Bluebrick.ie
BlueBrick.ie provides centralised access to accredited modules provided by Irish academic institutions.
BlueBrick.ie is major new flexible learning initiative which provides easy access to over 350 modules and courses in 14 Institutes of Technology. Through the portal BlueBrick.ie learners of all ages and aptitudes can search, compare and apply for career-focused programmes to meet their individual needs. The Institutes aim to provide access for up to 19,000 part-time students which represents an increase of almost 50% on the 13,000 students currently studying part-time within the Institutes.
BlueBrick.ie designed around 3 core features - search, compare and apply. A typical user journey through BlueBrick.ie would see the learner search for courses that interest them, then review and compare those courses, finally if they are happy with their selection they can apply online through BlueBrick.ie.
Search
The search interface was designed from the outset to be as easy to use as possible, learners can execute a search over all courses in the database by entering their query in the search box on the home page. There is also an advanced search option which allows the user to specify more search criteria such as providing institution, delivery method and academic area.
Compare
When searching for learning items a user can choose to save an item that has interested them to their account for later review. The user can also choose to compare two learning items side by side. This feature allows users to quickly and easily compare learning items based on the information provided by the institutions offering the courses such as; course contents, delivery method, duration or cost.
Apply
The BlueBrick.ie applications engine allows a user to apply for any course listed on the website through a single interface. A useful feature is that once a user submits an application we offer to save their information so that if they wish to apply for another course at a later date we can automatically populate the application form using the saved information.
Course Recommendations
Another core and unique feature of BlueBrick is the course recommendation system. This system allows BlueBrick.ie to provide users with automatically generated recommendations about courses which might be relevant to their needs. Course recommendations are generated through the use of various technologies drawn from the semantic toolbox such as Natural Language Processing, Latent Semantic Indexing and community classification of courses. BlueBrick.ie is capable of automatically classifying courses based on the employment and educational histories of users that apply for or show interest in courses listed in the BlueBrick.ie database. BlueBrick.ie then uses these community classifications when generating search results and recommendations for other users.
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Tue, 23 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT
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