Open College of Arts - Community Portal
HVL has built a new portal to serve the students and potential students of the Open College of Arts. The portal makes extensive use of the same underlying technology platform used in all of the HVL community sites.
The Open College of Arts (OCA) is a worldwide community of around 5,000 painting, drawing, textiles, photography, creative writing and design students undertaking home-study courses at their own pace. It is based in the UK and affiliated to the Open University.
OCA has contracted with HVL to implement much of the technology that HVL has developed for its LogonToArt portal in an OCA branded site for its own specific community of arts students.
The OCA site includes the following HVL tools and modules:
- The registration module - to allow the OCA students to profile themselves and sign up to the different courses
- ePortfolio tool- giving each student their own virtual gallery for presenting their work
- Flexible Content Management System - Allows users to view work in a variety of ways eg by style, course, artist or medium
- News & events module - keeping the students informed about what's going on
- Forums module - allowing the community to communicate and comment on important issues
- eCommerce platform - HVL are building OCA a book shop and eCommerce capability to allow students to purchase course materials and books on-line
HVL designed and built the new portal and managed the migration of all the data from the previous site, making the transition seamless to the users. HVL now hosts and supports the site for OCA.
The site has been designed and 'skinned' to the look and feel required by the OCA. By re-using the existing HVL modules and applications in this way, the OCA has achieved a rich level of functionality at a fraction of the price of a traditionally developed dedicated site.