The Progression of Cloud Computing in Further Education Colleges

Section 4.1 Student and Other Stakeholder Relationship Management in the Cloud

1

Detailed outcomes from Individual Projects

4.1 Student and Other Stakeholder Relationship Management in the Cloud

Needs and Opportunities

All Colleges have a need to manage their communications and relationships with students throughout their learning journey. This includes initial engagement in marketing to prospective students and recruiting them. Thereafter, it includes regular communication at many points in the learner journey and keeping a record of that engagement. This includes student engagement and achievement with learning programmes, their satisfaction and their destination. Once they have left the College there is an on-going need to engage students as alumni.

Communication and relationship management extends beyond students to parents and to employers.

Communications and relationship activities, recording and reporting are often delivered on a range of disconnected websites, management information systems and customer relationship management systems. The range of devices through which students can access and communicate key information regarding their learning journey is also limited.

Cloud computing provides an opportunity to integrate the range of communications and relationship management systems and to communicate with students and other stakeholders on devices of their choice.

The Projects

Three projects were commissioned in the Relationship Management Area. These projects represent a range of different approaches and perspectives.

Brockenhurst College’s project is a collaborative project run by the Wessex Federation. A home-grown system, ‘Emily’ has played a critical role for nearly a decade now in driving forward

the effectiveness of the College to recruit, support and retain their learners. Brockenhurst have now re-platformed in the cloud, using Microsoft Azure, to continue to support their learners in new, responsive and innovative ways.

Gloucestershire College’s project has been driven by the need for a single system to track and support learners on their journey onwards from

2

Similarities

All projects focus on information provision to learners. Brockenhurst College and Gloucestershire College offer personalised service benefits to learners and other stakeholders.Both Brockenhurst and Gloucestershire are longer term projects which are evolving to include the different stakeholder sets – learners, staff, parents, employers.

Both are dependent on systems integration for example Brockenhurst with EBS and Gloucestershire with Unite-e.

Both are bespoke web based developments and have been developed in Microsoft environments.

first engaging with the College. This is now a much larger, more integrated and more medium term project than initially proposed. It is based on

the development of a new cloud-based College website which will be integrated with Microsoft Dynamics CRM in the cloud. It will enable the delivery of personalised services to learners, employers and other stakeholders as well as capturing data on learners from the point of enquiry onwards. The website is planned to be live from November 2013 with the CRM component of the project following in February 2014. Gloucestershire College is already successfully hosting Moodle in the cloud and using student email in the cloud through Microsoft 365.

City College Coventry’s project aims to support students and communicate critical information to them. This uses cloud mobile technology to deliver an HTML5 mobile app. This includes key campus & student union information, VLE & eILP access, e-library and QR scanning. The approach enables this information to be made available on a range of mobile devices – iPhone, Android etc without the need to develop platform specific apps. This includes use of a cloud Platform and access to the app through a number of app stores.

Differences

Item Brockenhurst / Wessex Gloucestershire Development resource In-house team Digital partnersSavings Savings identified at £20K per

annumService is key driver

Replication in other Colleges

Other Colleges in the shared service partnership could use the software once the Brockenhurst College specific elements are removed

The website is tailored to the College but the strategic approach isreplicable

3

Delivery Modules

Brockenhurst/Wessex Education Shared Services: The delivery model used is Microsoft Azure, which enables the development of the software and its database to take place in the cloud (Infrastructure as a Platform) and the application to be hosted by Microsoft in the cloud (Infrastructure as a Service). Microsoft Azure enables the use of a wide range of Microsoft Software in the cloud, which in turn enables Wessex Education Shared Services to build upon the well-developed Microsoft expertise of the team at Brockenhurst. There is a staff view of the information on the system. This includes all key information on students, their attendance and grades. All of this is linked to EBS which is synced as a feed to SQL server data in the cloud. The following diagram illustrates the system integration involved in this project:

The student and parent portals enable them to view timetables and a range of other real-time information. Parents can see how their son/daughter is progressing, their attendance and where and when their exams are and the results. Putting this in the cloud has enabled the necessary scaling, particularly to provide a resilient service on exam results day where demand for access peaks considerably and abnormally.

4

Gloucestershire College: This is an integrated system comprising a cloud-based website hosted by Rackspace and Microsoft Dynamics CRM hosted by Microsoft. The system also includes links with College-hosted systems – UNIT-e, MIS, the Payment Gateway, Curriculum Planner (an in-house developed application) and the College intranet which is run on SharePoint. This is shown in the following diagram:

City College Coventry: The delivery model used is for cloud hosting of key College information services which can be accessed by students on a range of mobile devices through apps which are available from the apps stores of providers such as Apple.

The following screenshots indicate how the content of the app is displayed:

5

Supplier Relationships

Brockenhurst/Wessex Education Shared Services have built on the good relationships developed between Microsoft and Brockenhurst College to achieve a good working relationship with the Microsoft Azure Team.

