Southampton Learning Environment Internship: Overview

My internship consists of helping develop the new Southampton Learning Environment (SLE) – “a 24/7 ‘one stop shop’ for learning and living needs at the University of Southampton” as the research team’s website puts it. When finished, it will include various “apps” such as email, news feeds and more, as chosen by the student body.

One element of my part in this project entails gathering student opinions on the current environment (“SUSSED”) and how they think it could be improved.

This will be supplemented by finding data stores that would be useful to staff and students (such as bus time tables or swimming pool booking databases) and converting them into a machine readable format (if they are not already), so they can be integrated with the SLE.

Associated with this will be drawing mockups in Pencil (an open-source 2D animation software) to give an idea of the way the environment will look. These mockups will then be used to create a more realistic looking (but semi-functional) HTML mockup of the final product.