Development Projects

Fees and Funding Calculator

Research undertaken with prospective undergraduate students has shown that Oxford is perceived as an expensive university in which to live and study and that concerns over finance are a barrier to application to Russell group universities from lower socio-economic groups. Prospective students and offer-holders also have a very poor understanding of the funding that is available to them from Oxford and from the government.

Oxford provides bursaries and fee waivers, but the amount provided varies according to household income and the UK region or country in which the student is resident. EU students from outside of the UK are also be eligible for Oxford bursaries and fee waivers. The targets that the University has set itself in its Access Agreement make it particularly important that highly able prospective undergraduate students from the poorest household incomes and/or under-represented groups in the UK do not drop out at any stage of the recruitment or admission process because of a misunderstanding about financial support that Oxford offers.

Testing shows that prospective undergraduates can easily misinterpret the information on our website because of the complexity of this information. The University can only inform Home/EU offer-holders of the exact level of financial support that they will receive when it receives household income data from the Student Loans Company. This in turn means that the University is unable to confirm the exact amount of bursary and fee waiver that the student will receive until late August/early September – i.e. only 6-7 weeks before they arrive in Oxford to start their course.

In addition, graduate fees are becoming increasingly more complex; there are currently 23 different fees that a full-time graduate student could be charged depending on their course, year of entry, and their fee status. Funding for graduate courses is becoming ever more competitive and funding for overseas undergraduates is very limited.

It is important that all applicants are able to find out what funding they can apply for and how much studying at Oxford will cost them. Having such information will enable them to start planning as early as possible how they will fund their studies in Oxford. A single Fees, Funding and Scholarships calculator has been developed for use by all students to provide an estimate of their fees and the funding they might be able to access to cover their costs.

Enquiry Management/Web FAQ Pilot

Enquiry management and web FAQ tools provide professional, quick, and accurate responses to applicant, student, staff and public enquiries. Delivering excellent services to prospective applicants and students is a primary objective of the University. Enquiry management software assists in achieving this goal without the need to recruit more personnel within the admissions and student information teams. A corporate enquiry management and web FAQ pilot is being undertaken within HR, Public Affairs and the AAD. The RightNow 'Any Questions?' tool is now available from the Graduate Admissions, Undergraduate Admissions and Student Gateway websites.

OXAM: Oxford Examination Papers Online

OXAM was developed to provide online access for members of the University to the formal examination papers set by the University of Oxford since academic year 1999/2000. Students can search by keyword in paper title, exam title or exam code; or by a drop-down search on examination title and year. The examination papers are provided in portable document format (pdf).

A project to carry out a feasibility study on different technologies that could provide the Examinations team with the necessary functionalities to support the operational side of OXAM has been carried out. WebLearn was deemed suitable to accommodate the replacement of OXAM including the new requirements of being able to bulk upload and maintain exam papers without the need of major bespoke development. WebLearn is currently being developed to host the searchable database of old Oxford exam papers, to replace the existing OXAM system.

Student Systems Programme

The development of Oxford's IT-based systems that are used to support teaching, learning and assessment, and many other aspects of student administration and support services, is being overseen by the Student Systems Programme. Replacement of the Oracle Student System (OSS), Oxford’s current student records database, lies at the core of the Student Systems Programme, but it goes much further than this. The collegiate University currently has a large suite of systems that have been built to sustain specific aspects of Oxford’s student administration. These support the areas of admissions, day-to-day management of students’ records and academic progression, curriculum set-up, statutory reporting, visa applications, examinations and graduation, as well as the provision of student data to many other specialised and local systems across divisions, departments, colleges and central administration and services. For detailed information on the work of the programme, please refer to the Student Systems section of this site.

Key Information Sets

In November 2010, a consultation document setting out proposals from the Higher Education Public Information Steering Group for providing enhanced information for students was published. During Hilary Term 2011, Oxford took part in the pilot being run by the HEPISG to develop these Key Information Sets (KIS), with the assistance of divisional and college officers.

From autumn 2012, all higher education institutions in England and Northern Ireland will be required by the Funding Council to produce Key Information Sets (KIS) as part of their provision of clear and useful information about universities and their undergraduate courses to key groups including potential applicants, their advisers and employers.  The provision of KIS has been linked to the concept of transparency within the higher education market that is evolving as maximum undergraduate fees increase to £9000 from 2012 and will underpin one of the four strands of the QAA’s new Institutional Reviews.  From 2012-13 these will include consideration of the quality of public information, including that produced for students and applicants. It is also highly probable that external commentators will seek to produce ‘league tables’ based on data within the KIS.  Thus it is clear that these figures have the potential to play a significant part in shaping perceptions of universities among key external audiences.

