Rewriting the rulebook on Student Record Systems at TEDI-London

“The first thing I had to do was define TEDI-London’s digital strategy,” says David Minahan, CIO at TEDI-London. “Within that, you’ve got to think about what your end state is going to look like, what your IT operations will be, what cost overheads are you going to leave the organisation with, and the range of services you need to deliver within that.”

It’s rare for a CIO at a Higher Education institution to be in a position to define and implement a best practice digital strategy without being subject to any constraints of legacy, but that was exactly the position David Minahan was in when he took on the role for TEDI-London in October 2019.

The best answer for TEDI-London

“We were already used to using Microsoft 365 tools for collaboration. Outside of that, one pivotal component for a University IT Department is the student record system,” explains David Minahan. Following analysis of the commercial off-the-shelf solutions and investigating the option of building bespoke, David Minahan sought a better way.

He explains, “If you think where University IT will be in two or three years you have to wonder whether we will still be purchasing IP platform solutions? Probably not. And my experience in the past has been that with those suppliers there’s a lot of hidden costs, it can be very hard to get changes done and you lose a lot of control over what you do.”

“I knew the Microsoft Higher Education Accelerator existed and, when I looked at the costs, it seemed to make sense that if I could find the right partner to work with me and build a Student Record System out of Microsoft Dynamics then that would be the best answer for TEDI-London in the long term.”

“When you buy into Microsoft, you’re buying into a development resource that can’t be replicated anywhere else,” David Minahan continues. “The Microsoft development teams working on these products far outstrips anything you could do yourself. And I think the functionality and useability is only going to get better.”

Developing with the Microsoft Higher Education Accelerator

Given the sensitive personal data that a comprehensive student records system will hold, security and resilience were key factors in TEDI-London’s decision making.

David Minahan explains: “The base level of security when hosting your applications in Microsoft is a really high level of security. You also benefit from the Azure Active Directory for identity management, risk and roles-based access controls. We have multi-site resilience for all of our apps and a consistent approach to security throughout the stack.”

With these considerations in mind, David Minahan travelled to Seattle in February 2020 with Dr. David Kellerman of UNSW, a TEDI-London founder organisation, who had worked closely with Microsoft to extend the Microsoft Teams environment for virtual learning. He says, “When I explained to Microsoft that I didn’t want to be caught up in someone else’s intellectual property and subject to their change overheads and how those solutions currently constrained my ability to use the Power Platform, they understood and they helped me find a suitable partner.”

A global search led TEDI-London back to the UK to ANS Group. “ANS Group understood that the future isn’t about selling products; it’s about becoming an integrator of choice for the platform solutions that we choose as customers,” says David Minahan.

Microsoft is TEDI-London’s chosen platform

Having chosen Microsoft as its platform of choice, and working with ANS Group with support from Microsoft, TEDI-London began developing its student record system based on Microsoft Dynamics 365 at the end of August 2020. The Accelerator lived up to its name.

“This is how quick it’s worked for us – and this is the power of it,” emphasises David. “We deployed our initial release to production in November 2020 and we finished it in May 2021. We now have a fully functional student record system that takes us all the way up to the end of the first year of our student cohort.”

TEDI-London’s first student cohort will commence September 2021. Work is already underway for phase two of the student record system development: progression to graduation and alumni.

“We’ve got an end-to-end student record system that is built on the Microsoft Higher Education Accelerator and encompasses all of our marketing, recruitment and applications processes,” says David Minahan. “We manage those student applications through a workflow process with lots of automation and have also built the integrations we need with our outsourced finance operations.”

The team has built a whole range of functionality, including the curriculum, with all the programmes and modules, attendance and attendance monitoring, the student timetable, assessments and outcomes, and appeals.

Modelling a unique student journey

“My part of the student journey comes first, so my team has already been using the new student records system for six months,” says Helen Merrills, Director of Marketing, Student Recruitment & Admissions at TEDI-London. “We’re using it to take applications directly and through the UCAS system.”

“Our admissions system is unique and complex. Students take one of two pathways – one which includes a numeracy test and one that doesn’t. Both have interviews and require the completion of a project – it’s a multi-stage process. So being able to model that effectively in the system was really important,” explains Helen Merrills. “As we get more complex, we’ll need to understand how many are sat in each part of the funnel and identify any blockages.”

Initially, the team has been very hands on to really get under the skin of the communications flows as students progress through the system. The next stage will see the team automate parts of the process.

