Why are you giving away ish onCourse for free?

We believe that there is a broad need in the industry for a reliable and expandable enrolment system that focusses on the marketing aspect of selling courses. There is also a real benefit of creating a community of users who can share their experience of administrative systems, leaving them more time to focus on creating and selling top quality courses.

No really, how do you pay your staff?

There will be some advanced features of onCourse which will incur costs, such as payroll and call centre integration. In addition, we offer the option of a comprehensive web site for colleges which integrates directly with onCourse. Some other services like automated credit card processing and SMS have a per transaction fee. But you don’t have to use any of these things if you don’t want to.

So I can just download and use this thing?

Sure.

What if I’m a really big educational institution needing to do 100,000 enrolments per year?

No problem. ish onCourse is designed from the outset to scale upward. We can easily attach one of many SQL backend databases to suit your needs.

And this thing will work if I only process 100 enrolments?

Absolutely. We have integrated a high quality database server from IBM within the product in a way that requires no knowledge of SQL, ODBC or any other acronym. You just run the application and start working.

Can onCourse be downloaded onto our server and can all computers reading off that server have access to it or can it only be downloaded on the one computer?

onCourse has a server application which can run on your server and and a client application which needs to be installed on each client machine. You can install the client application on as many computers as you require - there are no limits. These can both be downloaded from here. If you run a smaller business and only have one main computer using onCourse, you can install the server and client applications on the same machine.

At this point we do not want to use our web site to take enrolments. Can this be changed later on if we chose to use this method?

The web enrolment option can be added any time you choose. You can also add on email and SMS services if and when you want them.

We also track a lot of people. Can we use onCourse to include client, carer, employee, etc contacts or is that a separate concept?

You can track as many people as you like in onCourse. You can create a contact that is either a student, tutor, company or other. A tutor can also be a company (a contractor) and also a student (has enrolled in your college classes). There is no need to create multiple records for the same person. In future releases you will be able to link multiple contacts to a company for corporate training activities.

Do we need certain software to run onCourse? It talks about applications in the under the hood section, I am not sure that we have all those applications. If we do not, are these easily downloadable?

No additional software is needed for onCourse - all those libraries mentioned are already built-in. If you have difficulties getting onCourse up and running, you may need to check that your Java edition is up to date. Instructions on how to check and update Java here

My college is overseas and we need to advertise courses in multiple languages. Can onCourse support this?

OnCourse supports unicode, so it can deal with other language characters with no problems including multi-byte Asian languages. OnCourse web can include multiple languages on your web site, you can configure the dollar symbol to your local currency and we can work with you to translate the onCourse client and server user interface to your preferred language if necessary.