VID’s ‘My Page’ Provides a Seamless Student Experience

Introduction

VID is a private, non-profit specialized university with headquarters in Oslo, Norway. Also present in Bergen, Stavanger, and Tromsø among others, VID offers  educational programs in health sciences, social sciences, and theology for a total of 6,000 students.

For some time, the administration at VID had observed and received feedback on the suboptimal nature of the digital student user experience, and especially the enrolment process. In the spring of 2022, VID put together a pre-project task force with people from different functions like the faculty, the administration, IT, HR, and finance to map the entire student journey.

The goal was to prepare a project where Enonic partner Frontkom eventually would improve the student experience substantially.

Challenge

The primary challenge facing the students was all the disparate services they had to contend with. Students had to retrieve different information on different occasions from:

• The VID website
• Canvas (teaching and learning software)
• TimeEdit (schedules)
• Nettskjema (forms)
• Inspera (exams system)
• ServicePortalen (student service)
• Sikresiden (crisis management)

The overwhelming amount of services was confusing, and demotivated the students from navigating through their journey.

This also spawned a second, related challenge. The students had no unified student experience. During the course of the studies, different events send the students in different directions.

The students for instance receive a printer access card, initiate a student loan, register for studies and exams, and apply for an exchange program. All these events happen in different places, like the international office, the student service, the faculty, and the Norwegian State Educational Loan Fund.

A third challenge was the amount of pages the students had to click through and navigate, and which the VID staff would have to edit. The results of this unmanageable amount of content was the same for both parties: outdated information.

On the flip side of the educational coin, no unit or department at VID knew the entire student journey from A to Z fully, either. Questions like “what’s happening for the student now?” and “who contacts the student, and when?” came up frequently during the pre-project.

VID thus mapped out the student journey, creating helpful personas like:

• Samira Student: 19 years old, wants to study for nurse, straight out of high school 
• Morten Midtveis (Morten Middle): Not full study progression, always lagging behind, wants to do an exchange program 
• Vilma Vilmye (Vilma Wantmuch): Classic part-time student, 40s+, family, busy, wants professional replenishment

How could VID make sure that these student personas perform the same tasks, and still guarantee that their unique information is available exactly when they need it? Cleaning up the information and schedule proved a significant challenge.

For instance, the onboarding process illustrated for the VID organization why they had to reform. The question “what is the first thing the student gets from VID?” was answered with “a dry pin code letter”.

VID not only changed specific elements like this in the student experience—they also had to re-organize themselves in order to reflect the new digital journey.

Solution

To make the amount of services manageable, as well as the information relevant and timely, the VID staff imagined a ‘My Page’ solution. A single, unified interface providing the students with what they need and when they need it.

The Norwegian digital agency Frontkom, which specializes in the educational sector, was brought in to realize VID’s vision using the flexible Enonic platform. They leveraged Enonic’s API integration capabilities to provide a centralized integration and caching layer for API data.

Enonic Content Studio also delivers robust content management features, which gave VID the flexibility to create and customize site content and structure as they required. Other handy features include automatic menu generation, scheduled content publishing, and rich text areas, enabling a visual experience for content editors.

Enonic empowers VID with a flexible tool that is easy to develop content and customization. Especially the functionality that enables customized content for dedicated groups was key for a successful platform.

The resulting portal—My Page—is a progressive web app functioning as a mobile app and a website, displaying dynamic and personalized content based on the individual user’s preferences and persona. The portal retrieves data from several different services, and conveniently displays relevant information from these, in a timely manner, to the student.

The portal is organized as follows:

• A personal greeting
• Shortcuts to the most used services/tools
• Todo list
• Schedule

Everything in the portal is centered on the phases that are important for the students—enrolling as students, practice, exams, exchange, and completion. The todo list is always centered around achieving goals within these phases, as is the editorial content.

First-timers in the portal get a step by step guide for the most important tasks to be done. They first log into FEIDE, which is a service for uniform identity management in the Norwegian education sector. After logging in, the students will see the most important tools, like the schedule, educational sessions that are mandatory to attend, notifications from Canvas, news, and events. This view is dynamic.

Prospective exchange students, on the other hand, get a todo list with tasks and information related to their specific needs. The VID staff has set up landing pages and forms in Enonic, where the inherent access management allows the right people access to managing the relevant content.

When practice is coming up for students, they see dynamic todo lists with tasks they must remember to perform in order for their studies to be valid. The portal also provides an overview of subjects and campus affiliation, and the possibility to book rooms, registration for exams, and more.

The dynamic and personalized nature of the portal is built by Frontkom through the Enonic platform. Every content type—tasks, news, articles, events, landing pages, school information, and administrator messages—is segmented. Segmentation is determined by various factors, including campus, year of study, programs, courses, classes, and groups.