The new visiting student portal was launched in time for this year's application cycle at the end of March. It is expected that 450-500 visiting students will use the site to select potential module choices for their semester or year abroad with us starting in September 2017.
Feedback from students and partners has already been positive. Incoming visiting students make up a small but important cohort of students. They support our global reputation, provide tuition fee income, and are critical to reciprocal arrangements enabling our full time students to experience education overseas.
The project was initiated after market research indicated the need to focus efforts on re-packaging the University's academic offering; to reduce application processing time for this particular cohort; to improve the applicant journey for students from current partners; and to allow us to expand and meet the growth set out in the Americas regional recruitment strategy.
International Operations led a project to develop a platform to present attractive, coherent, and appropriate modular offerings (called "module choice groups") to these students. This will support making good module choices easier and so application processing times will be shortened, and in addition gives us an excellent framework to bring on board new partner organisations.
The project worked to a very tight deadline. Thanks to excellent work from Karl O'Connor, Andrew Macfarlane and Carina Sutherland in Information Services and the collaboration with the School Support Service and Global Mobility Teams, we were delighted to launch this to our partners and students in the EU, and internationally so they can apply to study with us by the mid May application deadline.
Thanks also go to the many academic colleagues across the schools who identified their module choice groups.
The project team comprised of Claire Hope (International Operations), Helen McMillan (Global Mobility), Sharon Nairn (School Support Service) and Steve Yorkstone (Information Services).