Hotcourses Systems benefits from strong partnerships with a number of key organisations within the UK education sector.
Ufi/Learndirect
As the lead and technical partner in the consortium responsible for the official
Learndirect advice national course database, we have very strong links with Ufi. In addition to managing the design, maintenance and ongoing development of the national database (which currently holds over 700,000 individual course details), we also collect all FE and commercial providers' course information nationwide.
We have also developed a number of specialised web-portals which access the national database from the websites of various well-known broadcast and media organisations, such as the BBC, Channel 4, The Evening Standard, etc. And recently, we have successfully launched over 30 regional access web-portals for the government's local Information, Advice and Guidance (IAG) partnerships, and various local LSCs.
British Council
We are the lead and technical partner in the consortium - including UCAS and the Careers Services Unit (CSU) - which operates the £5m contract to develop and maintain the British Council's official
EducationUK family of international websites to promote UK education worldwide. Web-based services on this project have so far included:
- Bespoke database and web design of the EducationUK global website; including access to the Learndirect advice national course database, email enquiry facilities, online applications within a secure server environment, translated course content and student information (e.g., Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Thai, Spanish, etc).
- Web design, database and application development for individual in-country, British Council office websites (e.g., British Council Singapore, Malaysia, Scotland, etc); together with easy-to-use, web-based content management systems for non-technical users to amend and update website content (e.g., news items, student stories, FAQs) in a variety of European and Asian languages.
- As the same consortium also recently won the contract to publish the British Council's print-based publications, we have just launched a new product, Hotcourses Publisher, which fully integrates both online and offline media content; providing course providers with a simple web-interface to compose and amend their course data and institutional profiles via the Internet for publication in print or on the web.
UCAS
We have been working with the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service for a number of years and are proud to have its Chief Executive, Anthony McClaran, sitting on our Advisory Board. UCAS are our partner in the consortia which are responsible for the official
learndirect advice national course database, and the British Council's official EducationUK family of international websites to promote British education worldwide. In addition to online versions of our official UCAS retail guides, we also provide a course search facility on UCAS.com for students to find information on FE and short courses.