Helen Merrills continues, “What’s great about the system is that for our international cohort all the documents we need for them to study in the UK can be held in this central system. Then it passes over to the registrar who has access to all of those same documents – so we’re not looking at multiple document storage or transfers of files internally. It’s all there.”

An end-to-end view of student interaction

“Once they have arrived with us, we have everything we need uploaded into the system, so we can register them on the basis of that,” agrees Carmai Pestell, Registrar at TEDI-London. “We’ve been able to tailor credentials, access and privacy rules to control who sees what. We’ve got something that we’ve been able to define – rather than retrofitting ourselves into processes or systems that aren’t really working.”

“It has been an enormous piece of work to capture the whole student journey in one system,” admits Helen Merrills, “but the value of that is it is all now in one system. All the information we capture about a student and what they are interested in during the recruitment process is all available to the admissions and finance teams. We’ve got that overview. And, similarly, in three years’ time when they become alumni, they’ll come back to me and all their information will still be in the same system.”

A rapid rollout made possible

“We’ve done it in a short period of time, but we know we have more to do,” asserts David Minahan. “But the whole point of this platform from an IT perspective was to take a product approach and be ready for change – whether that’s coming from internal requests, regulators or UCAS. By pairing our small in-house resource with the support of a partner, we have the flexibility and agility we need.”

The plan is to integrate all gradebook data in Microsoft Teams into the student record system. David Minahan explains: “We’re going to be using Microsoft Teams for our virtual learning environment, so all of our assessments will be done through Microsoft Teams. We’re currently working with ANS Group and Microsoft to create an integration with the student records system in Microsoft Dynamics via the school data sync service utilising the OneRoster API.”

“For TEDI-London it has been an amazing outcome really,” continues David Minahan. “My colleagues have got a system that works in the way that they want it to work for the processes they have. And, from my perspective, we’ve got a reduced long-term overhead in terms of the cost of IT. And, most importantly, we have a low integration overhead because we have so much operating out of the Microsoft Dataverse. It’s a really clean solution from an IT architecture perspective.”

The University’s other apps are hosted in Microsoft Azure, so everything sits within the same technology stack. This includes the Learning Tree content delivery system that will integrate with the virtual learning environment in Microsoft Teams and practical teaching and learning environments.

“The Microsoft three cloud approach offers benefits not only in terms of integration, but also in terms of identity management. Effectively we’re managing all our identities through Azure Active Directory. And from a security perspective for me, there’s less data management to worry about,” David Minahan adds. “We’ve bought into the Microsoft development roadmap. It’s no-code low-code, so it’s easy to maintain. And we’ve done nothing that prevents us from benefiting from future stuff that Microsoft do.”

Mobile apps for students and staff

Using Microsoft Power Apps, the team has already developed a mobile timetable app for students to access and more will follow. Access to the apps will be via users’ Microsoft 365 account.

“Interestingly, the timetabling app is probably the most complex,” says David Minahan. “We’ll be adding the Learning Tree as a Power App too, as well as finance data, grades, and learning progress. Students will be able to access it all from an app on their mobile phone – I think that’s a really good outcome for them.”

The team has also used Microsoft Power Apps to build an attendance monitoring app for academics to use, eliminating the need for paper attendance lists and associated data loss. Accurate attendance data will be available in real time in the student records system.

“We’re excited to be able to progress our first students through it,” says Carmai Pestell. “They’ll be converting over the summer.”

“The UCAS integration will be really big for us, and the fact it can update UCAS decision-making will be a big change that we’re really excited about,” adds Helen.

Continuous development to meet future needs

“It’s now about prioritising the things that people need next,” says David Minahan. Case management and appeals will be surfaced in an app for students. For staff, Power Apps are being developed for IT service requests and reporting issues securely.

“We worked this through within TEDI-London because it suits us,” David Minahan advises. “These decisions might be harder to make for bigger institutions with more complexity because in any transformation change programme, it’s often not about the technology – it’s about the people. The work might be stickier and trickier to achieve in a larger organisation, but I think it would be possible to achieve the kind of end-to-end solution that we have got.”

He sees a great opportunity for higher education institutions to leverage the same tools for their own digitalisation initiatives. “The jigsaw pieces are all there – it’s about being really clear about what processes you want to build first and what capability you want to achieve,” David Minahan asserts. “That’s the big thing at a strategic level – you can’t think about it as a six-month project that’s going to fix everything – building digital capability isn’t a discrete project. It’s about thinking about how you embed that ability to develop digital capability in the organisation as part of business as usual.”