The Provision of an Engagement Monitoring Software Solution

Tender description

The University would like to be able to monitor the academic engagement of students, whilst partaking in academic activities on campus, off campus or academic activities whilst working online. Monitoring academic engagement has also been introduced as part of the new immigration system on 5 October 2020 by the Home Office (UKVI). The new academic engagement policy requires sponsors (University of Southampton) to ensure that all sponsored students are academically engaged for the entirety of their course, including activities they consider would indicate academic engagement such as: • Attending required lectures, seminars, or tutorials • Undertaking required laboratory work • Undertaking research or fieldwork • Submitting essays, assignments and attending examinations The monitoring needs to be simple for students to use and give visibility to the student of academic engagement information being collected. The university needs to be able collect the data required, use appropriate technology and to be able to report on the data quickly and efficiently. Our plan is to have the appropriate, technological solution in place for September 2023. Lot 1: To implement a new engagement monitoring system for all students across the university to ensure that the data which is collected is consistent across all faculties and schools and it is fully inclusive. The system would need to: • Be a cloud-based SaaS solution. • Have an end-to-end solution operating over Wi-Fi or Mobile Data connections requiring no hardware such as beacons or card readers. • Be accessible from mobile device, tablet or laptop or university owned device. • Have the ability for staff to manually amend the record where students do not have any IT device access for the class. • Be compliant with Student visa/Tier 4 reporting requirements and have recent proven acceptance from the Home Office. • Integrate with other University systems such as student records, timetabling, VLE, Lecture Capture, Library Management, Reading list software, Blackboard and MS365. • Provide a comprehensive range of reports which can be used in visualisations for different audiences such as Student Hub, Visa Compliance, Student Engagement. • Must be able to record several university attendance parameters such as attended/absent/late/left early/not required. • Have notifications feature to highlight low attendance of a student. • Able to produce data to enable an email to be sent from the system or from the University CRM. • Able to extract attendance data from the system to use as part of institutional workflows. • Ability to add 'adhoc' events directly into the system. • Be currently used by several UK Universities with a proven track record of providing user groups. • Be continually developed to adapt to the changing needs of the University. • Ensure that the University has sufficient oversight of student attendance to instigate an early warning system for unauthorised absent students. Procurement Process: This procurement process was being conducted as an Open procedure. Contract Period: five years - this will be the maximum contract period, including any potential extensions; an initial contract period of three (3) years with an option to extend by a further two (2) 12 month periods subject to satisfactory performance and at the discretion of the University. Additional information: Lots: This contract is NOT suitable for splitting into lots. The risk of dividing the requirement into Lots would render the execution of the contract excessively technically difficult, not cost effective and would undermine proper execution of the contract.