UCISA-Eduserv Award for Excellence 2011 

The 2011 UCISA-Eduserv Award for Excellence has been won by the University of Leicester. The submission focused on a project to develop, at minimal cost, high quality training material on information security suitable for all staff in a higher education institution. The project sought to ensure that the material would to meet the specific needs of the higher education sector, could be delivered online and for which completion was auditable. The material was developed collaboratively with Cranfield University, Imperial College London, the University of Leeds and the University of York delivering a far better result than could have been achieved by a single institution.

The successful collaboration, engaging with a commercial company with expertise in the development of e-learning material, aligns with many of the themes picked out in the recent report from Universities UK’s Efficiency and Modernisation Task Group. Not only does it highlight an effective way of producing quality training material, it also promotes more efficient delivery of training to the wider university population.

University of Leicester - Development of online information security training

Highly commended

Submissions from the University of Manchester and the University of Bristol were highly commended by the judging panel.  The University of Manchester’s Award entry focussed on the implementation of an automated process to rapidly produce high quality podcasts of lectures.  The submission from the University of Bristol described the development of an open source, geo-spatial smartphone application to permit crowdsourcing and remote validation of research data.

University of Bristol - Leafwatch application
University of Manchester - Podcast project

Other entries

Anglia Ruskin University - A flexible and energy efficient virtual desktop
University of Dundee - Microsoft 365 implementation
University of Huddersfield - UniApp - the university on your mobile
University of Leeds - Mobile learning programme
University of Nottingham - Identity and access management
Plymouth University - Online feedback and marks
Robert Gordon University - Online enrolment and Agile development
University of Stirling - Student Union systems