JCVU – A digital educational portal

JCVU, or UCJ in English, is short for University College Jutland and unites a number of medium-length educations in a cross-functional center. The organization consists of 550 staff members and provides education to professional bachelor level and further education within the general areas of teaching, health science, management and consultancy. In addition, a number of local and national knowledge centers are associated with the center which provide for a strong educational environment. 

On January 1^st 2007 JCVU was created as a merger between seven educational institutions, creating the need for a new central website. In a situation where several different institutions merged organizationally and culturally, JCVU chose to create a new website portal that should serve as the organizations primary external contact face. To solve the task JCVU got in touch with the Danish interactive competence bureau Co3. 

The website was created using a Dynamicweb Portal solution which gathers all types of information from various sources and which is able to handle the many pages of the website.

Individuality and integrated design
 

From the beginning it was emphasized that the website needed to fulfill functions on different levels within the organization, which made the logic of the user interface of highest priority. This meant that during the design process there was strong focuses on making the different administrative units stand out, while still retaining the perception that the units where an integrated part of the portal.

By combining the Dynamicweb Portal solution with Dynamicweb Language/Area a structured solution has been achieved in which the individual sub-sites can be customized from a shared design with the possibility of making individual adjustments. By using Dynamicweb the website is also easy to maintain and update. Adding new pages and developing the website in line with the overall design thus becomes very straightforward.

“We are very happy about our new website. In the development we aimed at fulfilling as many of the “Best on the Web” requirements by the Danish National IT and Telecom Agency as possible. With the new portal I think we are off to a very good start and with Dynamicweb it is easy to develop and add new elements.” Says Anne Kai, Information officer JCVU.

Another central module used on the solution is the Dynamicweb News module, which has been used to easily provide users with news. This includes news on JCVU portal level as well as news concerning the individual administrative units. In this way students can find news that are relevant to their specific education on the sub-site, while more overall news for the entire organization are brought on the portal entry page.

Course database with integration to SIS

For this portal solution Co3 has developed a custom module in co-operation with the IT-support centre at JCVU. The module consists of a course database that retrieves data from SIS –Study administrative Information System – goes through a central database and into a presentation on the website. In this way the user is able to search all available courses and diploma educations offered by JCVU. The dialog between the different environments is handled by webservices. To display the data, Co3 has developed a number of custom modules that are implemented into the solution.

JCVU in brief

JCVU, or UCJ in English, is short for University College Jutland and became a reality on January 1st 2007 after merger of seven educational institutions. The centre provides education to professional bachelor level as well as further education within the general areas of teaching, health science, management and consultancy. The organization currently comprises 550 staff members who educate 4.500 students at professional bachelor level, 1.500 at diploma level and 24.000 in courses and conferences.

As part of an ongoing development of the centre, JCVU has – in co-operation with four other University Colleges – started the preparations for the establishment of a central college for the entire Midtjylland region of Denmark. The aim is to merge the five institutions on January 1st 2008.
 

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