Course Data - Falmouth University


Funded by the: Jisc e-Learning programme.

Lead Institution: Falmouth University.

Learner Provider Type: Higher Education

Project Duration: January 2012 - March 2013

Key Words: Course Data

 

Case study tags: course data, process improvement course information, stakeholder engagement, falmouth university

Note: This is an abridged version of this project's final report.  The full version is available here.

 

Course Marketing Data Collector

Falmouth University

Project Summary

Within the HE sector it has been shown that there is a shortage of accessible information relating to specialist courses like part- time, distance learning, CPD, postgraduate and writing opportunities. As a small specialist institution within the areas of Art, Media, Design, Performance, this further restricts our audience and presents challenges to our potential student base and to our marketing team in terms of advertising and navigating to course information.

 

Falmouth is committed to developing new types of learning experiences for an expanded student base, this includes work based flexible learning opportunities and non-full time campus based courses at home and internationally.

 

The work completed under stage one of this funding stream enabled us to complete a high level review of the effectiveness of our current course marketing data creation and reporting processes. This highlighted issues in relation to data inconsistencies and process inefficiencies. In addition the current processes and structures do not readily support inclusion in an automated information feed.

 

Our project included the development and trial of a new internal online course data management tool, which enables us to collate all marketing-relevant course data from initial proposal through the full lifecycle of delivery.  Our vision was for this to be a dynamic data collection process and external marketing feed (XCRI-CAP) ensuring our visibility to prospective students and other stakeholders as well as providing the most up to date information possible. We hope that this facility will raise our profile and enable choice and comparison with bigger institutions that may have more marketing resources at their disposal.

 

What did we learn?

Workshops are a good way to engage stakeholders in the project and aid communication between “silo’d” departments. Bringing in and allowing others to hear the issues that exist in a process can aid in solution design.

 

The ROI from automating the course creation process is not as high as anticipated and the benefits of the work done to date are more qualitative than quantitative, we anticipate data quality and communication improvements to be the biggest improvement.

 

As we were unable to fully automate the XCRI CAP feed from our course creation process the maintenance actually creates an additional overhead for the marketing department.

 

We have found a staged approach to end user testing where technical and project office staff complete initial cycles before allowing business owners to ‘get their hands on the solution’ to be the most effective way at managing user expectations of new systems. If end users are exposed to new systems too early in testing (for example where major bugs still exist) they can find it hard to buy into its effectiveness as a solution.

 

With hindsight it would have been wiser to get more client engagement with the beta system at an earlier stage of the project, by building in more demonstrations of development in progress, which would have helped us to the problem with the user interface design at earlier on in the development cycle. We utilise a waterfall development technology at Falmouth, but we are exploring utilising a more agile approach to future developments, especially those developments with web user interface design requirements.

 

Open source development using Drupal where you are building a solution based on utilising existing Drupal modules can restrict your ability to deliver bespoke functionality, which can lead to compromises in design.  Obviously this can be overcome by creating original Drupal modules/developments, but original developments requires a much higher technical skill set and would require a much more rigorous and detailed design phase leading to a longer and more costly development cycle.  

 

The new requests for external reporting including the KIS, HEAR mean that universities are under real pressure to provide more and more core data electronically.  Where key and complex business processes are only supported by paper based systems this can mean that providing this data is a time consuming and complex process.  Falmouth need to be reviewing where core data that is required for external reporting purposes resides so it can manage and plan the automation of any data collection processes effectively. 

 

Engagement of key stakeholder teams can be difficult especially given other project commitments even if resources are available to buy-in additional resources it is not always that easy to achieve the commitment.

With hindsight it would have been wiser to get more client engagement with the system at an earlier stage of the project, and capture the problem with the user interface design at earlier on in the development cycle.

 

Immediate Impact

On reflection we feel the Course Marketing Data Collector project has had an immediate impact on;

 

Quality Office

 

Academics

 

Marketing

 

IT services

 

Planning

 

Data Quality

 

…We feel to date the actual external benefits that have materialised are;

 

Future Impact

Quality Office

 

Academics

 

ADPC

 

Students

 

Potential Students

 

IT Services

 

XCRI CAP Standards

 

Aggregator sites

 

 

Conclusions

General conclusions

Process benefits – Falmouth is a reasonably small institution with a reasonably small change year-on-year in course provision. When we started the project we anticipated that automating the course management systems would deliver a large quantitative time saving for the quality office and Academic staff, but on further analysis of the ‘As Is’ and ‘To Be’ process model the actual estimated annual admin effort saved is relatively small. The real process improvement and efficiencies will be qualitative and hard to measure, improving data quality, clarity of process, communication through the course planning process, and through reduction in process lead time. Initiating a similar project on a calculated ROI will be hard to calculate financially.

 

The XCRI Cap feed is a good concept, allowing students to ‘compare the market’ at a glance. In reality such comparisons across all HEI institutions is difficult, being a specialist institution we not only need to stand out, but sometime the standard measurements don’t and should not apply to us. Our specialist nature led to the formation of the Arts Assembly and the findings of the group have all been similar in terms of the challenges we face to get our voices heard. XCRI and  the work we have undertaken in this project gives Falmouth a head start – if and when aggregators do start-up we have done the extensive ground work and process development to be represented with the ‘big boys’ a position that without the Jisc funding we would not have been in a position to achieve.   

 

Conclusions relevant to the wider community

Very hard to get buy in from Marketing with no working or signed up aggregators. The XCRI feed is additional work and process which means there needs to be a driver to continue to maintain the feed and develop the process. For us the driver has been our commitment to Jisc outputs – but for others it will be very hard to gain any commitment for change without proven usage.

 

XCRI – CAP data still needs some work – if we are to adopt we need to formalise more of the fields so that the end data is usable by aggregators - more work is required between the community to define data.

 

Much of the process work undertaken has focused on quality of data and clarity of process rather than efficiency savings. This has helped to engage stakeholders who might otherwise have been reluctant to engage.

 

Academic restructuring – Universities continue to reorganise and restructure in light of the current environment, any restructure obviously has consequences on change initiatives like our CCMS/XCRI CAP project and as such to continue to impact on the value of such projects. At the moment Falmouth are going through an Academic restructure which may well alter the course creation quality process, which could then require  a substantial reworking of the ‘To Be’ process and CCMS system.

 

We had hoped that the CCMS system could eventually feed into our student records system, we now understand that the volume of work required to integrate the two systems would  not be worthwhile, significant investment would be required in an integration software tool, training and development and for the volume of courses created each year it would not be financially viable. We will continue to create validated courses manually, however the new CCMS system will aid this by automatically prompting the Student Records Team when courses reach validation.

 

Recommendations

 

General recommendations

Falmouth should look to utilise more programme management tools and techniques to ensure that resources spread across multiple change initiatives are planned and monitored effectively.

 

Recommendations for the wider community

Drive any XCRI CAP project from the Marketing department.

 

Recommendations for Jisc

 

Further details: email and contact names etc

Project Director: Dr Andrew Upton, Pro-Vice Chancellor (Learning & Teaching)

Project Manager: Johanna Smith, Business Information System Programme Manager

Contact email: Jo.smith@falmouth.ac.uk