UCAS provided notifications and the CSV reports related to an accredited body’s courses. Publish is missing these features.
In round 1 we hoped to better understand the reporting needs of accredited bodies, and the context in which they used these reports.
What did we want to find out?
- Understand previous experiences
- Uncover user’s needs
Findings
Previous UCAS experience
- UCAS alerted providers of changes to their courses via email
- Accredited bodies to check the changes so that providers can add this information to all their application processes every single time it happens
Need for reporting and alerts
I think it would be useful [auto email with report] but there are also going to be periods of the year where there’s nothing. It’s important for us to be reactive to any change… But it would still be a very useful thing [the report] for us to have because if for any reason we’ve missed any change, one notification, it will be picked up every so often by us being sent a sort of status report.
I think that they [UCAS] relied on the notifications rather than sending out a lot of data. If we could do both, we could have the ability to have reports that we can look at in terms of ‘this is our entire provision’ as well as notifications, that would be the best of both worlds.
The transition to Publish has created issues
- The problem with moving to Publish meant that there are no longer alerts to changes and no ability to generate CSV reports.
- Instead Department for Education (DfE) support provides a report which creates the potential for human error