Our Digital Strategy

Our Digital Strategy is an ambitious programme of change and improvement, designed to transform how we work, teach, learn, research, engage and do business. We have invested over £50m in technology infrastructure, including high-availability networking and on-campus datacentre services. We will invest further to enable high-quality, personalised online experiences for our university community, through modern, dynamic, and accessible digital environments. 

The Strategy will embrace the growing opportunities around the evolving digital landscape, to support and enable the University to develop at the scale and pace to thrive and succeed.

What we are already doing well:

• Our intuitive digital learning environment, Learn Ultra, enables greater engagement with students. 
• Our new Library & Collections management system allows users to engage with the full range of physical and digital resources through a single interface. 
• We have upgraded our campus-wide network which delivers high-speed and reliable wireless connectivity to our learning and teaching facilities. 
• Our new research data storage infrastructure provides scalable and adaptable services to meet the specific needs of research projects. 
• We have developed our high-performance and computing and advanced research computing facilities to power research and innovation activity. 
• We have extended the capabilities of Oracle Cloud to simplify our finance and procurement services.  
• We have introduced a system to manage estate assets effectively and efficiently throughout their lifecycle.  
• We have upgraded our audio-visual technology to support hybrid working. 
• We have published new strategies for Information and Cyber Security, and Data. 
• Our technical debt programme has led to the decommissioning of much of our legacy system and hardware.   

We will:

• Develop a dedicated esports village to support success in the National Student and University Esports Leagues.  
• Launch Durham On-Demand online platform, to manage and host live events.  
• Launch a Student Information Management System (SIMS), to support the entire student lifecycle. 
• Streamline our system portfolio to deliver significant financial, technical, and administrative benefits.
• Review and enhance our timetabling systems and processes for increased flexibility and reliability.
• Deploy more Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered services to benefit the wider student experience and explore opportunities for AI in an education and research setting. 
• Continue to pursue advanced air-cooling technologies within our datacentre facilities, to lower energy consumption and reduce electronic waste. 
• Use the c£1m in grant funding from UKRI to install Solar Photovoltaic systems on our estate, saving c.161 tonnes of CO2 per year.