Sydney University Continuing Education

online enrolment system

CCE

The Centre for Continuing Education (CCE) is a not-for-profit centre of the University of Sydney. Its role is to make the teaching and research expertise of the University available to the public through short courses. Each year CCE publishes four ‘general’ printed brochures, each containing around 260 courses, and a range of specialist programs.
h2. The challenge

CCE decided that they needed a new, more streamlined approach. User feedback indicated that the website was too difficult to use. A new website needed to improve the user experience, provide details of each course, and have the flexibility to change and grow as the courses changed.

The solution

Our first priority when we were engaged for this project was to bring together all the disparate requirements from different departments within CCE. Before a single line of code was written, we had put a lot of thought into the business processes. We engaged graphic designers to tie the feel of the site to existing printed material while dramatically improving usability of the web site.

Along with the convenience of a 24 hour service, the site has the flexibility to incorporate up-to-the-minute course availability and search capabilities. This is not only convenient for students, it allows CCE to schedule additional courses based on demand for those courses; this had never been possible with the printed course materials.

Prospective students can read through course descriptions and enroll in multiple courses in a simple process. Confirmation of enrolment is then emailed to the student and immediately recorded in CCE’s database.

The result

After just three months the site serves thousands of pages each day, and CCE enrols 25% of their students online.

In designing a solution for CCE, we took into account their particular requirements. High availablity, robustness and the ability to talk to third party databases were all important. In future, the site will expand in scope, complexity, and load. To accomplish this at low cost, we chose Java and WebObjects, a scalable, high-availability, high-performance application server. Our code can be easily built upon to add new features, with zero downtime. The web site has become a core part of CCE’s marketing and delivery of course information.