Location: Nottingham, England, UK
Challenge: Manual and repetitive processes to design, approve and govern curriculum.
Outcome: Central management of curriculum information to deliver improved management information, quality assurance, and efficiency.
- CAROLINE PICKERING, PRODUCT OWNER, NTU –
- CAROLINE PICKERING, PRODUCT OWNER, NTU –
NTU’s 2015-2020 strategic plan is future-facing and places the curriculum at the heart of the University’s ambition. Support for student employability by embedding professional attributes, skills and work experience in the curriculum combines with a personalised approach to learning, to deliver an outstanding student experience. This will in turn help address their goals to attract a wider range of students, improve student retention, and manage cost pressures.
It became clear that the manual processes that NTU, like many other universities, used to design, approve and govern their curriculum didn’t support their goals as outlined in the strategic plan.
Fundamentally, NTU lacked confidence in the accuracy of the information because of the associated high risk of error in their manual processes. They have also been limited in their ability to effectively report on the curriculum at a strategic level to facilitate decision-making, have high staff administration costs and have been slow to deliver new courses to market.
To support their strategic plan and ongoing success, NTU required a more robust, coherent mechanism for managing course and module information to benefit departments across the University, including Academic Schools, CADQ (leading and supporting innovation in curriculum design, learning, teaching, and assessment), Student Planning and ultimately current and prospective students.
Strength of the technical capability
The CourseLoop Platform provides true end-to-end curriculum management capability, which integrates ‘input’, updatè and ‘refinement’ of data to directly publish the catalog once campus-defined criteria are met. The modular approach also provides a straightforward pathway for extending this capability through adding additional modules for the required functions (e.g. Governance, Review, Marketing).
Deep domain expertise
The CourseLoop Platform is built by higher education experts with real university experience. Purposefully designed for universities experiencing challenges with curriculum data management, governance and publishing, the CourseLoop Platform provides a simply better solution for today’s students administrators, and academics.
"Despite being based in Australia and us in the UK, the CourseLoop team are always prompt to respond, available to call and be on-site to help get the project off the ground."
- EMILY-ROSE DAY, PROCUREMENT ASSISTANT BUYER (FORMER), NTU -NTU was looking for a solution that offered central management of curriculum information to deliver improved efficiency, improved management information and improved monitoring and quality assurance.
After a local market scan and review, NTU decided to launch an open tender process in order to ensure they could identify the best solution. Five proposals were returned from vendors across the European Union and from CourseLoop (formerly known as Factor5 Software) in Australia, and after reviewing all solutions the
University shortlisted the proposals down to two potential vendors. CourseLoop’s Curriculum Management platform was selected because it met all of NTU’s immediate business requirements with existing functionality, as well as supporting the configuration required to suit NTU’s approach and processes. The project team were also highly impressed with the user interface, ease of use and how intuitive CourseLoop is, which was ultimately the reason CourseLoop was the highest-scoring vendor in the tender process.
Recognised as one of the UK’s outstanding universities, NTU has received a string of prestigious awards over the last few years, including The Guardian University of the Year 2019, the Times and Sunday Times Modern University of the Year 2018, and the Times Higher Education University of the Year 2017. Based in Nottingham, NTU serves over 30,000 students with a staff of over 8,600.