Posted by pratyk on February 22, 2010 at 3:00pm
Hi
I work at a university and we're starting to look for products to have a sitewide CMS (single site or multi site still being debated). I work in admissions and I was wondering if anyone around here has any experience in using Drupal to manage Online Applications, messaging and other pertinent activities related to the Admissions Application process. It'd be nice to hear views of users w.r.t. this approach and any pointers to universities currently using this setup.
I worked with a K-12 organization writing custom modules for course registrations and seminar registrations. But the scope was limited to a few hundred users. Right now, we get about 25,000 new users registering accounts each year.
Thanks a lot.
Comments
Some of what I've used for sign ups....
I've found a good combination with the following modules...
Webform - Take in the user input and then can't do a ton with it OR....
--CCK to make a good "custom form" so that people are using the "admissions" content type.
--Use Views to make user lists as well as using the ajax pager and filters at the top to make things easier to search through (as if it were a relational database you were displaying on screen).
--Views bonus pack (http://drupal.org/project/views_bonus) is great for it's ability to export information
--Views Calc (http://drupal.org/project/views_calc) is great for adding up values in tables. This would be good for getting a quick count of people registering per college or major or department or in general. Things like that.
I think you're biggest issue is getting the IA down nice and tight so that you collect enough information but not so much that you're not sure what to do with it.
Ex Uno Plures
http://elmsln.org/
http://btopro.com/
http://drupal.psu.edu/
All custom
I have written a set of custom modules to manage the application process at our K-12. We get about 1,000 users a year, but I imagine that this solution would scale up to 10,000 without a problem. The modules are tightly grafted to our school, so I can't release them to the community. However, if I can author these modules in my spare time for this school, I imagine that a development team with more resources could do at least as well for a university.
I chose to write my own modules in order to customize the interactive tools for our site. Webform or CCK would not have allowed me to display data pulled from our admission information system within the custom forms, for instance. Building the form and storing the data in custom tables turned out to be pretty straightforward. The project got most complicated when I had to refine the logic for dealing with families with multiple siblings in different divisions and the esoteric rules we use to assign families to specific admission officers, etc.
By keeping the admission system within our main website, we gain all sorts of benefits, e.g. unified login, a single site for everyone to use, a familiar interface for admission office staff, a single system for IT to manage, etc.
I built the following features for our site:
- applicant checklist
- inquiry form
- tour reservation form
- visit reservation form
- application form
- student statement
- parent statement
- teacher recommendation
- pay application fee
- read data from our internal admission information system
- export data from website for import into internal admission information system
If you have the resources and expertise, I would encourage you to write your own modules to accomplish this.
Richard, I'm very interested
Richard, I'm very interested in the fact that you pulled the admissions system into your website. We have our inquiry process within Drupal (Webform), but the online application is handled by the vendor Infosnap. We also struggle a great deal with the "contact management" part of the process between inquiry > application > enrollment. I'm curious what backend admission information system you are using, and whether the "read data" and "export data" you mention is a process performed automatically, or are updates from one to the other done manually on a regular basis?
By the way, your posts on using Drupal for your school site were instrumental in decision to try Drupal for our site (in fact, I even put in a phone call to you early on and you were quite helpful) and I was greatly inspired by your site and various posts...our new Drupal-powered site went live in January and I'm continuing to improve it as I become more skilled in Drupal and experienced in working with it. Thanks for the influence and inspiration, Richard!
Behind every big man is a big behind.
Blackbaud
I'm glad to hear that it's going well, CaptDan. We use Blackbaud. Our custom modules read data from parent and applicant records and pull it into custom forms and checklists. This is live and automatic. Then we have export screens to pull data down from the website in Blackbaud-compatible import files. Admission office staff review new user-submitted data, download it to CSV files, and run a saved import routine to bring them into Blackbaud. Another option is to purchase Blackbaud's API and do it automatically, but that was both too costly and perhaps too automatic. We like having a set of eyes review user-submitted data before importing into the school's database.
Civicrm School module
Maybe the civicrm school module can be used for parts of what you want to do. With Civicrm profiles you can create any type of custom form for your online admission process.
http://civicrm.org/taxonomy/term/26
Nursing Schoolo Online - E-Learning Calssroom CMS
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good
good