Will This Technology Improve Student Life At City Of Bristol College?

City of Bristol College, one of the largest further education and higher education colleges in the UK, has begun implementing a portfolio of solutions from Compass Computer Consultants, an Advanced Computer Software Group company, to increase student engagement and retention levels and boost attendance rates.

Streamlining

Initially, the college will roll-out Compass’s ProSAR and ProVerify solutions in September 2014. ProSAR is expected to streamline the college’s self-assessment of courses, making the process easier and more effective for staff through the use of Ofsted criteria to centrally validate data. ProVerify will manage both the internal and external verification of college programmes.

The college will then go live with Compass’s integrated customer relationship management (CRM) system, ProEngage in November 2014. It is hoped that this system will help enable staff to engage with current and potential students more effectively. These implementations follow the successful roll-out of ProObserve, ProSolution and ProResource software earlier this year.

Rob Bishop, head of Strategic MIS at City of Bristol College, said: “The student experience is at the forefront of everything we do. Through this new system, students will have a more holistic view of their progress and have full access to key information such as their timetables, attendance records, targets and progress reviews. Parents and employers can also access student progress, allowing them to take an active part in their education.

“Our experience to date of using Compass’s systems and working with the Compass team has been very positive, so we feel confident that these additional solutions will help us to increase student engagement and retention levels, and improve curriculum planning.”

Following a formal tender involving three software providers, Bishop said that Compass was selected due to the ease of integration, the user-friendliness of its solutions and the company’s high levels of customer support.

Bishop explained: “One of the key reasons for implementing more solutions from the Compass suite was that they will improve our integration with third party systems and give better visibility of data, providing a holistic picture of performance across the whole college.”

Curriculum planning

City of Bristol College has been using Compass solutions such as ProAchieve for several years, and recently implemented ProObserve, which has helped the organisation to record and analyse lesson observations, ProSolution, a student management and information system, and ProResource, a funding forecasting and curriculum planning system.

ProResource is being used by the college’s 70 curriculum leaders and gives them access to planning and funding information for their classes. Staff have been empowered to take control of their budgets and highlight potential inefficiencies.

The software is also helping the College to increase students’ sense of responsibility by offering more information about their own performance via ProPortal.

Bishop said: “Giving students information about their performance will increase their accountability and help our staff to engage with them. Providing information about their grades and attendance will increase their sense of responsibility and give them control of their own academic destiny.”

In addition to the six Compass solutions being implemented this year, City of Bristol College also uses ProAchieve, ProGeneral, ProMetrix, ProMonitor and ProPortal.

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