Web Comm Lunch & Punch - Campus - Wide calendar

One of the reasons that we really wanted a campus calendar for OU was that there were just so many events that are out there on any given day within the University. How is it that somebody is supposed to find out what’s going on? How is it that a new student can see what is going on at The University? How is it that perspective students can see what The University is like? What kind of events that we have. So we really wanted to provide a tool for campus that you can share events, promote events and things like that. Back whenever we started our calendar search we looked at a lot of calendar solutions. We looked at about 4 different calendar solutions, 3rd party vendors, open source solutions, things like that. And then also a 5th option that we looked at was using, actually, a previous version of our content management system, using their calendar. We actually partnered with Day which is the company behind CQ5, our campus content management system. They had rolled out a new version of the CMS at this point and we were going to partner with them to create a calendar with them based on, not only our requirements, but really more than that, based really on calendaring standards. So taking all these standards across the board, putting it into one calendar So, this calendar has been built for us by Day or with our partnership with Day. The biggest feature of this calendar is that we can share events with each other. There are actually a couple of ways to do that. Calendars can actually subscribe to entire other calendars. If one department wants to display all of the academic events, they can borrow the entire academic calendar and display it within theirs. So they can always have those events but the department isn’t having to update those events. The next option is as a calendar author you can actually submit events to other calendars as well. So, if you have an event that you think different department might be interested in, you can promote it to that calendar. and laying, kind of, our sharing of events and those kinds of requirements on top of that. So, for example, the OU Homepage calendar, we call it The OU Campus Calendar, subscribes to the University College calendar, actually. This means that anytime Mark updates the University College calendar with a student success series or some sort of seminar for new students that will automatically show up with in the OU Campus calendar. Another option is like I said, submitting events to other calendars. So, let’s say University College has an event that’s very prevalent to maybe, international students. Instead of the International Programs calendar having to recreate that event on theirs, Mark can simply submit that event to the International Programs calendar and that will go into a workflow where International Programs can approve that event or deny that event. So those are some of the options that are available for sharing events. The biggest thing that we want in this calendar is to share, share, share. That’s the biggest point in having a campus calendar is that we are not having to recreate events and we can aggregate them all into different areas depending on who the audiences are. The very first features that are going to be coming out of the door very, very soon are a selection of date range. So, you’ll be able to choose from this date to this date, show me all of the events. Additionally you’ll also be able to choose categories and you’ll be able to continue to search by search terms as you have been. We have a couple different possibilities we’re playing with, this is one of the possibilities, this is another one of the possibilities where they click on the date range, advanced date options, there. Here you choose categories, what month, next month, select date range, choose days like so. So, there’s a lot of different things we’re trying. I’ll have Mario go over a few of the other things here but I just wanted to mention that we really want feedback from everybody. It’s very important to get feedback; we’re going to be trying to evolve this. Data and presentation are separate here, so, in the future, as we evolve the user interface the back end won’t be changing that much. In our office, we’re always like, “well, why don’t we do it this way”, “well, no that way’s not good let’s do it this way” and that will go into a workflow where International Programs can approve that event or deny that event. “no, well, come on, this is not good”, so you know we’re constantly going back and forth and around and around and around about how we should present things, how the user interface should work, what’s easiest for the user and everybody’s got their opinion, right? Everybody is like; I use the website this way so this is how we wanna do it. One of the cool things we do, I think it’s really cool everybody else probably thinks it’s really nerdy but we do what’s called usability testing. Basically what I’ll do is get 5 to 7 actual users, I’ll just put it out there whoever wants to come and participate in this usability testing, come on and we do a list. And we’ll actually present this to them we’ll record audio and video, we’ll ask them a series of tasks to perform, so it might be find out all the events that are happening on December 19th. Then what we’ll do is really look at and study how they interact with the calendar. Are they able to find the event? Are they able to complete the task? How long it takes them. We look at facial expressions. Are they sitting here going “uh, you know, I’m not sure what I’m doin here” or are they like, “oh this is kinda cool”. It really gives us insight on how people are using it. From there, basically, what I’ll do is come up with a report, make recommendations and we’ll present that and usually, that’s the way that we’ll go. I just wanted to walk you guys through adding an event but mainly what I’m wanting to discuss is this style guide we put together, Amanda and Lindsey are handing these out. This is basically to ensure that we’re all consistent campus wide. If your department already has a calendar in CQ5, there’s questions like; “How do I display this location?”, okay, it’s in the Union, right, well, it’s also called Oklahoma Memorial Union, it’s also called OMU, it’s called The Union, The Student Union. There’s a lot of things we can call it. It has an address, “Do we include the address?” “My particular event has a room, do I include that?” So, these are the questions we have answered in this guide and I’m going to kind of walk you through some of them. If you have an event, say it’s a deadline, a good example is “fall semester begins”. So, fall semester has a beginning and an ending but we don’t want that to span across our entire calendar because that’s every single day it’s going to say “fall semester”, okay we got it, we know it’s fall semester. So what we advise is that you create 2 events, fall semester begins, so you’ll have that date and it can be an all day event, you don’t have to put a time that the semester is beginning. Then in the body, the description of that of event you’d want to put the rest of the information, when the semester actually ends. Also, in there you can include a link to the full academic calendar or the admissions page or something like that. So that’s what we advise. I usually do that for events that last longer than 3 or 4 days. What you can do, instead of going down here, and going 19th, you can actually hit down here, it auto fills the feed. I don’t know if you saw that, but, before it was the day that I had just auto date that it came up. If you just actually click down there it’ll say 11/19, now if it doesn’t end on 11/19 then you go in and change that, obviously but I want it to be the same. Then it’s from 7 to 9 P.M. so I’ll go down here and I’ll click 7 PM. Same thing if you go down here, it auto fills an hour ahead. Now this event lasts till 9 so I’m going to change that. Then all day, these options would go away if it was all day. This does not repeat, however if you did have a repetitive event, you can definitely use this but keep in mind that, doing, I’ll go ahead and we can test this. Say it was weekly, this happened every Wednesday, we’re going to shoot a turkey, we would want to create an ending. Some people believe, hopefully your event is definitely going to happen weekly forever. Say it’s like your meeting and walking at lunch, I know the Huff has a great event where they meet and they walk at lunch and that’s hopefully going to continue for a year but we don’t want to encourage you to put it for a year because you have to take into account breaks and things like that. So, look at your own calendar and say “okay, when is our next break?” and put it up until that point. So maybe our next break is November 30th. We encourage you to use the OU map to actually find the address, which is really handy. Sometimes, websites, it’s easy to find, you know I can go to the Huff and find the address really fast, sometimes it’s a little more difficult. Tags, these are in the future, Christian showed you that functionality where you can search. So, there’s certain tags that we’ve set and you can read and hear what they are. We are trying to limit these to the selection of two tags because a lot of times events will fall under all of them but we really want things to be more narrowed down to the category specifically. Those are all really great points and things that we’re taking note of now and things that we hope in the future we can communicate about. Like I mentioned before, we kind of start off here and this run here is really to see how people are going to use it. What features are there? That’s a great point too, Sherry. We’ve thought a lot about different ways, stylistically, to handle if an event has been canceled, if a time change happens. Do we maybe include a little icon that gives people a little visual clue as to this event has changed? We’re going to stick around for a little bit so if anybody would like to talk, we’ll be here. Also, as punishment for your department having a calendar, you have to talk to Amanda before you leave and sign an agreement. [Laughter] So, thanks everybody, we enjoyed it. Do you guys have any questions? [Applause]