Information on uniservity

[SeanVin]

dsummar, patience is the key. I've been responsible for it at my school for a little under 3yrs now and its a slow process selling the idea to colleagues. I set up small working groups (10-12 staff) of interested staff and then used a trickle feed / cascade training model......

 

.....all the VLEs on offer are much of a muchness I have found. this one offers the collaborative aspect of learning, and is good from a learning and teaching point of view

 

Couldn’t agree more with both the above statements. Your site it very impressive pazman and shows it is possible to build something decent with Uniservity. It does however underline the three most important things about a VLE; Content, Content, Content. It does not matter how good (or expensive) the underlying platform is, if the content is poor it will not be used.

 

My biggest gripe with Uniservity is that it is hosted off site. We have nearly a terabyte of student data on our servers. Imagine if that is all placed into “e-portfolios” that can only be accessed via a broadband link! Our LEA has bought into Uniservity and I understand are looking at giving schools 1GB links so they can cope! Fortunately we have a very good SMT who consult with and listen to their staff; we are looking at alternative solutions.

[smadison]

We had someone sign up to a three year contract and before the contract was finished we started using our own system as we found it was not flexable enough for us. I think for a primary it may work but not for a secondary with the restrictions we had no control or input into the areas we needed.

 

Chck the pricing it would be worth looking else where in my opion.

[laserblazer]

I've just seen from pazman's link, that the other middle school in the town is up and running. I think that will speed up our process as our SLT won't like them stealing a lead. That said, theirs is pretty basic. Looks like they have just thrown together a few pages so they can say they have a VLE.

[pazman]

Couldn’t agree more with both the above statements. Your site it very impressive pazman and shows it is possible to build something decent with Uniservity. It does however underline the three most important things about a VLE; Content, Content, Content. It does not matter how good (or expensive) the underlying platform is, if the content is poor it will not be used.

 

My biggest gripe with Uniservity is that it is hosted off site. We have nearly a terabyte of student data on our servers. Imagine if that is all placed into “e-portfolios” that can only be accessed via a broadband link! Our LEA has bought into Uniservity and I understand are looking at giving schools 1GB links so they can cope! Fortunately we have a very good SMT who consult with and listen to their staff; we are looking at alternative solutions.

true enough - we are coming to the end of our current LA contract with them and their new standard issue seems to be 5GB of storage per school. this is clearly not enough still (think ours is about 17GB in size at the moment, and growing a quite a rapid rate!)

 

broadband speed is imperative to keeping it live, though I agree with a previous post about performance issues at times. They have taken the north-west off onto a different server and this has eased capacity down here but still some way to go

 

my concern with them at the moment is parent portal/online reporting as it doesnt look like they are as sorted as they claim to be! feedback from colleagues who have been to BETT today was not positive. I'm going tomorrow and will make a judgement for myself at that point...

[pazman]

We had someone sign up to a three year contract and before the contract was finished we started using our own system as we found it was not flexable enough for us. I think for a primary it may work but not for a secondary with the restrictions we had no control or input into the areas we needed.

 

Chck the pricing it would be worth looking else where in my opion.

it is worth shopping around I agree but UniServity is good value for money, and after some years of persevering with their staff, building up a good working relationship with them is just as important. For example, I am able to contact my CSM anytime from about 6am if we need support (and last week with the snow that came in very useful!)

 

My colleagues have really seen the benefits over recent times, and the snow day hits were a real confidence booster for them and the students.

 

if you have somethign established and working then it might be a little too radical to change. if you are still in the infancy stages then I would investigate possibilities. I did this last year at BETT and we chose to stick because there was nothing that offered "the full package"

[pazman]

I've just seen from pazman's link, that the other middle school in the town is up and running. I think that will speed up our process as our SLT won't like them stealing a lead. That said, theirs is pretty basic. Looks like they have just thrown together a few pages so they can say they have a VLE.

always a good way to get things done I'd say!!

 

recommend having a browse of sites on the school-portal network to get ideas

 

if you want some more details about how ive done things then am happy to converse by email - we won a UniServity Excellence Award in July 2009 for our eBuddies work, and have been the secondary in the LA that has really been making headway with this agenda

[pazman]

We use it here and it's going far better than our previous VLEs.

 

I do have two major gripes though:

 

1) It runs like a dog in the afternoons, almost to the point its unusable. I'm not sure if its a fault at their end or our net provider.

 

2) The "integrated" Gaggle mail service is poor. They're reliant on talking to Gaggle to sort out issues, and they're a US company who only work office hours, so problems take days to resolve due to the time difference.

 

I personally think an in-house solution is best, bandwidth wise.

is Gagglemail no good then?

 

I see the benefits of email integration but only if it your existing exchange mail addresses?

 

In all honesty, I really want them to sort out the single sign-on situation as this would be a really powerful and easy way of staff and students engaging even quicker with one less thing to do before being able to use everything on the VLE

 

thoughts?