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onboarding-content-designers

Future-proofing Birkbeck’s online course information

The content management system used to publish Birkbeck’s course listings was about to fall over. This meant that the most important information for prospective students was at risk. 

 

This presented us with an opportunity to fix some long-term systemic problems, so we decided to take this opportunity to completely overhaul our online course listings.

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What I did

I submitted a successful bid to JISC (a service that provides funding for the higher education sector to deliver digital solutions that can be shared across institutions) for £90,000 to launch the Birkbeck XCRi project. With this funding, we set up a multidisciplinary team: I was the project lead. 

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In one year, my team and I delivered fully re-engineered course listings by:

  • conducting comprehensive user research

  • identifying the new workflow that we wanted to implement (moving from a system that relied entirely on free-text entry to a structured-content model where key information was pulled in from 3 separate databases)

  • creating a comprehensive suite of use cases detailing all of the needs the new system needed to meet

  • implementing a new quality control workflow that reduced errors and ensured compliance with the Birkbeck digital standards

  • removing duplicate course content by taking down course information published on locally owned microsites

  • introducing a digital-first approach to publishing course information 

  • creating an XML feed that enabled third-party course information providers to automatically update the information they held and published on Birkbeck courses.  

 

The results

  • Before the XML feed had been introduced, information for third-party course aggregators had to be provided by manually inputting information into spreadsheets. With the introduction of the XML  feed, we converted this manual process into an automated process.

  • When we audited our content, we found that courses were being advertised that were no longer offered. The new process, based on pulling key information from databases, meant that course information could not appear on the Birkbeck website unless it had been approved.

  • Key information, such as fees, completion time and the application process, was now provided through a feed from relevant databases. That meant that we were fully compliant with quality assurance requirements.

  • Within 3 months, we saw significant increases in relation to 3 KPIs we used to measure marketing success - Open Evening bookings, prospectus orders, and enquiry submissions.
     

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