Student Portal in the cloud for ROC Friesland College

Customer

ROC Friesland College offers secondary vocational (MBO) and adult education to 15,000 students per year.

The College operates from ten locations in Leeuwarden and Heerenveen in the Netherlands. Knowledge sharing is central to its approach. The College works alongside the business community, institutions and other educational organizations. The information exchange between students and teachers is an important factor in how the College operates.

The challenge

ROC Friesland College wants to make it easy for students to keep abreast of schedule changes, exam schedules, grade lists and more.

In addition, they must be able to study wherever and whenever they want. A student portal in the cloud is identified as being the means to provide this capability - an online environment where students can easily find, use and share all educational information, applications and administrative information in one central location.

Portal in the cloud

The student portal had to be user-friendly. It should be suitable for the needs of the new generation of students who seek personalized and mobile educational services. For this reason, the ROC decided its cloud portal should be developed with a responsive design. This would be of particular value to those students who learn in the workplace at external organizations, enabling them to use teaching material and education information on their mobile and tablet.

Solution

ROC Friesland College asked Sogeti to bring the new portal to fruition before the start of the new academic year. Sogeti picked up the gauntlet and developed the new student portal (FC live) in one month.

Standard SharePoint Portal Solution

The College’s new cloud environment is based on the ready-to-use Sogeti SharePoint Portal Solution. It incorporates responsive design, including standard functionality such as news sharing and chats via Yammer. Close cooperation between Sogeti and its client also contributed to the rapid delivery. Sogeti and the ROC first held a joint workshop in which they created a detailed portal layout: identifying which functionality should reside wherein the portal. This enabled Sogeti FC live to get up to speed in tune with the wishes and planning of the ROC.

Everywhere on every device

The cloud portal is location independent. It integrates with Office365, allowing students to access their e-mail and other educational applications anytime and anywhere. The portal is also device-independent. The responsive design ensures that the look and feel are the same on a tablet, PC or smartphone. Moreover, the portal has single sign-on; logging in once is sufficient to open all the required educational information and apps, such as Microsoft Exchange, Word, Excel, Yammer, and Skype.

Improved personalization

Students receive information personalized to them, such as news reports, timetable changes and digital books from their own study program. With additional functionality, the ROC knows how to prevent information overload. For example, students only see a limited number of buttons and the last five messages. If they want to open digital learning materials, 'My Study' houses their books and classroom assignments. Sogeti has linked an external education catalog to the portal via Microsoft Azure.

Improved Collaboration

There are also plans for Sogeti to integrate FC live with a comparable SharePoint Online portal for employees. This will enable teachers and students to easily share documents and communicate via one central environment. Educational plans are also automatically updated in personal diaries. Through Microsoft Classroom, the College offers students and teachers the opportunity to bundle information, assignments and teaching materials per class, course, or future course. In this way,  ROC Friesland College injects further quality into its education.

Inge van Dongen, Program coordination DLWO, ROC Friesland College - "The portal offers students everything they want. They use it much more intensively than the old blackboard. For example, e-mail traffic via the portal has increased by 2,000 percent."

Coen Eskes, Principal Consultant Office 365 / SharePoint Sogeti - "Thanks to the well-oiled collaboration with the ROC Friesland College, we were able to set up a responsive cloud portal within one month."