The University of Washington is a public flagship research university based in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast.
Challenges
The University of Washington was a member of a higher education consortium whose purpose was to develop an open-source, cloud based, student information system, called Kuali-Student. However, when the consortium disbanded, The University of Washington was left to continue the development on their own. They needed to replace their antiquated 30-year-old paper-based student information system with the electronic, open source Kuali system to better improve student and faculty use of the system.
The Solution
The University of Washington brought in Akvarr’s senior Java consultant, who was already working with Kuali on this project for the consortium, and therefore was already familiar with the process involved and the necessary next steps. Once the consortium disbanded, UW was quick to bring in Akvarr to help them build this open source, cloud-based system from scratch.
Result
Akvarr completed the development of this new system, allowing close to ten-thousand students and staff to access courses and curriculum planning. Prior to this new Kuali system, Students maybe knew about ten different programs in their majors, when in actuality there were hundreds. Making this all electronic allows students to align their interests to the kind of program that they may want to major in. This project was estimated to take 12 months to complete, but with the help of Akvarr, The University of Washington was able to complete the Kuali Student system in half the time at 6 months, saving the university time and money, and increasing satisfaction of both students and staff.
