1. The rapid implementation of Talis Aspire at LSE
Suddenly Last Summer
Michael Fake
Teaching Support & Academic Liaison Manager

2. Context
Conversion
Advocacy
Outcomes

3. Context

5. Small university
50% postgraduate, 50% international
Social sciences, c.1,000 courses
Library central purchasing
LSE

6. In-house reading list system failing
Ordering backlogs
Moodle well established, but inconsistent
Poor student experience
Reading list problems

7. Simple user interface for editors
Consistent experience for students
Structured data for the Library
Talis Aspire

8. Conversion

10. Slow rollouts got stuck at pilot stage
Academics didn’t influence each other quickly
Pressure for fast solution
Goal: implement for all UG courses by October
Big bang

11. Could only persuade, not demand
Inputting lists from scratch still time-consuming
Had to make Aspire the obvious option
Decision: Library to pump-prime the system
Library conversion

12. Attempt to migrate data from in-house system
Data too old, too limited
No structure
Delayed manual conversion
Data migration

13. Production line
Take lists from Moodle
Replicate structure and notes
Guesswork!
Manual conversion

14. Teaching Support Staff (4.5 FTE)
Additional hours (1 FTE)
Temporary staff (7 temps, April – July)
Staffing

15. 4 months, 513 lists, 91,440 items
Temps each added 138 items per day
c.10 – 13 pence per item
Library staff added c.70 items per day
Conversion in numbers

16. Temps are faster than Library staff
Need good quality control
Need a lot of motivation
Useful way of auditing VLE
What did we learn?

17. Advocacy

19. Awareness of the new system: Positive potential for
them and their students
Commitment to use the system after conversion
Orientation and training
Purpose

20. Teachers and administrators
Generic emails unsuccessful
Individual approach much more effective
Emails and notices

21. Wary of this approach initially
Departmental meetings
Positive response
Presentations

22. 275 individual desktop training sessions
Half hour orientations
No group sessions
Training

23. Short overview
Basic information
Assumption that Aspire was intuitive
Guides

24. Outcomes

26. Browser problems
Navigating long lists
Problems

27. 93% of UG lists converted, 28% of PG
Contacted all academics again - 73% handed over
Handover

28. Remarkably uncontroversial
150+ lists created independently
9,000 unique hits on the first day
Success

29. Convert our remaining postgraduate lists
Implement DCM
Next steps

30. Michael Fake
m.fake@lse.ac.uk
http://readinglists.lse.ac.uk
Thank you