The Cascade project

Overview

We aim to develop a web-based interface which enables students to register, enrol and pay for more courses online.

Currently, many courses can only be booked in person, by post or by fax. Manual processing of bookings is time consuming and labour intensive. While online enrolment and payment is well established for some of the Department’s programmes, such as online courses (http://onlinecourses.conted.ox.ac.uk/), other programmes have not been able to take advantage of this service. Expansion of online enrolment and payment services has not been straightforward due to the need to develop extra functionality to manage the specific enrolment requirements of different programme types. Our experience indicates that great savings in time can be made by allowing students to enrol and pay for their courses online. In addition, given the global nature of our audience, this functionality also offers a major improvement in the service we can offer our students. As such, this is a priority for development across as many of our activities as possible. We have focussed development in four main areas, as outlined below, with priorities set both by ease of implementation and commercial impact.

Purpose of the pilot study

To extend the functionality of the system in the areas of:

• Online enrolment for Weekend Schools, including the ability to book catering and accommodation
• Discounted enrolments
• Students able to login online and update their information on the system
• Payment of invoices by instalments.

Current state of progress

The first two areas are working well. Development of the additional functionality of enabling students to login online and update their own information is due to come on-stream shortly. Speed of progress in this focus area has been sufficiently rapid that attention is now turning towards drawing up the technical specification for a 'shopping basket' facility.