JISC

Start date: 1 November 2000

End date: 31 October 2002

Funding programme: Building MLEs in Higher Education

Project website: http://www.bangor.ac.uk/studentfocus/project/

This project is part of the Joined up System for Institutions project cluster in this particular programme. Projects in this cluster intend to integrate a variety of different types of information systems to support learning and teaching (for example joining up the student record systems with the institution's VLE).

Background/Context

This project focuses on integrating information and processes from a student perspective. Campus Pipeline™ will be used to provide the integrated user-interface to the student. This tool has been successfully used in some US institutions for this purpose. The project will help to inform the FE and HE community of student information needs and institutional barriers to providing information. It will implement Campus Pipeline™, pilot its use with students, evaluate it and report back to the community. Importantly, the project will tackle the issue of ensuring that information provided is of good quality and is provided promptly. It will suggest appropriate methodologies or best practices (from the study and survey) which can be used widely.

Aims and Objectives

The primary objective of this project will be provision of personalised information to students via an Enterprise Information Portal (EIP). This will allow them to perform various process and requests online that presently require students to attend the campus in person. Campus Pipeline™ provides the tool that will help to integrate systems from a student perspective.

Project Design

The project is in the design phase and will have elements of both quantitative and qualitative research. However, the work will have several facets:

• A student survey to help determine information needs and preferences
• An HE survey designed to identify barriers to providing integrated information/access and identify possible solutions/best practice
• Initial installation and configuration of Campus Pipeline™
• Integration of the underlying data to support the student portal
• Trial use by students - factors such as time spent 'off campus' will be considered in the selection of the group

Finding a product to help with providing integrated access to information could be considered the easier part of the project. Ensuring that the information and processes made available to students via administrative back-office systems are accurate, timely and well maintained is harder. This project will determine appropriate methodologies to tackle these main issues. The HE survey will include questions to inform this process.

Implications/ Deliverables/ Stakeholders

The key outcomes are:

• Evaluation of integrated systems in action and benefits (or otherwise) to students
• A survey instrument and survey results from the student survey which will help inform the community and provide a questionnaire which can be re-used or modified for further investigation
• Report on the HE-wide survey to identify barriers to integration and best practice
• Trial and evaluate the benefits (or otherwise) of integrated student information systems and report back to the community on the findings
• Implement an overarching system (Campus Pipeline™) that could be used by other institutions for integrating administrative and other systems
• Use of inter-operability standards where relevant (e.g. IMS enterprise specification)
• Dissemination of findings across the FE and HE community