{"id":1736,"date":"2019-05-02T16:03:23","date_gmt":"2019-05-02T23:03:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hr.uw.edu\/dsa\/?page_id=1736"},"modified":"2019-05-02T16:10:00","modified_gmt":"2019-05-02T23:10:00","slug":"digital-strategies-team","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/hr.uw.edu\/dsa\/recipients\/2019-recipients\/digital-strategies-team\/","title":{"rendered":"Digital Strategies Team"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Ian<\/div>
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Digital Strategies Team, Evans School of Public Policy & Governance<\/span><\/h2>\n

John Compton, Ian Gonzales, Molly Jay<\/p>\n

Nominated by Sandra O. Archibald, Dean and Professor, Daniel J. Evans School of Public Policy & Governance<\/p>\n

Awarded 2019<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

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I am so proud and excited to nominate the Evans School\u2019s Digital Team for the UW\u2019s Distinguished Staff Award, in recognition of their tremendous work this year to accomplish an important special project for our school and our sector: the launch of a new online case repository and interactive teaching resources for public policy, management, administration, and nonprofit courses and instructors, called \u201cThe Hallway.\u201d<\/p>\n

The original version of this asset, called \u201cThe Electronic Hallway,\u201d was an Evans School project that started in the mid-1990s and has long served as an important online repository of teaching case studies and teaching tools to support instructors of public policy, management, public administration, and nonprofit-related subjects in colleges and universities across the country. At the time it was launched 30+ years ago, the Electronic Hallway was the only platform serving faculty nationwide with case studies and management education materials in these fields. For many years, it was the \u201cthing\u201d the Evans School was most known for before we emerged as a top ten school. The Electronic Hallway has long been a service the Evans School has provided to the field \u2013 but in recent years became in dire need of a massive update and upgrade.<\/p>\n

When I hired Molly Jay in 2015 as the Evans School\u2019s first Chief Digital Officer, I asked her to move a handful of mountains for our school. One of these was a complete overhaul of the Evans School\u2019s outdated Electronic Hallway.<\/p>\n

Molly scoped out the requirements of this project and secured three bids for the redesign: the most cost-effective was $180,000 plus annual support and maintenance fees. Knowing such a significant cost was beyond the school\u2019s budget, Molly gathered her small team and asked if they wanted to scale a mountain with her. And with that, they enthusiastically got to work.<\/p>\n

Together with her team, Molly imagined a re-envisioned and updated tool to apply advancements in case teaching methods, media, and web standards to the existing body of case teaching resources. She saw the opportunity to create a lightweight, simple web-based repository for case studies that also allowed instructors to control serialized access when they shared the content out to students. Moreover, Molly saw the opportunity to create an attractive and accessible experience for learners and instructors, and an interface that is easy to use with any device.<\/p>\n

Over the course of ten months, the prestigious yet outdated case repository was transformed from its 1996 model to a scalable, revenue-driving, multimedia platform thanks to the creativity and dedication of Ian Gonzalez (above photo, left), John Compton, and Molly Jay.<\/p>\n

The technological expertise of lead developer Ian Gonzalez, the project management and user-experience focus of John Compton, and Molly Jay\u2019s overarching vision and leadership made for a team that was truly in step with one another. Together, this small but mighty team launched the new \u201cHallway\u201d in October 2018 with a sleek new user interface, entirely new capabilities, and permission-based usability, described by Evans School faculty member Steve Pages as a \u201cquantum leap over the previous version.\u201d (www.hallway.org<\/a>)<\/p>\n

This innovative redesign was done entirely in-house by this team of three Evans School staff members, saving the school more than $180,000 in outside vendor costs. In addition to this important cost savings, the new platform has already attracted national attention, leading to a first distribution deal with SAGE Publishing.<\/p>\n

The effort and dedication Ian, John, and Molly poured into this project successfully addressed a number of stakeholder needs and limitations of the previous model:<\/p>\n