Patrick, I've been preparing for this for a while, but have not implemented it yet. This is a cluster of many communication tasks, not a single problem, and calls for a variety of tools and practices, whether you use Moodle or a purpose-designed workflow system.
I am starting to use the Questionnaire tool quite a lot. I want to create a Questionnaire for Course Proposals. This tool gives you an immediate summary of all submissions, and different visibility options. I would not choose anonymity, and I would allow multiple submissions. I want to allow "students" (i.e. the proposers of courses) to view all submissions by peers, so they can see the overlap.
I intend to create a Group for each department, and provide a GroupSelection tool to allow staff to join the appropriate group. This will help segment and aggregate work by the departments.
I want to create a Forum for faculty/committee meeting minutes in Separate Groups mode. The dean would then be able to search all faculty minutes with the Search Forums tool. I believe we should turn on Ratings, so each staff member can indicate [Yes/No] assent or Reply with amendments to the minutes before the next meeting.
Forum digests reduce the workload of tracking official notifications.
I intend to create a Wiki for resources in Separate Groups mode, so each department sees only its own Wiki, but the dean can quickly switch between them all.
In the absence of a separate Document Management System, the text of crucial documents (policy and guidelines) should be posted in Wikis for four reasons:
- The entire policy-base must be easy to Search, which works well in Wikis and not at all with uploaded files.
- You must be able to distinguish between currently active and preceding versions of policies and procedures. Wikis give you a revision history automatically.
- Wikis automatically allow you to restore accidentally deleted content.
- Wikis in Moodle 2.x automatically apply group-based access control to all new and revised content.
I often use the Grid format or Tab display in courses to avoid the Scroll of Death, and that will be necessary on a staff portal, too.
For the most frequent decision paths or workflows, I am considering constructing Lessons.
I want to add each official responsibility as a term in Glossary, with the current holder in the definition, so that the right name pops up whenever someone mouses over a responsibility in any of the policy documents or minutes. As my organisation has a large workforce, I want to do the same with staff names and photos, so I can see a face just by hovering over someone's name.
I propose to use Workshop for approval and quality assurance processes, marker benchmarking, peer evaluation processes and much more.
We are already using Course Completion for compliance purposes, to check which staff are ready for particular activities and responsibilities. However, we are periodically storing a permanent copy offline due to the risk of completion data in Moodle being reset during course maintenance.
You might want to give your Registrar an Auditor role (perhaps without permission to post) in entire Course Categories, so (s)he can view any course content.
I'm looking forward to the stories from other sites.
Regards,
Russell