Open Universities Australia (OUA) is a higher education organisation formed and owned by seven of the country's large universities. Now 25 years old, OUA boasts 150 different degrees and around 1,500 different classes from 13 universities, allowing students to gain tertiary training completely online through its Open Access program.
Although OUA is almost unrecognisable from the organisation that begun broadcasting lectures via television at 2am, OUA general manager Andy Sheats said somewhere along the way, the OUA business got "really complicated".
"The platform was built and the systems were built around a much more complex business model," Sheats told ZDNet.
Open access to education is legislated by the government; however, Sheats said OUA is the only place that students can get distance tertiary education
Sheats joined OUA in 2017 with a focus immediately on simplifying its marketplace platform and the underlying IT. However, with 250 staff all based in Melbourne and focused on the student, OUA turned to IBM's Bluewolf to help it centralise everything.
"We use a lot of Salesforce; we use Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, Advertising Cloud -- we do a lot of stuff," Sheats explained.
"We use quite a few different applications because the education tech landscape is a bit complex, we use quite a few different things, but we wanted to bring all of the base information into Salesforce so that we have one view of the student to figure out what to do with them."
Sheats said the project was aimed at getting all of OUA's data into one place so it can begin to use machine learning to help "home-in" on the student's experience, whether it's a piece of advice, recommendations, or identifying a problem or a potential problem faster