Migrating services to the cloud in higher education is happening at a faster rate than ever before. According to Tribal’s CTO, Mike Cope, this is primarily because the sector’s appetite for risk has changed as education institutions seek solutions that provide the most up to date capability, for the maximum number of use cases, whilst also providing enough flexibility to adapt to increasingly frequent business changes.

In times of great change, we are holding our free of charge, online conferences (W/C 12th October 2020) to discuss the significant issues that will help colleges and training providers become more resilient and continue to deliver quality education.

Enrolment during coronavirus

Enrolment day is normally a notoriously busy event in the academic calendar. For further education (FE) institutions, campus is alive with activity as learners are welcomed in, perhaps for the first time, to register for their chosen courses. Learners are often required to queue in different locations around college to complete the necessary paperwork, ID and qualification checks and have their photographs taken. Staff Teaching teams, Support Services, Learner records and Admissions staff are busy too, ready to support students and answer questions. It can be an exhausting and chaotic day!

The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced extraordinary challenges for further education (FE) providers in the UK, with colleges, councils, and adult learning institutions facing a new reality of managing sickness absence reporting.

The Coronavirus is having a huge impact on higher and further education, as well as economies and lives across the globe. The education landscape changed, virtually overnight, when on 23^rd March 2020, the UK followed many other countries into ‘lockdown’ in an attempt to slow the rate of infection of Covid-19.

The downturn in demographics and numbers of people going to university and college, competition from international markets, and high dropout rates means that UK institutions need smart ways to demonstrate and deliver the Student Experience they have on offer if they intend to meet increasingly ambitious recruitment and retention targets.

When you think of education you might typically think of schools, colleges and universities. But, there’s another type of institution becoming increasingly attractive to learners - the specialist and independent providers, living somewhere in between the world of colleges and universities and experiencing their own set of challenges.

Shifting interviews with potential learners to the online environment is something lots of FE colleges are rapidly having to come to terms with, and Tribal customers have been discussing their plans and how they are using the tools in ebs OnTrack to make this process go smoothly.

Did I hear you say Taxi?

Yes, TCSI (pronounced “taxi”), you heard that right! It stands for Transforming the Collection of Student Information (TCSI). It’s a joint project between the Department of Education, Skills and Employment (DESE) and Services Australia to transform how student information is collected to build a better solution that benefits both Australian education providers and students. The project name TCSI has also been retained as the name of the new portal in which institutions report to, however the acronym now stands for Tertiary Collection of Student Information.

There’s little doubt now that enrolments for colleges and universities are going to look very different this year. Luckily, although there is nothing ordinary about 2020, educational staff are rising to the challenge and seeing it as an opportunity to push through much needed change and create a new kind of student experience this year and beyond.