Cascade Project: Case Study 3

CASCADE PROJECT: CASE STUDY 3

Using technology to support prospective students

Aimed at staff responsible for coordinating the marketing of courses and managing student enrolments, this case study draws on the JISC-funded Cascade project’s experience of using technology to support the very first stage of the curriculum delivery process by making it easy for prospective students to find the course they wish to study and, where possible, to enrol and pay for their chosen course(s) online.

1. BACKGROUND & CONTEXT

The Department for Continuing Education1 is the University of Oxford’s largest department and each year enrols approximately 15,000 part-time students. It employs a core staff of 149 academic and support staff, as well as over 1,000 part- time tutors, to deliver its broad portfolio of over 700 courses, which range from one- day courses to six-year part-time DPhil programmes.

In November 2008, under its Transforming Curriculum Delivery through Technology programme,2 JISC awarded the Department funding to undertake the Cascade3 project. The key objective of this project was to address the financial challenges posed by the introduction of the government’s Equivalent or Lower Qualifications4 (ELQ) policy, by investigated how technology could be used to increase efficiency and improve the delivery of services associated with curriculum delivery. Following a process of stakeholder consultation, further developing the Department’s online enrolment and payment system was identified as a key activity. This case study draws on the work of the Cascade project to provide an example of how technology was used to improve the quality of information made available to prospective students and to extend the availability of online enrolment and payment facilities to as many courses as possible.

2. INTENDED OUTCOMES

The intention of this focus area of the Cascade project was to use technology to make it easier for students to:  Identify a course they are interested in;  Access the information they need to decide whether that course, and the Department, is right for them;  Enrol and pay for courses in one simple and efficient online transaction.

1 3. THE CHALLENGE

The introduction, by the last government, of the ELQ Policy, effective from the beginning of the 2008-09 academic year, led to a reduction in teaching income for the Department of over £1.5 million. This potentially catastrophic cut in funding led the Department to examine its operations to look at how it could:

 Undertake its current activities more efficiently;

 Improve its offerings and their quality to students for an acceptable level of cost;

 Reach new audiences by adapting existing, or developing new, programmes that allow for more flexible delivery.

As Dr Harriet Dunbar-Morris stated, in a recent JISC-commissioned report, “Government proposals to increase graduate contributions will make it more important than ever for universities to demonstrate the benefits they offer. Prospective students need solid information on what university life will be like, both in and outside of the lecture theatre, if they are going to make informed decisions on where to apply”.5

As universities are often surprisingly bad at providing the information students need to discover courses and decide if the course is right for them6, our challenge was to use technology to improve the information the Department provides to prospective students and to increase efficiency of the enrolment and payment process in order to attract and support new students using existing staff resources.

4. ESTABLISHED PRACTICE

At the start of the project, the Department had a website providing information about its course offerings. However, each course provided different amounts of information, and some gave very little at all. The website provided a simple search facility, but with the large number of courses it sometimes didn’t help students identify all courses that might be of interest, and it was not possible to filter responses on additional constraints, such as “location” or “type”, to show the most relevant result. Some general information about the experience of study and the institution more generally was provided, but this was not always easy to find, and there was very little information provided about other students’ experiences of studying with the Department.

With few exceptions, enrolment for courses took place in person, by post, or by fax, with payment made by cheque or credit card. Students therefore had to apply for courses well in advance and could only engage with the Department during UK working hours, regardless of where they were located in the world. Processing paper-based course registrations took a significant amount of course administrators’ time leaving less time available to improve general course information for all students or for responding to individual enquiries.

2 5. THE CURRICULUM DELIVERY ADVANTAGE

Figure 1: An example page from the Department’s website, which was redesigned in 2010

Using technology to improve the quality of services available to prospective students has given the Department the following advantages:

(i) Improving course information and search functionality has:  Made it easier for students to find courses by subject area;  Provided easy access to core course information for students to compare and judge against their requirements;  Allowed students to filter the results of course searches to identify which are right for them.

(ii) Increasing the amount of information available, structuring it better for current students, and making more information available to prospective students has:  Improved the amount of information available to everyone;  Offered students' perspectives on studying with the Department;7  Allowed prospective students to see what additional support and services are available to them when studying with the Department;  Provided more in-depth information about courses, with full programme specifications for all award-bearing courses now published on the website 8;  Provided a more accurate impression of the overall experience of studying.

(iii) Expanding the availability of online enrolment and payment has:  Increased efficiency: For straightforward enrolments, handling them online rather than through paper-based processes saves over five minutes per

3 enrolement9, with the Department taking over 6,500 online enrolments in 2009- 10 this represents over 520 hours of time saved;  Increased quality: Self-enrolment has produced more up-to-date, accurate student records;  Improved service to students: Available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with more staff time available to address enquiries;  Improved diversity of recruitment: Students anywhere can enrol and pay on an equal footing;  Delivered greater value to the Department: Between 2007-08 and 2010-11, the number of online enrolments transactions increased by 142% from 1,171 in the first quarter of the academic year 2007-08 to 2,834 in the same period in 2010-11. Growth in financial value was even greater with a 290% increase in income generated through online transactions over the same period.

