The Next Practice Acceleration Space is an online space where education professionals can share their ideas, experience and good practice whilst benefiting from the views and experience of their peers.
Building a collaboration space
Headshift worked with The Innovation Unit to identify the requirements for a site that is expected to support the overall objectives and approach of the Next Practice programme. The main idea was to build a collaboration space where user-generated, spontaneous contributions are key, but also a space where "validated" content is available for practitioners to use with a good degree of confidence.
From workshops to live site
A couple of user workshops were held to gather requirements, ideas and preferences. These shaped the live site which brings together a robust wiki platform customised to provide some interesting features:
Most of the customisation work was carried out in order to offer the best possible experience to the user and to put "people" at the core of all interaction on the site.
Widening the scope
The Next Practice Acceleration Space has been live for 6 months. During this period it was made available to a limited number of users who have helped populate it with quality content and who have been "testing" it in real life situations. The feedback received has now been used to improve some of the functionality and the plan is to open the site to a wider community of practitioners at the beginning of the new school year.
Building a collaboration space
Headshift worked with The Innovation Unit to identify the requirements for a site that is expected to support the overall objectives and approach of the Next Practice programme. The main idea was to build a collaboration space where user-generated, spontaneous contributions are key, but also a space where "validated" content is available for practitioners to use with a good degree of confidence.
From workshops to live site
A couple of user workshops were held to gather requirements, ideas and preferences. These shaped the live site which brings together a robust wiki platform customised to provide some interesting features:
- extended user profile
- knowledge marketplace - by telling what they know and what they would like to know, users can be alerted to others who have knowledge for them or who need their knowledge
- recommended reading based on what users are interested in
- search results make people matches float to the top, etc.
Most of the customisation work was carried out in order to offer the best possible experience to the user and to put "people" at the core of all interaction on the site.
Widening the scope
The Next Practice Acceleration Space has been live for 6 months. During this period it was made available to a limited number of users who have helped populate it with quality content and who have been "testing" it in real life situations. The feedback received has now been used to improve some of the functionality and the plan is to open the site to a wider community of practitioners at the beginning of the new school year.
