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Editor, Internal Publications
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e-mail: snoble@mtroyal.ca
Fred Cheney
Media Relations Officer
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e-mail: fcheney@mtroyal.ca
The great thing about work experience initiatives for Mount Royal students is that they get a taste of what it will really be like to work in their industry.
When Brian Traynor, associate professor, Information Design in the Faculty of Communication Studies, heard the Alberta Association of Colleges and Technical Institutes (AACTI) was in need of a complete re-vamp of their website, Traynor put the idea in front of AACTI to hire students for the job.
“AACTI wanted to redevelop their website to be more active, more social and just more effective overall for the users, which the current site just wasn’t living up to,” says Traynor. “This was a great opportunity that I wanted students to benefit from.”
Students had to interview for the three available funded positions by AACTI — work terms that contributed towards completing their programs. The Faculty of Communication Studies supported the project by finding a small corner of space within their own facility the students could use to work.
Gareth Burke, fourth year Electronic Publishing, was one of the students hired to work on the AACTI project for his work term in 2009 along with SAIT student John Torvi.
Team work
“Re-developing the AACTI website at first was really daunting because it was such a large project,” says Burke. “Plus it was my first time getting industry experience so I wasn’t sure what to expect.”
Burke acknowledges that classroom knowledge is essential to honing your skills, but now says, as a student, you never know the value of what you have learned in a class until you apply it on the job.
“I like the hands-on aspect of working on a real project. You can sit down and play around more than when you are sitting in a lecture. And, we were lucky that AACTI was really open to hearing our recommendations on how to approach the project. We actually had to go out and figure a lot out on our own,” says Burke.
AACTI is an association that aims to bring researchers from across its member institutions together for undertaking and sharing information on research projects within niche communities of practice such as health and new media. They needed their website to reflect the collaborative feel of AACTI where researchers could join groups, have discussions and create a place where the stories of the research projects and the researchers themselves could be told.
“This project was much more than just building a fancy rolodex — people want a lot more than just a static website nowadays,” says Torvi. “AACTI wanted something the researchers would actually use and feel is worthwhile.”
“The technology that we ended up using was initially designed for dating which is interesting. It had the functionality of putting people in touch with each other built right in. It’s actually very Facebook-like.”
Great feedback
Since the project began in the summer of 2009 a lot of work has been done. The student team met with AACTI for assessment and user needs analysis to develop the navigation and architecture of the new site that needed to allow for future growth and expansion. All methodologies the students learned in the classroom.
“It was great working directly with AACTI as a client,” adds Burke. “They admitted technology wasn’t their expertise and that they didn’t know the best route to take with the website. They were really open to us guiding them through the process, they really valued our input.”
The AACTI project impacted some current Mount Royal students as well.
Traynor arranged to have some of his Information Design students test drive the new website in class with usability testing — a combination of real-scenario tasks to complete and surveys to gauge their experience and satisfaction with using the website. Burke and Torvi captured all the information to use in final tweaking of the website.
“It’s great for the Information Design students to be the testers of a website — one day they will want to be giving the usability testing,” says Burke, about the feedback which was exactly what they needed — “extremely honest and opinionated.”
The new AACTI website will be launched by the end of the year. Burke will graduate from Mount Royal in early 2010. When asked what he will do with the industry work experience he now has under his belt and on his resume, Burke says he plans to go out and get a job.
Welcome to the real world.
— Karen Richards, Dec. 10, 2009
Calgary, Alberta, Canada T3E 6K6
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