Glasgow Caledonian University is one of the largest universities in Scotland with nearly 17,000 students. It consists of three academic schools covering business, health, technology and computing, science and engineering.
The challenges
Glasgow Caledonian prides itself on, and is committed to, widening access to Higher Education for talented individuals regardless of their background. However, in light of the fast-changing Higher Education (HE) landscape in the UK, it realised that students from low income backgrounds would find it increasingly difficult to take up tertiary study. There is also general acceptance that Universities across the United Kingdom will need to become increasingly self-sufficient in generating the revenues needed to provide first-class education.
Despite these challenges the University was not prepared to change its core accessibility principles and devised a strategy to fund the ongoing provision of high quality and widely available education.
A new system for a new era
With the future needs of the University in mind, Glasgow Caledonian undertook a rigorous investigation and procurement process to select a solution that would facilitate the University’s strategy. It eventually selected Student Management and Curriculum Management Systems from UNIT4’s Agresso Campus Platform.
A platform for the future
Glasgow Caledonian now has in place curriculum and student management systems with future growth potential that fully support its aims of offering accessible education by facilitating the availability of information, providing visibility of operations and increasing revenue.
The solutions from UNIT4 promote continuous, high quality improvements to educational services. Agresso Curriculum Management guides the relevant staff at Glasgow through the processes for creating new courses using a pre-determined workflow. This ensures that each course is created using the same standards, promoting quality and ongoing improvement.
Business users are able to more easily obtain information by creating their own reports adding to productivity and allowing the University to make savings.
The intuitive interface of the student system allows students to register online, at a time convenient to them, and to view course and module information.
Additionally, Glasgow Caledonian’s users can, in the main, configure Agresso without the help of IT consultants, enabling the University to be agile and responsive to an ever-shifting set of requirements, whilst also keeping down the cost of change.
With the competition for international students growing and the importance placed on league tables increasing, the University is ideally positioned to understand what is required to improve performance thanks to the new UNIT4 solution. These are important steps in allowing the University to improve educational facilities and remain accessible.
Benefits of the Agresso Campus Platform
- Closely aligned to a strategy of accessible, high quality education.
- Significantly improved operational visibility.
- Improved statutory returns.
- Improved availability of information.
- Facilitates revenue growth.
