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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Positive side effects of automated testing

We’ve recently been doing more automated testing in the SSP, and with that has come a lot of the benefits you might expect: an ability to spot faults as we make changes, and a guarantee of functionality working as prescribed among them. But I’ve come across a whole bunch of bonus benefits we get, some related to managing stories and projects, and some as personal gains for me.

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