TECHNOLOGY AND SERVICES THAT OPTIMISE RECRUITMENT, RETENTION AND ENGAGEMENT IN EDUCATION
A better way to create, plan and manage organisational events, communications and knowledge
uCal
Very often, when discussing challenges and aspirations with our clients, the conversations touch on how painful it is when every department, the leadership and even some individuals will create and control their own calendars of events, surveys, emails, campaigns and other contact points with students.
Whilst everyone, perhaps understandably, has their own strategy for student comms and engagement, this does slightly ignore how the resultant waves of communications and occasional contradictions feel to students as they wash over them at various times of the year. When a student is contacted by student services, their school or faculty and your comms team about the same stuff in the same week by email, text and the student portal, it is understandable that they might form the view that comms from the institution are not much worth reading!
uCal provides a universal view on any and every event that your institution has underway, has completed and is in the plan for students to get the best possible learning and life experience you can give them. Through its integrations to external systems and sources (including your admin, HR and learning systems, your shared resources and planning sites, and, of course, the centrally controlled academic year calendar(s). uCal gives a single place to go to get that joined up view.
You can create events and engagements by simple click and drag actions, group them by types, link them together in temporal chains that manage the flows of engagements and activities and no self-respecting calendar/timeline can hold its digital head high unless it supports drag and drop changes to any item on its configurable, multi-coloured interface!
Of course, you can't allow this stuff to become a free for all where anyone can create, change and confirm an event and all the student comms that go with it. So uCal includes the ability to set statuses, enable team and individual ownership and control, and, if you wish, the ability to filter who can see what is happening across the institution.
uCal feels like that thing that everyone would love to have so that no-one has any opportunity to say "well, I didn't know that you were planning/doing/asking/saying X or Y or Z. Wouldn't that be lovely?!!
Below is a quick video of how uCal works. You can watch this or click this link to get to some more detailed explanations of what uCal is made up of, how extensible and configurable it is and how it can deliver a simple, scalable and flexible solution to move your organisation a big step forward.
uCal - functional elements
Sometimes it can be tough to explain software. These sections (hopefully) allow you to see how uCal can be adapted to your organisation. Ignore that these examples are about education - they can be about anything!
Underpinning Data
Building a unified calendar and plan is akin to building anything that is going to be sustainable, understandable, shareable and relatable to YOUR organisation.
It needs imagination, collaboration, reflection and clear direction.
The names we call things, the images we relate to them, the colours, the shapes all create something that everyone can relate to.
How you can make uCal YOURS is reflected in the way you create event groups, types, statuses, channels etc. YOUR terminology, YOUR images, YOUR processes, YOUR teams, people and permissions.
Obviously, there are advantages to having a common model of all these things but, when considering the publication of your calendars, the use of imagery takes on a different meaning.
Integrations
Obviously, you will want to be able to take what you already have and import it into uCal so we provide simple templates for you to be able to download, populate and then upload into uCal where you can link, enhance and update simple data into connected events and engagements.
uCal comes with a real-time push subscription services that can drive event and engagement data to destination applications where they can be used in whatever ways you want.
If you do not have suitable systems, uCal has the capability to use its own multi-channel contact management system to do the work for you. This is Student Pulse, also developed by Cenote and well-established as a leading student engagement and experience management application.
Daisy Chains
Metaphors are powerful because they create connections the resonate with us all more deeply than similes or simplistic analogies.
Chains, links, associations, connections are metaphors that everyone understands; their certainty and yet their potential fragility, their longevity and yet their possible brevity, their obviousness to some despite their obliqueness to others.
uCal deals with linkages, chains, relationships in multiple dimensions. It allows you to connect an event to any number of engagements, communications, responses and automations thus creating a planned, streamlined but adaptive communication model.
Naturally, users with permissions only have to drag and drop an event or linked set of events from one date to another date and uCal takes care of all the linked elements.
Attachments
There are so many documents, websites and discussions that are critical to a successful and collaborative model of organisational event and engagement management that it is easy to understand why users get sick of trying to join them all up from the disparate locations where different teams keep them.
There is nothing wrong with having lots of documents in lots of places per se but there is something wrong when that results in people wasting time duplicating information, creating conflicting documents etc etc.
uCal overcomes this by allowing users to link URLs, documents, images and notes/discussion threads to any and every event and engagement. Permissions ensures that users can keep control of attachment visibility while @mentions ensures that people can be alerted to important changes through discussions and notes.
