College of West Anglia Case Study
The Challenge
College of West Anglia – Courses Database linked to Bespoke CMS. Users: Faculty, admin, students
With five campuses and around 10,000 students, the College of West Anglia needed a better way to create, manage and publish course information. Details were spread across multiple databases and spreadsheets, which slowed updates and led to inconsistent listings online.
Staff needed to set up courses once and see those changes flow straight to the website, with clear search and booking for students and employers. A PDF of the course details also needed to be produced automatically from the same CMS data. Off-the-shelf products were reviewed, but none matched the college’s processes or could integrate cleanly with existing systems at a sensible cost.
The college therefore commissioned a central course database linked to a bespoke CMS, so the web team could manage the site in house while curriculum and MIS teams controlled course data from a single source of truth.
The Development Process
We worked with the college internal web design team. The intention was always for the final system to be hosted internally at the college and maintained by the internal team.
We ran workshops with curriculum leads, admissions, MIS and marketing to map how courses are created, approved, published and retired. From this we produced a detailed specification for the data model, roles and approvals, search facets, and the APIs to and from the EBS system.
Wireframes covered all key screens: course editor, search and filters, PDF generator, and admin dashboards. Clickable prototypes let stakeholders confirm the journey before any build. We planned migration of historic course data and set accessibility and performance targets for the public site.
Build was phased: core database and CMS, EBS integration, publishing and PDFs, then bulk import/export and employer pathways.
Test scripts were taken from the spec, with UAT by course administrators and the college web team.
What we built
- Central course database linked to EBS for reliable updates
- Dynamic course pages that publish instantly, plus on-the-fly PDF generation
- Employer-focused views for vocational and work-based training
- Bulk CSV import and export for fast updates and reporting
- Powerful search and filters by subject, campus, start date and duration
- Course activation and deactivation that controls what appears online
- CMS with roles, approvals and content scheduling for the wider website
- Analytics and audit logs to track changes and measure engagement
PDFs automatically generated from the same data entered into the websiteOutcome
The new platform gives CWA a single source of truth for courses and a CMS the team can run themselves. Updates are faster, listings stay accurate and the website reflects live availability without manual rework. The pay-monthly build proved more cost-effective than ongoing licences for a tool that did not fit.
“Throughout our association, I have been completely satisfied with the work RD Research have done. They are customer focused and responsive, particularly in the scoping and development of the database work showing great flexibility in adapting to our changing requirements. I would be happy to recommend RD Research for CMS and database development work.”
Paul O’Shea, Head of Marketing and Student Services