Open University Become a teacher
The Open University Careers Service is responsible for providing guidance to its students regarding the careers that they can pursue subsequent to obtaining OU qualifications. As part of this activity, the Careers Service created a booklet, called "Becoming a Teacher", which provided students with guidance on the transition from degree courses to a PGCE. The booklet contained details of (nearly) all OU courses and their relationship to the different PGCEs on offer. This information was provided in the form of a table, which made up almost half of the booklet. The table contained information such as the relationship of each course to the National Curriculum, what GCSEs a course was an alternative to (in terms of PGCE entrance requirements), and which courses would provide a contribution to a chosen PGCE subject.
Capturing various inputs
Due to the large number of courses and PGCEs involved, and due to the fact that these undergo frequent alteration, keeping such a booklet up-to-date posed a significant and expensive challenge.
This problem was naturally suited to a web based solution. There were two aspects to the solution, one which was student facing, and another which was targeted at the administrator.
The student facing solution involved designing and implementing a series of screens that would enable a student to effectively filter the table so that they would be presented with only the subset of information that was relevant to their interests.
The administrator facing solution involved providing data entry and management screens that enabled the administrator to add and edit courses and their associated relationships on a real-time basis.
Web based solution
The outcome is a solution which provides students with accurate, relevant and up-to-date information directly from within the Open University Careers Service website.
In implementing this solution, we had to work closely with the OU IT department to ensure that our solution could fit into the already existing website, both from a technical and graphical design point-of-view.