Dashboards and Reporting
An optional module to add even more value and power to uCal is its integrated dashboard and reporting functionality. uCal has various different formats it provides to present data for you but there are sometimes occasions when you may want more than that, so you can subscribe to this module and then the possibilities are almost endless.
Fully controlled by roles and permissions, with integrated triggers for alerts through email to selected users, uCal dashboards provide tables, numerous chart formats with drill down, drill around, filters, targets, trendlines and analytics to ensure you are able to provide whatever information is needed.
Cenote delivers training and a managed service for dashboard and report development if required.
Implementation and Training
Rapid Implementation
Getting uCal up and running is a matter of a few days for the key users across your organisation who will lead the creation and management of your unified calendar.
The focus in our service delivery consultancy is around the way you set up and manage the underpinning event types, groups, channels, statuses, tags, users, teams and permissions etc so that, as you start creating entries or importing them from other sources, you know how uCal is going be able to filter, present and report on everything.
It's not that it is difficult, it is just that it needs thinking about and agreeing otherwise, just like all those disparate calendars and plans you have right now, nothing will really fit together in a coherent way.
We can work with you on-site and/or via on-line sessions in order to keep things agile, flexible and lower cost.
You should be ready to get up and running within a couple of weeks from the date you sign up.
On-line training
We suggest two levels of training for your organisation;
- power users
- casual users
Power Users
These people will be able to create core reference data, manage tags, teams, permissions and other administration functions plus be able to create dashboards and reports, if required. They will be able to upload data from other systems and create exports and integrations from uCal into other applications. Obviously, they can do all the things Casual Users can do.
Training for these users will take around 8 hours in total and can be delivered on-line
Casual Users
These people will be users who are allowed to create events and engagements, attach documents, URLs, user notes and discussion threads and decide who can and cannot see their entries.
The can create and save filters, change views and timelines plus being able to run reports and dashboards.
Training for these users is four hours
OUR
TEAM
We'd like to introduce the Cenote Team:
Mark Sampson
CEO
Mark has over thirty years working in the EdTech sector in many countries across the world, in particular in the UK and Asia Pacific. Having built and led large companies, worked in exec roles in VET and HE, Mark is the creator and driver of uCal and other Cenote software solutions.
He has implemented some of the largest and most complex student management systems in education, bears the scars and brings those experiences to the way he engages with a passion and drive to change the ways students are engaged and supported
With a fair fewer years than Mark (don't those years just show!), Luke brings a remarkable level of experience and knowledge of how to implement uCal successfully.
Perhaps it has something to do not only with his enormous capacity for hard work and his determination but also because it was only a few years ago that Luke was himself a student, working in student support while he completed his degree. A perfect blend of recent experience and devotion to changing things for the better
Lead Consultant
Luke Fenech
Of course, there are plenty more people who do the incredible work of taking the ideas the Luke and Mark have (plus all the feedback we get from users of our software) and turn those ideas beautiful Figma designs (thanks Jed) , into code, components and all the super-clever stuff that goes into building an enterprise application such as Student Pulse (thanks wonderful development teams). Keeping everyone in order and on task we have our lovely project manager (thanks Kenny). The team has been working together for years now and really understand what Pulse is for and not just how the code works.
OUR
CLIENTS
Cenote is very proud to have worked with the following leaders in education:
WHAT
THEY SAY
A few things our clients have had to say about our offerings:
“As a small but rapidly growing technology business working in education, it is sometimes hard to navigate the challenges and changes we have to respond to. Having Mark alongside us to advise, guide and support us has been invaluable. His ability to see beyond the immediate need and identify where the added value lies how allowed us to accelerate developments and market initiatives more quickly and effectively. His commercial experience and judgement has played an important role in some of our most significant contracts and we look forward to working with him for many years to come.”
Ben Grozier, CEO of ClassCover
NEWS
A lovely award - November 22
We are delighted to have been recognised for our market-leading work by APAC CIO Outlook who have placed as one of the top 5 education technology companies in Australia.
We believe passionately in what we do and work hard to try to be creative and yet pragmatic, ambitious and yet realistic, confident but not arrogant.
When someone from the outside world recognises that we have done some cool stuff and made a difference, that is a lovely acknowledgment that we are getting some stuff right. Always plenty of room for getting more stuff right, but it is nice to feel seen and appreciated by some industry experts.