A report on the University’s participation in the development of the KIS was received by Education Committee in Hilary Term 2011. This noted the potential for compilation of KIS data to be highly resource intensive; general concern among the participating institutions that the attempt to capture single statistics to represent the experience of an undergraduate on a specific course inevitably masked the choices available to students as they progress through their studies; guidance on a consistent approach to be used across the sector as the basis on which any concatenation should be conducted would be essential; and the potential that an institution’s KIS – which represent, almost exclusively, measures of quantity – could become confused in public perceptions with measures of quality if not presented appropriately.

2011/12 activity: HEFCE’s final decisions on the content of the KIS is due to be issued to the sector in September 2011.  HEFCE plans to make a test data submission available to institutions from December 2011. The first round of KIS data will need to be supplied to HEFCE no later than June 2012.

For this first year of data provision at least, KIS will only be published through universities’ own websites; the planned single point of access to this data, through which applicants can readily compare KIS for different courses and institutions, will still be under development at that point. The Undergraduate Admissions Office is considering how it wishes to incorporate the KIS data within the Admissions website. When supplying data that will generate its KIS, universities are encouraged to provide links to more detailed information about modules within courses – both in terms of learning and teaching and of methods of assessment - for example as part of the undergraduate prospectus or within programme specifications or handbooks.  Purely quantitative measures of learning and teaching methods such as those to be included within KIS will not, of themselves, clearly reflect the core role of the tutorial in undergraduate courses at Oxford.  It is therefore crucial that the ‘supplementary’ information which will link from the KIS for each course to provide context to the raw data presents a comprehensive picture of the Oxford student experience, in terms of patterns of both study and assessment. Integration of the more detailed information about course content into the main design of the university’s website should avoid any need for multiple presentations of the same material on other web pages.

The data collected on a course level may also provide additional information that can be of use within the University in areas such as planning, validation of courses and options and quality assurance.

Establishing initial processes to collect KIS data: A working group was established chaired by Professor Softley comprising the divisional/CE representatives on Education Committee and the relevant quality assurance officers and the Chairman of the Senior Tutors' Committee, for the pilot work.  To ensure consistency and accuracy of Oxford’s KIS data supplied annually to HEFCE, it is recommended that a working group include both Divisional and College representatives.  This group, using the experience of the pilot, should establish the appropriate processes for the simplification and automation of the annual data collection and checking that will be required for the KIS.

An outline of proposals for collecting data for the KIS that will be published in 2012 will highlight the need to draw on information that is currently held in a number of different places within the university – and not always in a form which is consistent with the KIS categorisations.  As the requirements of KIS become clearer, it is intended that these should be built into the University’s processes of validation and amendments to degree regulations – however, given the consistency of a number of Oxford’s courses and papers over time, there will be many situations in which initial KIS data has to be generated specifically for this purpose, rather than extracted from existing documentation. 

It is inevitable that the data collection process will require input from a range of individuals: in the main, these are likely to include divisional officers, departmental administrators, course leaders, senior tutors and examiners. The University’s participation in the KIS pilot data collection exercise confirmed that a manual approach is highly labour intensive and requires the input of a number of senior members of staff across Oxford (within Departments, Divisions, UAS and the undergraduate Colleges). The manual processes that are used to collect KIS data for 2012 will inform the system requirements that need to be specified to automate this process in future years. Furthermore (once appropriate guidance has been disseminated internally on how that data should be prepared), this centralised approach would reduce the possibility of inconsistencies in the quality of information produced.

It is proposed that the data collation and analysis duties be given to a member of staff for whom this would be their duty for three months of the year, with time needed at other stages to verify data, review and refine processes, with oversight by a senior member of staff for policy and internal communications issues and by a senior member of staff for review of Oxford’s data before submission. 

Data to be supplied by universities: Of the items of information to be included within KIS data, five sets of data are to be collected and provided by institutions to HEFCE annually.  These are:

• Accommodation costs, by institution: costs of undergraduate accommodation provided by or through an institution; and costs of undergraduate accommodation in the private rented sector (both to be presented in terms of upper and lower quartile only);
• Coding (UCAS, JACS and internal identifiers), by course: can be extracted from the Oracle Student system (OSS);
• External accreditation, by course: where accredited by a professional body, information (including links to the websites of accrediting bodies) will be included within the KIS.  This will cover the award granted, its period of validity of the accreditation and any compulsory routes through the course that are required to obtain the specified professional status; 
• Learning and teaching methods, by course: scheduled activities; guided independent study; and placement/study abroad are to be shown as a percentage of the undergraduate’s study time, broken down by each year of the course.  The ‘study year’ is considered to be 1200 hours;.
• Methods of assessment, by course: written exams; course work; and practical exams.  Information will be shown as a percentage of the potential contribution that each could make to the undergraduate’s academic credit, for each year of their course. Agreement that only summative assessment is to be included.