. 

Caryn has also explored using Add-ons, such as Autocrat,CopyDown and Awesome Table to add extra useful features to her spreadsheets and sites.

The video below shows Jess Hendon, Caryn Douglas and I being interviewed for the Professional@York award.

Why This Might Be Of Relevance To The Wider University

The interesting part of this project was not what we achieved. We achieved what we set out to do, which was to handle the PHD application process and make the applications gradable by lots of people at three institutions. For me, the most interesting part was that once Caryn had got to grips with the tools, she was then able to think about different ways and different groups of people she could share certain aspects of the data with.

This has meant that the functionality and grown and expanded to involve new people and support new processes. Even the students themselves now have dashboards where the can review their ongoing training usage, and admin teams can easily get to the lists and breakdowns they need. 

So whilst I work with lots of teams at improving processes, once you do that, and if you take the care to keep your data clean, then the improvements can keep on growing, organically almost.