Kahu Virtual Campus: brought to you by Lockdown Level 4

Like many people who found their creativity revived during the Covid lockdown in Semester One, Vanessa McQuinlan used her innovative thinking skills to devise ways to engage with potential students.

Vanessa leads Connected Experiences, a ‘lean start-up’ under Digital Services that created Kahu Virtual Campus, Your World Your Way (yourworld.auckland.ac.nz).

“We were tasked with coming up with something that addresses the fact that Covid has affected our face-to-face recruitment model.”

Vanessa started looking at what other universities around New Zealand, and overseas, were offering and found most were variations of the same theme. “They all had virtual tours, but we wanted something that differentiated us … something that would really appeal to 15- to 20-year-olds,” she says.

“We wanted people to go online, explore and have fun. The University of Auckland is seen as highly academic so we wanted future students to experience the rich social and cultural dimensions of our spaces and places. We wanted to create a ‘home’ for future students.”

Vanessa and the team partnered with an agency, Method Digital, and used creative technology to showcase the University and engage with future students.

Kahu Virtual Campus phase one was launched on 26 August and is aimed at students who have not yet enrolled.

“It’s a creative and interactive experience where future students and their whānau can explore in a way they’re familiar with, through growing up in the age of gamification. They expect experiential ways of doing digital things.”

The Kahu Virtual Campus on desktop is a “connected experience”.

“We want to transform the way we connect with our future students and, ultimately, our current students.

“We’ve co-designed it with the Pro Vice-Chancellor Māori teams led by Michael Steedman, Pro Vice-Chancellor Pacific Damon Salesa, and the International Office.

“We’ve made sure it underpins and reflects the values of a Māori and Pacific world view. It’s all about inclusiveness and connectedness, and that really suits our kaupapa,” says Vanessa.

“The University of Auckland’s place within Tāmaki Makaurau has special significance to us, as a university in the South Pacific.”

Kahu Virtual Campus can be personalised in many ways, including 3D items for a personalised desktop which appear after a user answers a few questions. The items are tailored to reflect students’ interests and can even detect if students are international and float up information that’s most relevant. It also includes videos featuring a wide range of students who tell their stories.

“Students answer a few simple questions which are interactive and fun, they are then welcomed by a digital pōwhiri and then they are presented with a personalised and tailored desktop just for them – a virtual gateway into all the university has to offer in one place.”

Vanessa says beta testing revealed prospective students spent around 19 minutes on the site, having a look around and personalising it.

“That’s huge, and it’s probably because it’s designed based on questions we know potential students ask.

“If you are looking around as a prospective student you don’t need to register but once you do, you can save your personalised desktop which has a built-in response to questions you’ve asked.”

The idea was prompted by the extensive student journey-mapping the University did with high school students in 2017-18. That resulted in the student digital strategy.

“So that’s really provided us with an opportunity to do something like this using what they told us.”
The whole concept and much of the work was done during Level 4 lockdown.

“We just worked very agilely to get this done over that lockdown and it worked because we were working without guidelines. [Chief Digital Officer] Stephen Whiteside just said ‘create something’ and I think that made a difference.”

“We’ve had a lot of interest from schools who say there’s nothing like this out there and it will really help answer Year 12 and 13 students’ questions.”

Kahu Virtual Campus will be integrated with information on the regular university website and with the contact centre for communications and events. The Connected Experiences team is working on a number of other innovations.

“Phase two of Kahu Virtual Campus is planned by the end of the year. It will include 3D modelling of the campus, extending our map into a 3D virtual world of Auckland.”

The modelling of the campus will enable digital wayfinding, a dramatic improvement on the PDF maps of the University. Kahu will even be able to lead students from one classroom to another and tell them the best route.

In 2021, the team plans to add the final layer, the Kahu Unified Campus.

“The third phase is the Unified Campus, the concept of a digital kaitiaki or personal assistant for students who are already enrolled. Work is beginning on that now and will hopefully be ready before Semester One, 2021.”

Vanessa says when the Unified Campus is launched it will “do some amazing things”.

“It will amalgamate around 25 systems with some really useful and practical organisational tools. So, for example, the digital personal assistant will tell you if your library books are due back or you have an assignment coming up.”

University with a personal assistant. Not bad.