Background
The University of Canterbury ranks in the top 2% of universities globally, serving communities for over 150 years. The university values empowering others to be the best in their work and studies.
Catalyst has collaborated with the University of Canterbury on the Student First Programme’s Easy Enrolment Project since May 2017. The initial aim was to build a new application to manage student enrolment.
Opportunity
UC was after a simple, fast and certain enrolment experience for new and returning students.
Solution
Catalyst developed this solution in myUC(external link). We delivered a set of microservice APIs and databases using Django while supporting and re-platforming the integration to the existing Student Management System.
The positive feedback from students and staff showed that myUC met this expectation. myUC provides a significantly smoother, more modern enrolment process for students than its predecessor, with the added benefit of reducing the time required for staff to process enrolments.
In particular, feedback from returning students who had also enrolled using the previous system was very positive. The improvements in data collection through myUC and streamlining of associated business processes resulted in significantly improved timelines when making enrolment offers.
The introduction of myUC also signalled the digitisation of a previously paper-based enrolment process for the University’s College of Education, Health and Human Development. The digitalisation substantially reduced the staff's time to process teaching enrolments.
Before myUC was introduced, using the enrolment system was not an easy or enjoyable experience for students or staff. The system was also not flexible enough to adapt quickly to changes in the tertiary education landscape.
We collaborated closely with developers from other vendors who developed the user interface that interacts with these APIs. We also worked with the University's IT Service Group developers, who built a set of APIs to provide integration with existing systems, an in-house QA testing team, business analysts, and project managers.
Until May 2021, our improvements continued on myUC and other applications through additional projects to take over tasks previously handled by other legacy systems.
