The experience for would-be students applying to Simon Fraser University through ApplyBC will soon appear seamless, with the added benefit that B.C.’s post-secondary system will have much more complete, real-time application data.

A re-design project to integrate ApplyBC with SFU’s application system has been underway for the past several months. “This moves us significantly towards the option selected by the ApplyBC Steering Committee and post-secondary institutions as the future direction for ApplyBC,” said BCcampus’ director of student and data services, Randy Bruce.

The redesigned ApplyBC will be in production at SFU at the beginning of October in time for the start of their Fall-2013 admissions cycle.

“It makes sense for SFU to put effort and resources into this work,” said Randy Bruce. “Their current system couldn’t support this functionality – but the re-design will save them significant resources in the future. For instance, they won’t need to spend staff time chasing application fee payments, and they won’t need to maintain this application system because BCcampus will.”

This model will be implemented at several additional institutions over next year or two (see the posted 2012-14 ApplyBC workplan), so B.C.’s post-secondary system can realize significant economies of scale in its application service.

For those interested, here are some more technical milestones coming up:

• Design, initial programming and first-round testing are now complete.
• The joint BCcampus/SFU team is currently resolving some bugs and design issues found during testing.
• A second round of internal testing late July, followed by another period of issues resolution.
• A final full-load test is planned for mid-August.