Exploring

In this section, we’ll look at some of the ongoing initiatives that highlight our commitment to supporting Ontario colleges now and in the future.

These efforts focus on improving the domestic application experience – such as through the creation of a refreshed ontariocolleges.ca website and the addition of an AI Advisor Chatbot that can help prospective applicants narrow down their search for the right college and program.

Overall, these initiatives are designed to support our partners in increasing domestic applications and enrolments while helping us invest in our technology foundations.

ontariocolleges.ca Refresh

As part of our ongoing commitment to innovation, we’re excited about the progress we’ve made on our refresh of ontariocolleges.ca – the website through which all domestic applicants explore and apply to college in Ontario.

This marks the first major update of the ontariocolleges.ca website in about eight years. We're making sure to incorporate user research, feedback from our college partners, and industry best practices to build a site that's easy to use while truly capturing the excitement of going to college. We're also collaborating closely with our partners to identify the programs, facilities, events, and more they'd like to showcase on their college's dedicated profile page.

Taking the Next Steps

In 2024-25, our work evolved from user research, content strategy, and copywriting into user experience (i.e., wireframes) and visual design.

Wireframes are essential because they help visualize the site's navigation and functionality. Through this process, we start to see how menus and pages will all work once the site is launched.

With this information ready, we can then move into visual design, where we choose the colours, branding, and overall imagery that will help prospective students visualize themselves in a college program that will help start their future careers.

Wireframes are the blueprints of a website page.
They serve as a visual guide to the structure and functionality of each page.
They represent the layout, content hierarchy, and navigation flow without delving into detailed design elements.
Wireframes help designers, content specialists, and developers agree on the basic framework and user experience before moving on to more detailed and visually polished mockups.

Constructing wireframes and visual design in a website project is a meticulous process that encompasses:

Creating skeletal frameworks of the website that outline its basic structure and layout and provide a visual guide to the placement of elements, including navigation and content.
Crafting colour schemes, typography, imagery, and branding elements.
Using tools like Figma to develop high-fidelity mockups that showcase the final look and feel of the website.

A huge part of our collaborative effort in this project involves working alongside our college partners to update their profile pages. These are the pages (found on the Choose a College page on today's site) where colleges get to share what's going on at their campuses, including their featured programs, facilities, and initiatives.

With the new website, we're working with each college to craft visually memorable and engaging profile pages that help prospective students see themselves in a program and on campus. We're also collaborating to help each college identify what sets them apart – from their unique programs to the culture of the community around each campus.

Looking ahead, we're super excited to continue working with our college partners on this important part of the new ontariocolleges.ca!

With the visual design moving along, the ontariocolleges.ca project will soon transition into its development stage. This is where the design shifts into coding and implementation. The goal is to have a seamless transition from conceptual wireframes to a fully functional and visually captivating website.

We’ll have plenty more to share with our partners about this project (including our refreshed visual design) in the coming months – so stay tuned for more on the new ontariocolleges.ca!

Domestic Technology Modernization

Domestic Technology Modernization is a multi-year program designed to upgrade OCAS’ domestic college application technology platforms and help us evolve our most vital products and services. As always, the goal is to position OCAS to even more effectively support our college system partners.

Domestic Technology Modernization involves a few different projects, but they all share the same objective: ensure we have an up-to-date software stack that provides better stability for OCAS domestic technology.

Migrating to the Cloud

Contact Centre

In 2024-25, a big part of this project involved moving the ticketing system for the OCAS Contact Centre to the cloud. In doing so, we can reduce our operating costs and the amount of ongoing maintenance required for the ticketing system.

Right now, we’re collaborating with a vendor to facilitate this transition while also bringing some key pieces of relevant technology in-house. This dual approach ensures we maintain better control and support over the system in the long term. Additionally, we anticipate improved performance from the new cloud-based ticketing system, which will significantly benefit our Contact Centre operations.

On the Horizon

Looking ahead, our focus remains on leveraging technology to improve our services – including transcript management and our eTMS platform – and continuously evolving to meet the evolving needs of learners and partners.

AI Advisor Chatbot

In the past, we’ve heard from applicants that they feel overwhelmed by the vast spectrum of program options available through Ontario’s colleges. We designed the AI Advisor^BETA chatbot as an alternative to classic search on the ontariocolleges.ca website, and we’re exploring whether a conversational approach to looking for college programs might help manage these concerns.

Given that students are more likely to apply to a program that aligns with their personal interests and career goals, this public beta release will help us understand if such a strategy can increase application rates.

Definition: Beta is a test version of a software program. The primary purpose of a beta release is to identify any bugs or issues by having real users interact with the software in real-world scenarios. Feedback collected during the beta phase is crucial for making adjustments and improvements before the final launch of the software.

Background

The AI Advisor^BETA has its roots in the 2023 OCAS Innovation Challenge, which took place in November 2023 and involved 60 participants from across OCAS and the college system.

Ten teams of participants pursued the question:

Elements of six teams’ ideas were incorporated into the AI Advisor^BETA – from matching tools and chatbots that help applicants find college programs using conversational questions to program-applicant compatibility scores. The idea of providing relevant, personalized suggestions based on an applicant’s educational and career interests resonated throughout that Challenge and formed the stepping-stone to further innovation at OCAS.

Fast-forward to early 2025 and the OCAS Innovation team has taken that idea all the way to a functional public beta release known as the AI Advisor^BETA.