A complex shop front for the University of Aberdeen

What our client needed

In May 2018, the University of Aberdeen wanted to procure a system to manage and market a new product offering, which would represent a significant change in how they would operate as a university. The On-demand Learning model would, for the first time, allow them to offer online short courses to a global audience. Integration between the site and their internal systems would be required to allow students to ‘self-evaluate’, pay online and register as fully fledged University students without any manual intervention from the Admissions team.

Although the system first went live as a marketing tool in March 2019, further development has been required since then and will continue at least to 2026. The most recent additional functionality allows a student to plan their part time degree – see for example https://on.abdn.ac.uk/degrees/schedule/oil-and-gas-law/.

Additional functionality included invoice requests for employer-funded courses and administrative tools for managing course withdrawals and transfers. These ensured that outstanding balances could be settled by students, invoiced to funders, or waived where applicable.

Challenges

University staff needed to be able draft and publish the marketing materials about their degrees and short courses, with sophisticated content management including a content library, version control and mobile first responsive design.

Degree curricula require complex prescriptions defining which modules can be studied when, taking into account pre-requisites, anti-requisites, mandatory courses, credit limits and more.

Integration with the University’s student records system required close collaboration with the in-house systems development team to ensure an API was in place that would both provide the highest possible security and allow for future changes to the student records system.

A further integration was required to channel enquiries to the University CRM.

How we were able to deliver it

The core functionality has been developed iteratively using Agile methodology over the past six years and the platform now delivers against a wide array of business requirements. The bespoke content management system and content library is sophisticated and very easy to use; discounts can be set up with rules about who is eligible; products can be grouped together via flexible categories; additional content can be provided to support the learner journey; bespoke landing pages enable marketing campaigns and much more. The site is mobile first, fast, secure and extremely well supported.

Our background in Higher Education allowed us to quickly understand the complexities of degree programmes and deliver an interface for admin staff to be able to define and manage their prescriptions. We identified the logic and algorithms necessary to deliver a degree scheduler that gave the student maximum flexibility while ensuring their choice of modules and schedule stayed within the rules of the prescription. We used React to deliver a great user experience to students planning their study.