My.monash: Supporting students and staff in teaching, learning and administration

Abstract

The my.monash Portal (Portal) provides a virtual gateway to support student centred flexible learning by coordinating many of the university’s key resources to meet the needs of students and staff. The Portal is intended to help deliver innovative learning programs, foster opportunities to undertake research, increase flexibility of access to resources and services, support asynchronous approaches to teaching and learning, and allow online teaching and learning environments to be more responsive to changing student needs. In essence, it is part of a recent movement in higher education towards providing more complete, holistic online environments for students and staff by converging a number of technologies. The project has been developed with an innovative software design model (extreme programming) that involves rapid prototyping, in which iterative and continuous evaluation by staff and students is used to inform all aspects of the project’s design and development. This has resulted in significant collaborative activities across a wide cross section of the university community. The paper will address each of these aspects in turn, concluding with the results of the evaluation processes and future directions for the development of the Portal.