Improving curriculum data quality with better tools

Every student in the University of Edinburgh is enrolled on a degree programme and has some sort of “degree programme table” (DPT): a set of rules which guide the individual courses they’ll take during their studies.

For some programmes, the DPT is just a selection of the courses you must take each year. Others add choices for students (“select French 1A or Arabic 1A”) or let them select from a wide range of courses (“select any level 10 courses in the Moray House School of Education”). These rules are joined together with simple and/or logic.

On Wednesday we released a new version of our DPT editor. Those familiar with the old editor will be pleased to see a big UI update, plus features to natively support core courses and unstructured degrees. More exciting to us though are changes to improve the quality of future DPTs.

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Harry Roberts: Refactoring CSS Without Losing Your Mind

Last Thursday we were lucky enough to be able to welcome Harry Roberts from CSS Wizardry (https://csswizardry.com/) to give a talk on “Refactoring CSS Without Losing Your Mind”. Many thanks to Harry for taking the time out to speak to us on this subject. The talk was organised and funded by the University’s Front-End Development Community, a new subset of the Software Development Community.  If you aren’t part of the community yet, check out our community channel on Slack.

Slides and a video of the talk (for those that missed it), can be found here:

Overall the event was a huge success, with almost 100 people attending! Since this is one of our first community events, I thought people might be interested to learn a little bit more about who attended. The numbers come from the Events Booking application so won’t be exact – some people may have attended without booking, and others may have booked but not attended.

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