JISC

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This project mapped out the locations and processes around the information within Staffordshire University, identifed what could, or couldn't, be internally aggregated and then developed a mechanism to expose it in the eXchanging Course Related Information – Course Advertising Profile (XCRI-CAP) schema.

Information workflow & process mapping report

During this first stage of the project the project members interviewed key internal stakeholders at the institution to fully understand the key processes which exist at the institution to support the creation and management of course advertising content. In order to support this process the team used the outputs of the COVARAM project to facilitate understanding of the institutions validation processes.

The key stakeholders within the institution who are involved in the creation and management of course advertising content were identified as:

• The six academic schools and faculties (academic staff, embedded quality & admission staff)
• Central admissions department
• Central marketing department
• Central quality department
• Student Administrative Services

This interview and mapping process produced an end to end view of the processes which take place from the conception of a course through to advertising via printed and web based prospectus and through external partners (UCAS).

The primary findings of these interviews were:

• From a faculty/school level there is a lack of consistency in when and how advertising content is produced and to what involvement central marketing play within this process.
• There is no standard system in place for creating, storing or managing content electronically.
• Only a small part of the workflow is automated, and this does not fully meet the needs of the academic schools and faculties who use it.
• There is a reliance upon duplicate data entry
• Some ‘key’ items of data (for instance course start opportunities) are managed in a highly flexible, but subsequently difficult to process, manner which often relies on academic discretion.
• The lack of total process ownership by a single body within the organisation means that even though issues exist and are well known there

The course creation process at SU begins within the academic schools/faculties and most of these embedded the creation of some advertising content within the initial stages of their course validation process. At this initial stage of product development there is no consistent electronic storage of information, although some faculties choose the use of flat, unstructured storage systems such as word processor documents to store the information. Once validated internally by the school/faculty there is a ‘branch’ in the process where as many as three other departments may be engaged. These departments are:

• Central Marketing This department may be engaged to start a new Marketing project to develop course specific advertising content. This project is booked using a paper based form and there is no structured storage of the course advertising content at this time.
• Central QIS Department This department will continue the final stages of validation (again this will be paper based).
• Central Admissions This department will liaise with all of the other parties to bring together all of the appropriate information required to make an entry into UCAS via the web link system. Central admissions will liaise with all appropriate departments to ensure that all validation stages have been completed and content is suitable for publication. At this point an entry will be made to UCAS via the web link system.

Once the course has been accepted by UCAS and a course code assigned to it a request is made to Student Administration Services to create the course as an award record in the student records system (TheSIS Plus) at which point an internal reference code is created and the course is ready to receive applications from UCAS.

The other responsibility of the faculty is to create an entry into the institutions web prospectus system. This system is build using the Tridion content management system and is supposed to manage the creation and workflow of web advertising content. This system has been partially successful but due to problems with the workflow setup the academic faculties have never achieved full ‘buy in’ to this system and instead of reducing workload it is another point of data entry duplication for them.

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