Gloucestershire College: The digital partner is Gill Fox James with the website development carried out by Firehoop. The digital partner was selected through a tendering process.

City College Coventry: A key aspect of supplier relationships in this project is the need for the app to be accepted by service providers, such as Apple, to be included in their app stores.

Project and Change Management

The Brockenhurst/Wessex Education Shared Services project used formal project management tools and methodologies which included the Team Foundation service and Scrum. The project was well managed and the development phases were all completed on time and to the full specification. Testing through the summer period when internet usage was comparatively light (while students and staff were away from College) proved very successful. However, once staff and students were using internet resources to the full extent during September it became clear that bandwidth could not be guaranteed to ensure that the user experience accessing cloud-based resources was consistently good enough. The cloud-based system works very well. The Azure platform is robust and reliable. Unfortunately any cloud-based strategy can only be as strong as the weakest link; in this case the bandwidth on the connection has proved to be the weak link and while an upgrade has been budgeted for and ordered, there is an extensive lead time to getting this installed and running.

Gloucestershire College: The project is in its technical development stage with change management processes to follow for staff use of the system. The project is managed for the College by Gill Fox James according to the College’s specification. There is a small Systems Team which includes a systems developer who handles data issues and an internal web developer.

City College Coventry: The project management activities included a full consultation with students on the information which they would like included in the app.

SLAs

Brockenhurst/Wessex Education Shared Services: Service Level Agreements (SLAs) include agreements with Microsoft in respect of Azure and will increasingly involve SLAs between Colleges and Wessex Education Shared Services Ltd for on going support and further development.

Gloucestershire College: the main SLA is with the Digital Partner, Gill Fox James, who arranges SLAs with the web development and hosting companies.

City College Coventry: SLAs include agreement for hosting and with app stores for app distribu-tion.

6

Impact

Brockenhurst/Wesses Education Shared Services: The impact is through:

Supporting learners in new responsive and innovative ways.

Communicating effectively and efficiently with learners.

Improving individualised marketing and applicant tracking.

New ways of working and tracking learners.

Development experience gained by project team.

available in October 2013 on completion of evaluation. During the project no new server infrastructure (physical or virtual) has been deployed on College premises. Traditionally at least one new server would have been purchased for an implementation of this sort, more likely two (data and applications delivered separately). The College can therefore estimate a cost avoidance to date of c£10,000 on hardware. In addition, support services for the infrastructure, including ensuring high availability during peak examination results period have been avoided. The College can also estimate cost avoidance of c£10,000 on support team services.

Gloucestershire College: The College has invested in this ambitious project to enable a high level of personalised service to learners and other stakeholders. It is based on the premise of “service not savings” and “better not cheaper”

Student impact is to be evaluated at end of project in October 2013 and will be made available via an AoC Technology Briefing.

Gloucestershire College: Impact will be evaluated in 2014. There has been a huge buy-in and support for the development of the project enabling detailed planning to take place in a very tight timescale. This has included positive input from stakeholder groups, senior management and Governors.

City College Coventry: The key outcome of the project is the genuine enagement with the student community and developing a system which supports their needs.

Savings

Brockenhurst/Wessex Education Shared Services: This is largely through savings in replacing College servers at £10k per year. Final information will be

7

City College Coventry: To create a native mobile app on each platform would cost the College at least 50 development days per platform; for three platforms this would at least £75k.

“Acess to College information portals for students is also available on Mobile platform which should keep them up to date with College information and thereby increasing the College retention figures.”

Sustainability and expected longer term impact

Brockenhurst/Wessex Education Shared Services: The longer term impact will be in benefits to a wider set of Colleges who, in choosing to use this application through Wessex Education Shared Services, would benefit from the development that has taken place and cloud infra-structure that is available.

Gloucestershire College: The longer term impact will be to track and support students through their whole period of engagement with the College, from initial enquiry onwards. As the implementation of the project progresses this will also apply to employer and other stakeholder engagement. Hosting the website in the cloud along with the CRM will enable energy savings.

City College Coventry: The app is sustainable in the College given the cloud hosting and app store distribution.

Replicablity for the Wider FE Sector

Brockenhurst/ Wessex Education Shared Services: The software can be used for other Colleges, following removal of features which are specific to Brockenhurst College. Other Colleges have expressed an interest in this system.

Gloucestershire College: The strategy adopted by the College to specify needs and work with a digital partner to develop the project is replicable in any College. The website design is tailored to Gloucestershire College’s specific context but the structure would be applicable in other Colleges.

City College Coventry: Whilst the app is specific to the College, the development process could be replicated in other Colleges.

With thanks to all project partners who contributed to the development of this report and consultant Chris West

The Association of Colleges 20132-5 Stedham Place, London, WC1A 1HU

Tel: 020 7034 9900 Fax: 020 7034 9955Email: projects@aoc.co.uk website: www.aoc.co.uk