‘How would you redesign the UCL Doc Skills website?’
Background
UCL Doctoral Skills Development Programme (UCL Doc Skills) supports postgraduate research students to expand their research skills and personal transferable skills. In addition to offering advice on the subject, the team coordinates and delivers over 800 sessions per year (nearly 13,000 places) to a population of 5,754 research students. The programme also delivers inductions sessions to new research students, and sponsors foreign language support, teacher training with UCL Arena, placements and internships. The full offer is advertised via the UCL Doc Skills website:https://courses.grad.ucl.ac.uk/
Problem
UCL Doc Skills portal contains several information-based static pages (e.g. FAQs, Cancellation policy), as well as dynamic training section, through which registrations are taken. Each course has a dynamic, individual website automatically generated by the booking system. This means that currently the UCL Doc Skills portal contains over 200 individual course pages (full list can be found here). To make sense of the vast course offer, each page is additionally tagged with filters, including: course topic, Researcher Development Framework domains and recommendations based on the student’s year of study/Faculty. At the moment the website does not allow for calendar-based browsing. Courses are also advertised via the Weekly Bulletin sent to research students and Departmental Graduate Tutors.
Based on the student feedback and the email enquiries the team receives, it is clear that the current structure of the website and communication methods are inefficient. Students seem to struggle to find the training, or the information they need, and as a result, they either email the Doc Skills team, or give up altogether. The challenge is to propose changes to the current UCL Doc Skills portal and communications to improve student experience and reduce administrative workload (it is estimated that over 90% of student emails received by the team relate to the information already included on the Doc Skills portal).
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Challenge hosted and facilitated by Kasia Bronk, Doctoral Skills Development Advisor