It’s been a busy year for the West Slope. In March 2024 we held a ground breaking ceremony to mark the start of construction and to celebrate the benefits that the West Slope brings to both our campus and local community.
Lots more developments took place throughout the year, including: hosting a Meet the Architects event for students to find out more about the process of developing spaces and interiors; an interactive campaign asking students to vote on Instagram for their Health and Wellbeing Centre design preferences; and the first cranes arriving on campus in time to start building the Health and Wellbeing Centre.
Check out our timelapse video to see what's been happening on the West Slope site in 2024.
The Atrium Market, the first contactless store at a UK university, opened its doors in the Student Centre in May 2024. It sells coffee from local brand Redroaster along with a range of sandwiches, snacks, Tanpopo sushi and gyoza, and Japanese and Asian halal ready meals.
For the ultimate in convenience, the Atrium Market doesn’t have a till – instead, shoppers scan their payment card on entering, select their food or drinks and then simply walk out.
Over 3,000 colleagues across campus are now using our new telephony software – MS Teams Calling.
Thanks to the efforts of a team of Change Champions, Sussex Projects and ITS colleagues, as well as the cooperation of colleagues across campus, we were able to complete the Teams Calling rollout in the summer. This team effort meant we implemented a new telephony system that meets the needs of our modern workforce.
The Student Information System (SIS) project met some important milestones this year.
New application form and processing screens for International Study Centre (ISC) applications launched in Spring term 2024.
In Autumn 2024, new features were released for UCAS Admissions, Curriculum Management, and important connections to housing, reporting, and marketing systems. Recently, a second Autumn release was launched focusing on postgraduate admissions. This includes deposit payments, automatic scholarships, and more curriculum features, along with new marketing and finance integrations. These updates are important to support our student recruitment objectives, and we received over a dozen applications on the first day of use alone.
Following the successful delivery of the Worktribe system, the Research Management System (RMS) team and partner Infonetica spent the summer training research-adjacent staff to use the new Ethics and Application Review System. Significant progress has been made towards fully implementing a new system to replace the current ethics application process on Sussex Direct, allowing for a more standardised and trackable ethics application and review process. As well as speeding up this process, it will reduce the administrative burden of extensively amending applications before submission.
A fantastic, new-look Eat Central opened in September 2024. With sustainability in focus, the new design features a food court-style layout with communal seating areas and some quiet spots, new furniture and counters, cosy booths, sustainable tables, digital screens, an adaptable space for live performances, and comfortable areas for relaxing.
Five food kiosks, including beloved Tortilla, each have their own checkout counters and offer a range of unique and nutritious meal options.
The University moved to a fully paperless parking system in October 2024. The system has streamlined the parking process, making it more convenient by replacing paper permits and scratch cards with a digital alternative, available through an online self-service portal.
Over the course of August and September, more than 4,000 staff members were emailed guidance on how to set up their Multi-factor Authentication (MFA), along with details about when the system would be enabled for them. Throughout September and October, the rollout was gradually widened to include more than 24,000 students. This is an important milestone for our Cyber Security Programme and using MFA will help to keep your data and the University safe and secure.
The rollout went smoothly, with just 5% of users contacting Service Desk for support [during the rollout period].
The Network Replacement Programme (NRP) is installing new fibre optic cabling in order to provide a fast, efficient and secure new internet network. This work has already begun in residences and will move on to other buildings on campus in 2025. The long term benefit of this will be improved internet and connectivity, making it easier for staff and students to work and study.
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