Industry specific software package

Tender description

The University is seeking to renew its institutional online learning provision, with a view to identifying a solution which will be fully operational from August 2107. The University seeks a solution which will enable the institution to provide exceptional opportunities for online learning. The system should: — provide and support a full suite of content management and online learning tools; — afford a high degree of flexibility to adapt to the changing and future needs of the University; — be optimised for a range of mobile devices; — offer an intuitive interface and workflows; — deliver a high level of availability; — be secure and resilient; — support seamless integrations with other University business systems and learning applications; — produce meaningful usage data and reports to support student learning and academic practice. LJMU is seeking to implement a new Virtual Learning Environment which must: — Support the University's Strategic Plan, which emphasises the necessity for ‘Confident and active use of technology by staff to enhance and support the student learning experience’. — Be in the form of a cloud hosted service with at least a 99.9 % access guarantee; safe, robust, scalable and compliant with UK/EU Data Protection Law, and compliant with the LJMU Information Security Policy — Provide an API framework that actively supports technical integration with LJMU's other corporate systems, and those used within the context of teaching and learning. — Have full recovery and restoration capabilities (and clearly articulated RPO and RTO that matches the targets specified in the document) to allow recovery from any major incidents and to allow for the reinstatement of lost or deleted content to ensure this critical service suffers no prolonged outage from which it cannot be recovered. — Offer an accessible, easy to use desktop and mobile interface, for both staff and students to retrieve course content and complete learning activities. — Provide the widest possible opportunities to create rich, engaging learning activities to support different pedagogical approaches and assessments. Be financially sustainable, offering value for money, affordability, flexibility, and adaptability to enhance the service to meet the changing needs of the University. — Integrate seamlessly with current LJMU systems, e.g. SIS, email, reading list, module evaluation, Turnitin, Panopto, and offer methods to develop and expand the service in the future. — Provide the ability to produce detailed, meaningful statistical reports on all system activity, and if LJMU choose, for this data to be exportable in a format that LJMU can further interrogate using the institutions preferred BI toolset. — Provide an intuitive, easy to use assessment environment where all assessment and feedback processes are underpinned by seamless, linear workflows; this should include additional functionality for the creation of media-rich student feedback in video and audio formats. — Offer an intuitive user notification system with the provision of 2 way integration with social media tools. — Provide a system which is fully optimised to allow all major mobile operating systems to undertake core VLE functions, and be available on or off campus, over commonly supported browsers. — Provide the University with a licensing structure which grants access to non LJMU staff and students, where the business case dictates (for example external examiners and validated collaborative provision). — Be accessible, enabling the University to meet its inclusion principles and legislative obligations. — Be fully compliant with appropriate sector legislation and institutional regulations. — Have the ability to support a day-to-day usage level of 1 500 concurrent users, with the ability to scale to an estimated maximum of 3 700 concurrent users without loss of performance. — Provide high-level security for all data. The system should have a low risk of becoming obsolete and there should be no significant change requiring an unplanned migration during the contracted period.