Thursday 28 January 2021 4:51pm
The SONIA Project team Vivienne Allen-Kelly, Charlene Seal, Stewart Hood, Paul Brunton (Project Sponsor), Nick Oborne, Sally Warlow. Absent: Angela Findlay and Annette Hunter.
The University recently won the SONIA User Excellence Award for 2020. The award is in recognition of the progress made to implement and rollout SONIA, the new student placement administration system, to all departments that manage student placement activity.
Every year around 17 per cent of Otago’s students go on a placement. When the Christchurch earthquake struck in 2011, there was no consistent and up-to-date record of all our student placements.
The project has delivered these benefits:
• Improved student experience, with consistent and visible information - SONIA has easy access with up-to-date information for students including an ability to preference their placement online where appropriate.
• Improved health and safety and pastoral care practices - allowing the University to quickly locate students in the event of an emergency.
• Positive feedback of the administration of placements - an end of project PROSCI survey has confirmed that the majority of Placement Officers agree, that in general, SONIA has improved the efficiency of administering student placements.
• Improved contingency planning/disaster recovery – placement related information is now stored digitally ensuring that information is more accessible and not at risk of being lost.
Project Manager Nick Oborne says the project included onboarding more than 40 different placement areas within the four academic divisions across three University campuses. The project team worked with each area to understand how they managed the student placement activity so that they were able to configure the SONIA software aligned with their needs.
Project Sponsor and Health Sciences Pro Vice-Chancellor Professor Paul Brunton says he would like to thank all those involved for making the project such a success.
“The primary goal of this project was to implement a single online placement administrative system. I am personally looking forward to using the SONIA dashboard and seeing in clear real-time all our students on placement.
“I appreciate that SONIA is a complex system to learn. I’d once again like to thank the truly remarkable placement officers and administrators involved in the project. They have spent a lot of time learning to use SONIA.”
For information, such as instructional videos and FAQs, there is a dedicated SONIA website and there is also a team available as part of ongoing support. So for any other queries, issues or information you can get in touch by contacting askit@otago.ac.nz