In September 2016, the University of Chichester started a project to reduce the amount of printing by 10% each academic year. The plan was to meet with departments and individuals to learn about their work-practices and see where improvements could be made.
From the point of view of the TEL team, this was an ideal opportunity for us to promote the various online systems we have available, and that aren’t necessarily the first things people go to use when starting a new piece of work. People seem to move instinctively toward paper as it is familiar and they’ve “…always worked that way”.
Arranging and managing meetings
It has always shocked me to see the amount of paper printed for meetings “just in case people don’t come with a device”. I’m sure you’ve all seen it, for a meeting with 10 people, the agenda is printed, along with all the handouts or documentation, plus a couple of extra copies in case someone brings a friend… Still, everyone comes with a device and leaves the paper scattered around the table, only to be stuck in the recycling an hour later.
We worked with various teams, including the PAs for the Vice Chancellor Group, to improve meeting management. This included better use of Office 365 mail and calendar when setting up the meetings, distributing documentation via OneDrive, and writing meeting minutes using OneNote (which can be used to import meeting details, attendance registering and a simple one-click email to all participants). For complex meetings, OneNote’s audio recording was also used to assist the person responsible for writing up the minutes.
Module evaluation
We’ve had Office 365, Bristol Online Survey and Moodle for many years, but many tutors still revert to paper to collect student module evaluation. This can result in weeks being taken up by administrative staff who need to process the information.
Various departments are now using Moodle questionnaires, Microsoft Forms, and Bristol Online Survey, now owned by Jisc.
We will be evaluating all of these approaches, as well as a number of other automated approaches, to see if there should be an institutional standard what we could better support. Keep your eyes peeled for a future post!
What we learned
We’re pleased to report that after the first 12 months the staff community reduced their printing consumption by 10% compared to the previous year. That’s a total of 268,933 fewer sides of paper going through our printers! Considering this was achieved simply through communication, digital skills development and sharing best practice it is a commendable outcome.
There’s definitely an appetite to reduce paper usage across the University. This was clear from the many meetings, committees and departments that are going paperless, and all the areas who’ve made contact with the Skills team to explore how technology can help improve business processes. We’ve also spent time analysing print usage and have some interesting insights. Over the past 12 months, the average number of black and white pages printed per person was 2,155, and the colour average was 377 pages. With this information, we’re now able to inform budget holders how their team’s monthly print usage compares to both the institutional average and their team’s usage at the same time last year. We hope this additional information will help departments put their print consumption into context.