Closure Report

Objectives

Achieved?

• O1.Address the backlog of issues and improvements prioritised in the product backlog by Student Systems Operations . The priorities may change throughout the year as agreed with Student Systems Operations, and Schools' user group in line with key deadlines (should)
• O2. Support the emerging ART stream of work (must)
• O3. Provide annual maintenance and support services during peak periods of the life cycle (must)
• O4- Address compliance requirements (must)

• D1-Regular releases of improvements to EUCLID functionality (should)
• D2-Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) with each release (should)
• D3-Communication to users, with updated user guidance (should)
• D4-relates to requirements to capture data for HESA statutory returns (enhancement to Annual Registration process)  and Widening Participation contextual checker existing process (must)

• D1- Yes- 30 releases in the 1st year (see outcomes below)
• D2- Yes
• D3-Yes as part of releases
• D4- Yes

Ref

Objectives

Deliverables & Benefits

O1

As a result of Brexit, address  immigration changes. There are required changes for EU/EEA Students to be able to request a Confirmation of Acceptance to Study (CAS).

• D1-communication updates
• D2-self service enhancement 
• D3-update visa types
• D4-enhance flag for immigration compliance status
• D5-update application for CAS
• D6-email notification to EU applicants

Benefit achieved:  we are able to remain compliant with the Home Office regulations for EU/EEA students post Brexit.

• D1-Yes
• D2-Yes
• D3-Yes
• D4-Yes
• D5-Yes
• D6-Yes

O2

Address EU fees change and impact to Irish nationals

• D1-Rewrite the algorithm calculating the fees changes for Irish and EU applicants
• D2-Update BI reporting  to meet requirements for  post-Brexit Irish applicants/students, and for other post-Brexit EU applicants/students,
• D3-Update communication sent to students/applicants, web guidance   

Benefit achieved: EU student experience enhanced: EU fees can be processed as BAU, and the rewritten algorithm can be scaled up with future changes

• D1-Yes
• D2-Yes
• D3-Yes

• D1-Awarding Credits on Aggregate 
• D2-Credits on aggregate usage 
• D3-Average mark showing incorrect 
• D4-Overall mark not refreshed when recalc done 

Benefit achieved: the issue with the award mark was causing confusion and additional work for Schools during programme boards. The new feature for awarding credit on aggregate significantly reduced the time to perform that action. 

• D1-Yes
• D2-Yes
• D3-Yes
• D4-Yes

Address SRA/Widening Participation WP bug

D1-Enhance current functionality ahead of start of term for new intake 

Benefit achieved: the WP contextual admissions checker is working as expected with new enhancements in place for start of term

D1- Yes

D1-Enhance support for the Bulk Optional Course Enrolment Service, incl guidance and webpages for users

Benefit achieved on Oct 21: We received requests for a total of 1,173 courses, 8,521 students, and 24,718 enrolments between the end of July and the end of October 2021, with 17 Schools using the service during this period. We processed a total of 24,506 enrolments; the remaining records either had already been processed by someone in the School, or we couldn’t process because there was no space on outside courses. We are expecting more requests in November/December for semester 2 enrolments. We are working on an evaluation which will include suggested ways to improve the service in 2022 and would welcome feedback from colleagues on the service.

Ref

Objectives

Deliverables & Benefits

O1

APT performance issues ahead of next Board of Examiners: improve assessment and progression performance:

• D1-  rewrite some of the EUCLID database queries for efficiency ,
• D2- add analytics to monitor performance,
• D3- review  the infrastructure when students' semester 1 results are published:  set up a read only database for student queries 

Benefit achieved: 

• Year-on-year net improvement in undergraduate marks publishing – with 91% of marks published by the deadline.
• The average time to publish course results in the week leading up to the deadline has also improved since 2021.
• Moreover, average page load times for students viewing course and assessment results were lower in 2022 – even with a greater number of page views than 2021.
• There were also improvements in the performance of bulk processes, used by staff to perform tasks like calculating and publishing course results, and average user timing across all processes.
• Since the enhancements were made no issues or outages have been reported by staff or students.

Link to the news on https://secure.projects.ed.ac.uk/project/sac084/journal/2

• D1-Yes
• D2-Yes
• D3-Yes

O2

Security issue: update Single-Sign-On (SSO) links to follow the Tribal’s best practices recommendation, as a result of a security  breach: some of SSO links from 12 institutions have appeared in the searching results using Bings or Google.

Follow the Tribal’s best practices recommendation including:

• D1-Ensure all SSO links have an expiry date
• D2-Review the length of expire period to keep it as small as possible (depending on the business needs)
• D3-Develop a process to regular change the security key for the SSO link encryption and start doing this regular
• D4-Apply the software update as soon as it is published

Benefit achieved: risk of security breach reduced

• D1-Yes-Standard expiry period applied.
• D2-no. The expiry date will be reviewed later to agree a suitable expiry period for each SSO link generation as per the business needs
• D3-no, the process to regularly change the security key is still outstanding and in pipeline work for SSP
• D4-Yes

• D1-Impact analysis and organise batch work across all EUCLID services
• D2-prioritise and start updating codes being desupported, incl archiving/deleting legacy codes

Benefit achieved: prioritised services have the SITS legacy codes updated, removing the risk of errors for users. It ensures the current syntax remains supported by Tribal .

