MCDC Community web site
Our challenge was to create a network to facilitate the communication and collaboration between everyone in the network - PhD students, senior researchers (Investigators), supervisors, mentors, educational advisor, secretariat and members of the committees - who are spread over Africa, Europe and America.
MCDC is...
... a consortium of four European and five African partners funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The consortium initiated a new PhD programme for African scientists undertaking malaria research in Africa and to provide support to the doctoral and postdoctoral Fellows trained under the Gates Malaria Partnership (GMP).
MCDC aims to lead improvements in the malaria control measures available in Africa, but also to stimulate research and facilitate the professional development of researchers to develop new ways to control the disease.
Background
MCDC sought to create an online network to encourage information exchange between all the different groups and individuals associated with the programme. The network would therefore consist of a wide range and diverse mix of people with varying degrees knowledge, experience and expertise in malaria research. The PhD students would, for example, benefit from contact and support from their peers, senior researchers, European supervisor, host institution supervisor, and the educational advisor and secretariat.
It was important that the network provided a platform for the:
-
Exchange of information and resources
-
Discussion about research topics, skills and techniques
-
Social interaction of all members of the consortium as groups or individuals
-
Further development of their careers through personal development planning (PDP) activities
-
Participation of MCDC led discussions
Our involvement
Key to the success of this network would be developing a clean and simple interface that required minimal training to use. We therefore invested considerable time and effort on the information architecture and wireframes to ensure the interface was intuitive to use with high usability for the wide range of users.
The system
Software
The network is built using Drupal a fully featured, open source, web content management platform. It has a powerful and extensible templating system, which allows a high level of control over the look of the site. New features and extensions are constantly added to the core system, with many more being available and supported by the highly active community.
Community
We created a closed community of over 100 individuals, restricted to individuals involved with MCDC, which included PhD students, senior researchers, mentors, RMC course tutors, educational advisors, supervisors, the secretariat and committee members.
The MCDC ‘Community' included the following features to meet the consortium's requirements:
-
Personal profile
-
Comment walls - allows message posting on user profiles
-
Internal messaging system incorporating external email alerts
-
Integrated PDP system
-
Learning zone - wiki-type area for sharing knowledge about learning resources and research
-
Forums - message boards to facilitate threaded discussions
-
Chat - allowing real time communication between all users
What's next?
We will evaluate how the Community has been used since going live and look at ways to improve the network and overall user experience. We will continue training groups of users how to use and benefit from using the Community.
