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My Dev Environment - Anil

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Open Campus Management System: The Choice to Build

In today’s educational environment, there is a greater reliance on Information Technology to improve the production, flow and control of information. This is particularly true for the UWI Open Campus since it’s nature as a virtual campus makes it’s reliance on Information Technology extremely important with software becoming one of it’s driving forces to providing it’s services.

What is of particular interest is the decision to build it’s core application, the Open Campus Management System (OCMS),  in house. Here we will give some background on why this decision was made.

The Open Campus Distributed Environment

The organisation of the Open Campus is different from a traditional campus in a few respects. The Open Campus is an amalgamation of the previous Office of the Board for Non-Campus Countries & Distance Education (BNNCDE), the School of Continuing Studies (SCS), the UWI Distance Education Centre (UWIDEC), and the Tertiary Level Institutions Unit (TLIU).

The Open Campus is a virtual campus providing many of it’s programmes online through distance education. This is supported by a number of software tools including Learning Management Systems (LMS) for course delivery and Student Management Systems for managing student data.  In addition to the virtual campus, there are over 50 site locations of the Open Campus currently serving over 20 countries in the English-speaking Caribbean.

This combination of online and face-to-face learning modes across a wide geographical region makes the Open Campus’s approach to education unique. When it comes to Student Management, this poses a problem since the current proprietary tools that were in use at the other UWI campuses were not designed for such an environment. The choices were to either heavily modify the proprietary tools to fit the needs of the Open Campus or develop custom software.

Build vs Buy

It has been the custom of educational organisations in the Caribbean to buy proprietary packaged applications. However, there are compelling reasons for building software in house, especially in the case of Open Campus. The distributed nature of Open Campus and it’s mix of virtual and on-site learning means that there are a number of unique needs to be met both in course delivery and student management. Combined with the wide rage of programmes, from vocational to post graduate, that are offered by the campus and it was clear that there was no existing solution that would completely fill the needs of the organisation.

In addition to this, the software packages that are available require a long implementation time which the Open Campus could not afford.  The Open Campus is a quickly evolving organisation which is still in it’s initial stages so many of the processes are not fully implemented. As the organisation evolves, the processes change quickly and sometimes, radically. Any software implementation must be flexible enough to not only adapt to these changes, but do so quickly. This level of flexibility was not available in any of the software packages that were currently used by the other campuses.

The existence of these challenges and decision to build are not new and actually pre-date the formation of the Open Campus. UWIDEC initially saw the issues that come about when trying to implement a large proprietary student management system into it’s operations and had made the decision to implement it’s own Student Management System. The addition of the other units have added a magnitude of complexity to the operations and so have served to reinforced the need for a custom solution. This saw the evolution of UWIDEC’s simple student management system to what is now the Open Campus Management System.

Now that we know why the choice was made to build a custom solution, the question remained as to how this was to be achieved. In the next article, we will explore the advantages of setting up an in house development team and the challenges that come along with it.