Harnessing the power of Office 365 to provide a social learning environment through a new Student Portal

Abstract

The University of West London (UWL) has harnessed the potential of a Cloud-based suite of collaboration tools (Microsoft Office 365, offered free of charge to higher education institutions) to create a personalised, interactive, social platform to both improve the learning experience and to enable students to combine social learning with their academic study.
UWL describes how it engaged with its students to design and refine the requirements for a new student portal, outsourced the development of hosted SharePoint, and delivered an award-winning solution1 in just 5 weeks.