Winner of Tribal University of Year Award

During Tribal SITS:Vision Annual Customer Conference 2014 in the Celtic Manor resort, Newport on 15th – 16th July, Tribal has announced their customer awards for 4 different categories and the overall award “Tribal University of Year”

The 4 categories are

  • Most Improved Student Experience
  • Outstanding use of Innovation and Technology
  • People, Process, Performance
  • Improving Efficiency, Achieving Effectiveness

We have been named as the winner of the overall award “Tribal University of Year”, and also named as the runner up for the following three categories “Outstanding use of Innovation and Technology”, “People, Process, Performance” and “Improving Efficiency, Achieving Effectiveness”.

Tribal Award pic
Award for Tribal University of Year

The following are our entries for the four categories of Tribal customer awards:

Most Improved Student Experience

Why: In University of Edinburgh, we have implemented the student self-service project from August 2013. It provides a number of functions to allow student to:

  • view their details in the university portal;
  • update a set of personal records in eVision.
  • perform online registration including requests for programme changes and submission of immigration documents in eVision.

The benefits include:

  • Student can view their real time data
  • Students can register online
  • Students are informed when they have not matriculated and what actions they must take
  • More timely data – students are recorded as registered earlier and queries can be actioned immediately rather than when the paper form is found
  • Removal of paper-based process;
  • Data entered by the source
  • Student Administration and their temps no longer needs to undertake manual keying.  The amount of corrections to data by Student Admin has dropped 90% compared to a year ago.

Since August 2013 until end of May:

Details Updated

Volume of changes

Address

26000

Known as name

2500

Mobile/personal email

11000

Emergency contact

16000

Students have completed online registration (with Start date >= 1 Jan 14)

1316

 

Outstanding use of Innovation and Technology

Why: The University of Edinburgh has always delivered the majority of functionality through e:Vision. From two years ago, we started to integrate other web development technology and frameworks (like Bootstrap, JQuery plugins, Ajax etc.) into our SITS eVision to improve the user interface design and system performance combining with the latest development in eVision from Tribal. Now we have established a set of frameworks for our own development which deliver a much improved UI and good performance. This has reduced the overall development costs and improved the building quality. In the same time, the user experience with our recently development has been improved.

The technology we have used included

– Using Bootstrap toward responsive design

– Use global stylesheet (CSS) across eVision and use LESS framework to manage changes

– Testing framework to allow automated testing for bug and performance

– Integration eVision process with database programme (PL/SQL) to improve performance

– Configuration management using Project to detect dependency between different ongoing project works and support works and to manage the deploying changes across different environments

We have delivered a number of projects using these framework include paperless admission, student self-services, direct admission, UKBA data capture and management etc., Student bursary management.

 

People, Process, Performance

Why:

We have developed the marks upload function to upload exam marks and the resit marks in eVision directly two years ago which schools can upload the marks from any exam into SITS. The marks are validated automatically before saved into the system.  Recently we have worked with Tribal to develop the similar function for award upload which allows the schools to upload the award directly into eVision and control when the results for a programme are published to students.

The benefits of these two functions include

  • Both of these functions have delivered control to the end user so they can better supports students who have queries resulting from the processes.
  • Students will have access to consistent guidance on what resources are available for support following publication of end of stage results.
  • The upload and keying process will systematically validate against the student record.
  • The system will provide Schools with oversight of students expecting to graduate at a particular time of year, and allow them to identify missing or incorrect information
  • Schools owning programmes will have control over when Awards are made available to students.
  • The current reliance on Academic Registry keying awards into EUCLID will be removed.
  • Scope for errors in keying will be reduced

 

Improving Efficiency, Achieving Effectiveness

(same entry as most improved student experience, see above)

 

SITS upgraded to 8.7.0

We have upgraded our SITS system to the version 8.7.0 over the last weekend. This was a double upgrade from version 8.6.0 to 8.6.1 and then from 8.6.1 to 8.7.0.

The upgrade process went well. It started from 1pm on Friday 28th Feb, and completed by Saturday evening. This allowed the technical technical tests to start from Sunday morning, and by the 4pm Sunday afternoon, the system was ready and re-opened to the public.