6. KEY POINTS FOR EFFECTIVE PRACTICE

Outlined below are the key lessons learned during the Cascade project:

(i) Engage your students where they are. Global distribution of students meant use of the Internet was an obvious tool. However, previous research by the Department10 has shown that our students are not very engaged in Web 2.0 technologies so, while we do have pages on Facebook for some Departmental activities, our main focus has been on the web where we know the majority of our students find us and are comfortable to engage with online services.

(ii) Make as much information as possible available to all and structure it clearly so that both current and prospective students can find what they are looking for. Where there is generic information about the experience of studying at an institution, this is usually only communicated to students once they embark on a programme of study. However, in most cases, this is information that could be made publicly available much earlier, both making it easier for students on the course to access and available to prospective students, giving them a better understanding of the real experience of studying at that institution. Information such as full programme specifications, library information and access to study skills, IT support and guidance, policies and regulations can all provide answers to questions about studying, and provide students with a richer picture of the student experience at your institution.

(iii) Make it as easy as possible for students to enrol on and pay for a course. This may be somewhat dictated by externally defined application processes; however, where possible, remove barriers to enrolment and payment to make it as straightforward as possible for students to sign-up online, especially for short courses or modular programmes of study.

(iv) Automate high volume and low variation tasks such as handling course enrolments and payment to accrue the greatest benefits in terms of saving time and increasing efficiency.

(v) Ensure individualised help is available to students who need it. By saving time on more standard tasks, more resources can be made available to provide a more personalised service to students who require additional help.

4 (vi) Make your website search facility work for your users to make it easier for them to find courses. For example, allow filtering of results by course type, location, study mode, start date etc.

(vii) Standardise basic course information to ensure all courses provide core information needed by students when choosing a course. In the Department, staff provide information against the following fields in our database, providing comprehensive information about a course.a

 Course Name  CATs points  Staff  Level and demands  Type  Fees  Course aims  Accommodation

 Location  Course contact  Certification  Recommended reading  Address  Overview  Libraries  Teaching outcomes  Dates me  Description  Assessment  Scholarships methods  Subject area (s)  Programme  Teaching  Fee payment details methods options

7. CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

A Higher Education Academy survey undertaken in 200611 showed that, of first-year students at university, 41% of those who knew little or nothing about their course before enrolment had thought about leaving, compared to 25% of those who knew a moderate amount or a lot. This strongly suggests that the more students know about their institutions and course before enrolling, the less likely they are to drop out.

To encourage students to choose your institution, you should:  Make finding courses as easy as searching on Google;  Provide easily accessible information about all aspects of a course and the institution, and offer answers to common questions about what a course involves, both in pedagogical terms and practical ones;  Provide testimonials or case studies of previous students’ experiences of studying your courses;  Make enrolling on and paying for a course as easy and straightforward as possible, using online enrolment and payment wherever possible.

8. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

1. Department for Continuing Education website: http://www.conted.ox.ac.uk/

2. JISC Transforming curriculum delivery through technology programme: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/curriculumdelivery.aspx

3. Cascade project: http://cascade.conted.ox.ac.uk/

a Note not all are relevant to all programmes, and thus are omitted if not completed. These have been developed in parallel with the XCRI specification and although some work has been done to map these against XCRI we are aware there are some points of divergence, this is something we would like to explore further in the near future.

5 4. Withdrawal of funding for equivalent or lower qualifications (ELQs): http://www.hefce.ac.uk/learning/funding/elq/

5. Dunbar-Morris H., Managing Students’ Expectations of University, 1994 Group, November 2010 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/reports/2010/managingexpec tations.pdf

6. See Theme 2 of the Key findings and recommendations section (pp. 4-5) in White D. et al., Study of UK Online Learning, HEFCE, October 2010 http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/rdreports/2010/rd17_10/

7. The Department’s Alumni spotlights webpage: http://www.conted.ox.ac.uk/students/alumni/spotlights/index.php

8. Programme specifications for the Department’s award-bearing courses: http://www.conted.ox.ac.uk/students/currentstudents/undergraduateprogrammes. php and http://www.conted.ox.ac.uk/students/currentstudents/graduateprogrammes.php

9. Further information about the tangible benefits of online enrolment and payment are provided in Section 4 of the Evaluation report of the Cascade project, which is available from: http://cascade.conted.ox.ac.uk/project-outputs

10. Results and analysis of the Web 2.0 services survey undertaken by the SPIRE project: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/digitalrepositories/spiresurve y.pdf

11. Yorke M. & Longden B., Survey of the first-year student experience, Higher Education Academy, January 2007 http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/news/detail/2007/First_year_experience_survey

12. More detailed information about the work outlined in this case study is available in the Final Report of the Cascade project, which is available from: http://cascade.conted.ox.ac.uk/project-outputs

Project Contact: Sean Faughnan, Director of Technology-Assisted Lifelong Learning and Director of Administration Department for Continuing Education University of Oxford Email: [email protected]