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SkillClouds: Aggregating & presenting skills information to students
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This project investigated whether tags and tag clouds might be a visually appealing way of aggregating and presenting skills information to students. We adopted a user-centred design approach to ensure this project (SkillClouds) met the needs of students.
Executive Summary
The general view of students we interviewed is that skills are not foregrounded within the curriculum and that transferable skills are not mentioned on the courses they take. Where information relating to skills is made available, some students feel that the skills tend to be the same across all courses and don’t feel personal to them.
Students are willing to use tag clouds as a search tool, although their understanding of tag cloud principles is limited.
Before students can move on to more complex tasks of applying their skills to a CV or job interview, they require relatively basic information about their skills to help scaffold their understanding and development.
Based on our research with students, we have built a system that:
- presents skills information in an accessible format
- reflects the different stages that students are at in their skills journey
- offers a high level of personalisation
Students gave very positive views about the SkillCloud interface.
Academic staff have been enthusiastic about using SkillClouds as a tool to support discussions with their students about their academic progress.
SkillClouds has been adopted by the University to support some of its key strategic objectives and committed funds to further its development.
A number of other institutions are interested in using SkillClouds and we have created a demo version and an open source version available for download. These can be accessed via the SkillClouds project website