Online Student Handbook

Student handbooks are an annual headache for any university.  For University College Falmouth providing handbooks for international students was becoming a resource intensive excercise that did not necessarily deliver the benefits intended.  It came to altcom to explore how it could transfer its annual handbook to an online presence but keep the useful immediacy and feel of a book.  The solution made use of the latest web technologies to create an innovative interfacethat sits over an Open Source content management system that the staff and students could update.

• The chosen CMS was Drupal- flexible, robust and easy to manage
• The information architecture was developed around the classic handbook structure
• The interface controls allow A - Z browsing with filtering by category
• Users can grab and pinboard content they encounter and  want to come back to - effectively creating a "lightbox" of useful info
• The system incorporates video and can handle podcasting
• It is also multilingual (but no translations were required for this as English is a pre-requisite of entry to the courses)

altcom were amazing to work with.  They demonstrated technical ability and creative flair and remained unflappable and professional throughout the project.  

Steph Cosgrove, International Office, UCF

The project went live in March 2009. It has also been the subject of an academic paper.