• D1-Yes
• D2-Yes

D1- address performance issues for annual batches to manage applicants transfer and continuing students roll over

Benefit- reduced impact to Operations and improved student and applicant experience thanks to faster turnaround 

Ref

Objectives

Deliverables & Benefits

O1

EUCLID support during Assessment and Progression Tools (APT) peak period Board of Examiners

• D1-Increase the memory on the database server  
• D2-Move the database servers to a new virtual management infrastructure (by IT Infrastructure)
• D3-Enhance the database performance by database turning and introducing more indexes 
• D4-Improve the Assessment and Progression Tool (APT) EUCLID processes along with the student self-services process

Benefits achieved: more than 37,000 course results released to students with no outages, link to news https://secure.projects.ed.ac.uk/project/sac084/journal/4

• D1-Yes
• D2-Yes- achieved via a separate project 
• D3-Yes
• D4-Yes

O2

Enhance Extensions and Special Circumstances ESC service

• D1-Ability for the ESC team to create and edit cases on behalf of students 

• D2-Add "Notes" functions for schools and the ESC team 

• D3-Ability to bulk remove old cases, ensuring the University meets GDPR requirements 

• D4-Deliver training to help University Schools align with ESC systems 

Benefits achieved: Improvements to students' coursework Extensions and Special Circumstances system LINK news 

• D1-Yes
• D2-Yes
• D3-Yes
• D4-Yes

D1- Enhance student Hub and Student Self Service 

Benefits achieved: improved staff and student experience

D1-Rewrite remaining SRL syntax 

Benefit achieved: further services have the SITS legacy codes updated, removing the risk of errors for users

D1- Deliver this year changes for the Widening Participation Contextual Admissions, ahead of start of term

Benefit achieved: the WP contextual admissions checker is working as expected with new enhancements in place for start of term

• D1-upgrade PATH selection process, so that schools can see the list of course selection made by students
• D2-Rewrite Prospectus fees feed showing tuition fees (delivered by CAM and IS Apps Dev Services)

D2 Benefit: new streamline process delivered with improved user  interface to upload fees directly from Euclid, removing manual points of failure

• D1-Yes
• D2-Yes

D1- standard operation procedure (SOP) for APT are written and delivered to student systems Operations

Benefit:  BA was able to work with Operations on APT issues to share knowledge. Operations can support APT as business as usual

D1-Graduation Ceremony codes are enhanced, including impacted reports

Benefit: Increased number of graduation ceremonies can be run in Euclid, no impact to users

D1-Support moving from EVASYS to a SharePoint solution for this student survey

Benefit: this allows the end of the annual maintenance on EVASYS, reduced licence cost , and the improved interface allows users to request update and new questions to be added to MTP

Ref

Objectives

Deliverables & Benefits

O1

Extension and Special Circumstances (ESC) service: address Extra Time Adjustments (ETA)- 

Enable students with disabilities to be able make full use of their ETA on all relevant assessments

• D1-Enable the correct ETAs to be ‘scaffolded’ on top of coursework extensions where the allowed extension is < 7 days
• D2-Understand and enable correct treatment of ETAs where the length of the ETA must be limited due to type of assessment (e.g. for multiple choice question (MCQ) tests)
• D3-Remove the need for students to have to apply for their ETAs to be assigned to all relevant assessments
• D4-Enable students to have visibility of their revised submission date deadlines (i.e. with their ETA applied) as soon as they are enrolled on the course/the deadlines are added to assessment/their ETA is granted
• D5-Remove the SharePoint ETA workarounds currently in place for BMI, PPLS schools and for assessments that don’t allow coursework extensions

Benefit achieved: Link to news https://secure.projects.ed.ac.uk/project/sac084/journal/5

• D1-Yes
• D2-Yes
• D3-no, not required after review/agreement with Disability Service
• D4-Yes
• D5-Yes

O2

ESC Reporting - dashboard development (operational and strategic)

• D1-Work with EPCC to determine options for data extraction
• D2-then one-off analysis and on-going reporting 
• D3- identify business and strategic requirements. Develop data dashboards

Benefit- With the data extracts received from the 2 different databases, an ESC Strategic Reporting Dashboard was created to then enable Heads of Colleges and Services to review the trends in applications for extensions and special circumstances. The reporting is flexible enough to allow review on a school, programme and study level basis. This is the first ESC Reporting Dashboard that has been made available to users. This dashboard also allows tracking the usage of ESC services, which enable changes in the ESC Policy. This will ensure that extensions and special circumstances are used as an appropriate support mechanism. 

• D1-Yes
• D2-Yes
• D3-Yes

Annual maintenance  for the 2 services:

• D1-On line registration: meet new data requirements from HESA
• D2-Widening Participation Contextual Checker : apply changes requested by SRA

Benefit: the 2 services used by students and applicants are enhanced as per new requirements from HESA and DRA ahead of start of term

• D1-Yes
• D2-Yes

• D1-Upgrade Google Analytics
• D2- Remove old analytics code

Benefit: Legacy code addressed

• D1-Yes
• D2-Yes

Year

2020/21

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