The university's mission emphasises four key factors. It aims to be student centered, quality focussed, innovative, and to serve the community - locally, nationally and internationally. Its modular course programme, which Oxford Brookes pioneered in the UK, helps to serve all four goals. But Stuart Brown, Head of MIS at the university, points out that the modular programme generates a lot of work behind the scenes. Students take two or three modules per term, with a complete degree consisting of about twenty four modules.
Modules are very flexible and can change and adapt, and there's a huge number of permutations.
We have to have efficient administration and management systems in order to keep track. In the early 1990s Oxford Brookes went through a major MIS systems update, installing the Oracle database as the basis for a range of new commercial systems plus its in-house course and student systems. At that time, Sequent was chosen to supply the hardware that would run these systems to the end of the decade. But by the end of the 1990s, the Sequent machines were starting to show their age, and as well as this the university faced Year 2000 compliance issues with several of its systems. It was clearly time for a change.