Case Study - Course search

The challenge

A higher education client required a new site for searching their courses. They also wanted to improve marketing consistency by ensuring the individual faculty websites would use the same data, following compliance rules.

It was important to faculties to retain their independent look and feel.

In an increasingly commercialised sector, ensuring the students receive the course as advertised is key.

The approach

I architected the solution that ensured course data was centralised (a single point of truth) and searchable on the course website, but accessible to faculties to display on their own sites.

The client already had an installation of Apache Solr, so I chose this for the search engine. It’s already understood and supported, which reduces admin overhead.

I ensured API docs were available to the faculties, so they could self-serve and get consistent course information on their sites. I also worked closely with faculty stakeholders and other business teams to help them understand the benefits of the solution, and to ensure buy-in.

The solution

The client already had a CMS in place, so I decided this should be built upon to reduce any training overhead. The central CMS also ensured auditing for marketing compliance.

A JSON-based RESTful API was built on top of this CMS to allow a unified API for both the search website and the faculty websites.

Where possible, out-of-the-box solutions were used to meet the client’s enterprise architecture ethos.

The result

Marketing compliance overhead was reduced by 80%, as they could be sure that course data had a single source, which could be checked for compliance.

Faculty marketing overhead was reduced, as they no longer needed to copy course data into their own sites and ensure it remained up to date.

The system was scalable, highly available and the solution received praise from the head of enterprise architecture.

Key aspects