Case Studies

City of Bath College - UK

The City of Bath College is a further education college set in the world heritage city of Bath.

It has a substantial number of students taking well-established vocational courses. The aim of these courses is largely to prepare the students for work or, for the part-time students, to further them in their careers.

A significant part of the college is focused on delivering IT including HNC/Ds in Computing.

Systems analysis is the art of identifying business problems and developing corresponding IT solutions. While an important subject, it is frequently seen as 'dry and theoretical' by some students.

The Virtual Work Placement software was used to devise a simulation of a three week placement carrying out a systems analysis project for a local business.

The cascading development of the scenario caught the student interest, consequently leading to a substantial increase in timely submission rates of the assessment and the grades achieved.

All the full and part-time HNC/D computing students rated the assessment as more realistic than the traditional paper based alternative version of the assessment.

Additionally, the percentage of students who, as a result of taking the assessment, assessed themselves as more confident of applying their learning in the real world increased to 82%.