City College Birmingham is to use a system based on IP
telephony and XML to track the attendance of 30,000 students when
the new term starts in September.
The college, which is spread across 32 buildings, said it was the
UK's first educational institution to use IP phones in this way.
City College Birmingham receives annual funding of £25m from the
Learning and Skills Council. Ninety per cent of this is based on
student attendance, so it was imperative the college tightened up
attendance tracking.
Previously its attendance system was inefficient, based on manually
collecting paper registers. The college worked with network
integrator Omnetica to develop a network-based approach which would
allow it to track student attendance in real time.
The college redesigned its network architecture last year,
replacing a hub and spoke design which had a 2Mbit leased line
between two main sites on different sides of the city. The new
network has a more secure, less expensive 10/100Mbit ring topology.
It is IP-enabled and has been designed for resilience.
Rachel Brown, director of student information and IT strategy,
said, "The old network was pretty much falling over."
Using the new network, Omnetica designed an IP telephony system,
which the college piloted between October 2003 and summer 2004.
This was based on a Cisco IP telephony system, initially using one
central Call Manager application.
The pilot used 24 IP handsets, into which the staff keyed in
student attendance data and text messaged it to a central database.
Users log on to the IP handset using a user name and password, and
the system uses XML to synchronise lists of students and attendance
data between the handsets and an Oracle database.
At £200 per handset plus the cost of the network, Brown said IP
telephony was expensive but worthwhile. The whole venture has a
projected cost of between £750,000 and £1m, so the college is
having to implement it in phases.
The college plans to add two more Cisco Call Managers this year and
48 more by the end of 2005. Altogether, the college expects to have
78 IP phones in operation.
Brown said the IP phones have given staff flexibility and reduced
internal call costs. "The main benefit has been that it will retain
students, and therefore, the core government funding," she said.