Department for Curriculum and Quality Enhancement

Project case study

Vision of Britain (large) 'A Vision of Britain through Time' (Geography, Faculty of Science)

'A Vision of Britain through Time' is a website detailing the story of how Britain's 15 000 cities, towns and villages have changed and unites more than 200 years' worth of official documents and travel stories.

The site www.visionofbritain.org.uk has been created at the University of Portsmouth with funding from numerous organisations including the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), in addition to a major grant from the Big Lottery Fund - a distributor of funds from the UK National Lottery. It is part of a programme to offer a wider audience free access to academic research and resources.

The project...

Production of 5 interactive tutorials comprising the 'Learning Resources' area of the website.

What we did...

  • Project managed the project from initial brief to sign-off.
  • Repurposed original content from initial submission in Microsoft Word for online delivery.
  • Actively led on the design of the tutorials using software including Adobe Creative Suite 5 (particularly Flash) and Action Script 3, while also actively liasing with colleagues at Headscape (former designers of the UoP website) in addressing issues of accessibility and usability.
  • Advised academic colleagues on the inclusion of interactive functionality including animations, timelines and hovers over images that unlocked more detailed content to create a more engaging user experience.
  • Proactively sourced imagery from multiple third-party sources, while advising academic colleagues of any copyright / usage restrictions and appropriate referencing conventions.

The result...

A bespoke collection of elearning tutorials as part of an overall web-based solution. Click the following link to see the kind of interactive functionality we could help you add to your teaching and learning materials. www.visionofbritain.org.uk/learning/index.jsp

Testimonial...

Working with Marie Kendall-Waters was a very positive experience. She took the time to understand fully our vision of what we wanted and used this information to create a series of elearning tutorials. Together we honed them into the finished products and we are very pleased with the results.

Paula Aucott
(Senior Research Associate on the GIS Project, Geography)