IELTS is the International English Language Testing System, the world’s proven English language test. IELTS was one of the pioneers of four skills English language testing over 17 years ago, and continues to set the standard for English language testing today.
Close to 6000 organisations and more than 1.4 million test takers around the world trust and recognise IELTS as a secure, valid and reliable indicator of true-to-life ability to communicate in English for education, immigration and professional accreditation.
IELTS is jointly managed by British Council, IDP: IELTS Australia and the University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations (Cambridge ESOL) through more than 500 locations in 120 countries.
IELTS was accepting all their submissions for test registrations via written form submission. Errors in submissions and difficulties in reading hand writing were resulting in a number of submissions being discarded. Also this approach meant that IDP was not able to perform any reporting on the submissions and left them with an abundance of paper work to manually process. IELTS wanted to implement a fully electronic system for collection test registrations. To begin they wanted a system to collect all the registration information and output a printable, completed PDF form that the student will submit via post and store a subset of the collected data in a database for reporting.
IELTS was displaying their available test registration dates on their website and did not provide any means to register other than providing a link to a printable (blank) PDF form. IELTS need to swap out the link to the printable PDF form for a link to the online registration system but only for specific registration centres that were participating in the online registration programme.
Shivam developed an online registration system for the IELTS.org website. The system collected the registration information across six steps and then stored them, utilise the stored data and generated a completed, printable PDF document for the registrant to download and print. Shivam provided technical expertise to implement the solution on existing infrastructure.
Shivam provided help and technical expertise to in-hose technical team helping them making changes to existing system and integrate it with newly developed system. The solution was developed using Visual Studio 2008 with ASP.Net MVC and deployed on IELTS existing web server running Windows Server 2003.
Shivam used MVC on this project as it produced a lightweight, stable output that could be more easily maintained and developed. This side stepped a number of issues present in ASP.Net Web Forms solutions around the area of “View State” corruption and increased page size. User input was validated by the jQuery Validate plugin which provides a highly extensible and customisable system for validating form input.
The solution Shivam developed for IELTS was easily dropped into their existing infrastructure and updates can be easily deployed by their existing IT staff. IELTS staff can now gain access to registration statistics on demand in real time which can be easily exported and reported on.
IELTS test centre staff now can easily read printed registrations forms.
IELTS now has a platform that can easily be extended to provide a completely online registration system which will collect payments online and submit registration data to test centres electronically.
For more information about what Shivam can do for to maximise your businesses success please visit www.shivam.com.au
