Open Colleges - Enrolment and Payment Processing System

Open Colleges is Australia’s largest private provider of distance education with over 30,000 actively enrolled students. With increased take-up of online learning, Open Colleges has an exciting future and will continue to play a pioneering role in open, online and distance learning in Australia. More than 700,000 students have benefited from distance education courses delivered by Open Colleges since its inception in Australia in 1910. Open Colleges engaged Intergy to provide an Online Enrolment and Payment System that integrates with the Westpac payment gateway and a 3rd party credit control provider, Debit Success.

The Solution

We created a separate website called “Edupay” to handle the enrolment and payment processing for Open Colleges, which is linked to from their main website.  Students use Edupay to both enrol in a course and pay for it, selecting either to pay in full using their credit card or to pay in instalments.  Several discount options are available to the student including a voucher system managed at the back end by Open Colleges (for example, Open Colleges can advertise certain time limited voucher codes in both online and traditional media – and their usage can be tracked).  The system is fully integrated with the Westpac payment gateway for credit card payments, and Debit Success for students who wish to pay their fees by instalments.

The system also provides the option for the student to complete a government mandated Survey in realtime, or print it out and complete it later.  Once the enrolment/payment/survey process is complete, the system emails the student with the enrolment details and survey in PDF format.  Cengage staff are also copied in on the transaction for further processing.

A Secure Management module has been created for Open Colleges staff to login and run various management and reconciliation reports, and export the data to excel or PDF.

Technology Used

User interfaces are developed using ASP.NET framework 4.0. SOAP Web Services was used to integrate with third party applications. SQL Server 2008 used as a database, and SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) was used for all reporting.