Slop University has published a new prospectus brochure built around its campus tour, walking prospective students past the same live instruments researchers use, from the Horizon Register to the Adaptive Metrics Lab's Living Dashboard.
A prospectus brochure routes prospective students through the Horizon Register, the Living Dashboard, and Demo Quarter, live
Slop University has published a new prospectus brochure that treats its campus tour as a piece of the University’s own research infrastructure, not a marketing exercise separate from it. The tour, the brochure argues, should show a visitor exactly what a researcher sees, instruments included.
The brochure, titled The Tour That Shows Its Workings, routes prospective students through three stops across both Schools: the Trajectory Analytics Group’s briefing room, where the School of Emergent Priorities’ Horizon Register scrolls live; the School of Continuous Improvement’s Adaptive Metrics Lab, where the Living Dashboard occupies most of one wall; and Demo Quarter, the quarterly showcase where a Capability Sprints cohort defends a term’s work to whoever turns up.
Most of what a university shows a visitor is finished — a photograph of a building, a number already rounded off. We’d rather a visitor left with a question about the Register than a slogan about it.
— Professor Verity Marris, Director, Trajectory Analytics Group, School of Emergent Priorities
Associate Professor Casimir Beng, who leads the Adaptive Metrics Lab, said opening the Living Dashboard to visitors had taught the Lab as much about its own instrument as any internal review: “people ask the button question the Lab always meant to ask itself.”
The brochure draws on the University’s own published record to make its case: a validation study testing whether the Horizon Register’s early alerts predict funding outcomes, and an audit of whether the Living Dashboard kept the boundary its companion wellbeing tool was promised. Both pieces, the brochure notes, examine the same instruments a visitor is invited to watch running.
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.hv917f.