UCC has a long history of supporting non-traditional learners to achieve their professional and personal educational goals. Many units across the university deliver responsive, targeted, and specialised programmes aligned with their academic strengths, paired with industry and community partners.

When the global pandemic hit, we were faced with the scenario of not being able to deliver our unaccredited courses. These are typically entirely campus based, and furthermore, unlike the majority of our undergraduate and postgraduate offerings, they are often managed in a devolved fashion, so curriculum and registration process do not exist within the university’s enterprise systems.  

A solution was found with an add-on to our Canvas platform, and over the past 2 years,  Eugene van den Hurk in the Digital Services team of IT Services has led out the technical implementation of Canvas Catalog, working closely with Katie Sandham and the team in Centre for Professional Development (CPD) to get the platform up and running. Adult Continuing Education (ACE) were amongst the early adopters of the platform and successfully delivered their full series of short courses in Autumn 2020.

With Canvas Catalog, UCC units can maintain listings of their course offerings, where students can easily find, register and pay for their chosen courses, and immediately gain access to our Open UCC platform – a dedicated instance of Canvas for our unaccredited courses.  

To date, more than 4,500 students have registered and completed a variety of course types, ranging from short courses to professional CPD, and UCC now has a capable digital admission and learning platform to support our outreach education, industry partners, and the ambitions of units such as ACE, Centre of CPD, IMI, Language Centre, and FITU amongst others. In addition, the platform supports critical national initiatives such as Bystander Intervention, and our Graduate Attributes Transitions-In programme, which will allow secondary school students to access our digital learning content on a secure platform.

The platform has been a significant enabler for the university, and UCC is now a European reference site for the platform. In July 2022, we presented our story to other Canvas customers across Europe, and we will do so again at the European Instructure Conference in September.

To see the platform, (or even sign up for a course!) visit https://open.ucc.ie

For units who wish to list their non-accredited course offerings on the platform, contact the Centre for CPD