Overview

Background

The necessity for a contextual admissions offer checker for the Student Recruitment and Admissions website has been identified by the Head of SRA and the Deputy Secretary, GaSP.  The Admissions Operations Officer has been instrumental in determining the requirements of this facility to date.  Some initial assessment of the need has been carried out and an estimation of time and resource have been identified with funding being provisionally allocated for the work to take place over 2015/16 and 2016/17.

With regard to the Student Systems Roadmap this project will contribute to the strategic objective of Equality and Widening Participation.  This project supports compliance by providing applicants from under-represented groups with a facility to check the likelihood of their being admitted to University of Edinburgh.  Having this knowledge before applications are made is expected to motivate more people to consider University of Edinburgh, encouraging more applications and helping the University to meet its widening participation targets and strategic priority. 

Scope

The project will deliver an online questionnaire accessed from the Student Recruitment and Admission website and accessing the existing Widening Participate calculation to provide an indication to the applicant regarding their Contextual offer eligibility from the University of Edinburgh.   The site will also provide applicants with supporting information on how contextual admissions operate.

The project will not collect any information and applicants will go through the standard UCAS application process, however there may be an opportunity to collect some analytics from the use of the questionnaire.

Objectives

The objective of this project is to provide a facility for applicants to check their eligibility with a view to increasing the number of widening participation applications received.

Deliverables

This project will be delivered following an iterative delivery focussed approach and therefore an absolute list of the deliverables cannot be provided.  The requirements will be recorded as user stories and prioritised by business representatives and estimated by developers. The expectation is that not all will be delivered but the subset provided will provide a viable product as determined by the project team during the course of the project.

Expected deliverables:

• Online access to questionnaire
• Set of questions relating to the various elements of widening participation including socio-economic, educational levels, educational establishments and geographical information. 
• Re-writing the existing PL/SQL package  for the calculation so that it can be used by the existing process and also by the new web front end
• Calculation using existing algorithms to present result to applicant
• Analytics in respect of visits to page or submission of form
• Equality Impact Assessment (EqIA) be created by SRA

Benefits

The benefits of this project will be:

- Increase the number of accepted applicants who meet the widening participation criteria.  This can be checked against the existing BI reports in relation to number of applicants before release of the solution and measured again post project to monitor and measure increase.

-  Improve ability to meet government targets and University strategy through providing applicants with a facility to check eligibility and aid  their decision to make an applicaiton to UoE.  Having this facility should encourage some applicants who may not have otherwise considered makeing an application to UoE.  All increases in WP apllicants contribute to improving this target..

- Applicants will be provided the facility to check their eligibility for contextual offers. 

- Applicant’s experience is improved by reducing the uncertainty of their eligibility

- Reduces number of enquiries dealt with by UoE staff from applicants asking about their eligibility

- Promote WP within UoE through access to information

- Promote digital transformation within UoE through proving applicants with online assitance to support that which is available from staff

- Provide information to support that which is available from staff and enhance decision making for applicants

- Provide a way for quicker access to information and decision making for applicants

More specific detail of these benefits will be able to be defined in relation to expected numbers or percentage improvement relating to Widening Participation Admissions once the Project Manager has initial meetings with the Sponsor and Head of Widening Participation.  Baseline information is expected to be available.

Success Criteria

The measures for success of this project will be based upon the use of the questionnaire and the increase in applicants.  It will not be possible to provide such measures until after the first intake following release and then after each intake.