Communication Strategy

Today marks the start for my team and I working on the new CiCS 3 year communication strategy 2010 - 2013 at the University of Sheffield.

The strategy will cover both internal and external communication and rather than write it in isolation we are holding small discussion groups with staff in the department to gather their views and input.

In order to get representation from across the whole of the department we have worked to a 25% representation rate across all teams. This has resulted in approximately 50 people taking part in the discussions and as we have tried to keep groups small, over the next 2 weeks we will be facilitating 6 group discussions.

Each discussion group will be together for 90 minutes going through some structured areas to consider. In advance all attendees have been asked to consider the following

- What are the problems with communication in CiCS and what actions can you suggest to remedy them?

- Who is responsible for communication and how can we get students, staff & CiCS staff engaged in what we have to say?

- In three years time what might CiCS communication be like, in cultural and technological terms?

The sessions should be interesting, and hopefully provided us with a full range of issues to consider in our new communication strategy. The aim is to publish the strategy early 2010.

Virtual chat

Recently I attend a residential for a distance learning course I’m doing. Day to day the course is supported with a website, online lectures (audio/video as well as slides), resources to download and through a VLE (Moodle).

Everybody there commented how important these face-to-face sessions were, and many said how isolated they had begun to feel, particularly as posts to Moodle had dwindled to nothing in the weeks before the residential. Someone commented they had wondered at one point if anyone else was still doing the course, but that they didn’t feel they could just send an ‘anybody there’ post to Moodle. It made me wonder why, since social chat was the first thing people did when meeting face to face. Interestingly, after the residential there was also a brief flurry of 'chat' posts, before silence one again fell on Moodle.

I'm a very quiet person - always sat at the back of lectures and hoped not to be noticed - but other people on the course are much more outgoing, so I don't think personality explains the difficulties of keeping the site active. It is a fairly small group though, so perhaps there is a 'critical mass' required.

At the Innovation and Communication' event back in 2008, Oxford University showed how they had successfully used Facebook to support central and distributed IT Support Staff. However, they had a very large number of staff (around 600), and about 20% joined the Facebook group, and discussion was still relatively limited.

I wonder what you would regard as successful for this kind of group? Given that they use very few resources to maintain, is any discussion a win, even if it is very sporadic, or should we be putting more effort in to promoting their use?