About The New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling
The New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling is a bustling college in London. The college specialises in the promotion and eduction of existential therapy and counselling. The school is certified by Middlesex University and (at the time of writing) has about 500 active students.
The school’s principals are world-renowned figures in the therapy and counselling sphere: Emmy Van Deurzen and Digby Tantam.
The school operates from the custom-built Existential Academy in Hampstead, North London. But the school also offers a huge number of distance learning opportunities. The Existential Academy runs short courses and is an asset to the local community.
The Challenge
Meeting the needs of so many students and the specifics of the therapy teaching environment presents myriad challenges. Many of these require custom solutions or the intelligent leveraging of existing systems.
Recent Projects Completed
Managing User Authentication
The school uses many websites and technologies and users need to be able to use the same logins wherever they access the school online. Usernames and passwords are maintained across multiple websites. This includes the Moodle Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) and the Moodle mobile applicatio. To make this work for NSPC which we wrote a custom Moodle authentication module.
Managing Registration and Application
The courses offered by the school are typically Masters-level or higher. These are therapeutic courses and the school must evaluate an applicant’s intent and experience before a enrolling a potential student. Our vCMS content management system allows for the production of multiple application forms specific to each course. On completion, the system records common field values as specific data for all applications from homogenous data sets.
Applications are stored online, triaged and processed by NSPC staff to ensure that only appropriate applicants are accepted at the school.
Recent Projects Completed for The New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling
Automated Class Assignment
Many of the courses share common modules. So, logically, people completing different courses might well sit in the same classes some of the time. The process of breaking the 500 students’ learning schedules down and assigning them to individual classes so that each student’s learning needs were met at minimum cost to the school was a mind-bendingly complex task. But we managed it.
Deep User Access Controls
A sophisticated set of user groups and permissions has allowed us to tightly manage the data and functions available, to staff and students alike. Faculty members update their details on the NSPC website, LARA saves these details and publishes them across the school’s digital presence.
Automated Student Feedback
At the end of each set of classes, students receive an email. This is an invitation to complete an online survey to appraise the tuition and course. This allows the School to keep tuition standards high and consistent.
Recent Projects Completed for the Existential Academy
Event Ticketing
The Existential Academy hosts short courses and lectures to benefit the community and introduce potential students to the ideas and practices of NPSC. The Existential Academy website sells tickets and takes payments using the Stripe payment gateway.
Recent Projects Completed for Moodle
Made Moodle Mobile
One of the great advances in the long-established VLE is the availability of a touchscreen application. This application which shares data with the website. Little Fire Digital helped the school launch their own app.
Took Learning Online
When the pandemic hit and the Existential Academy had to close, we enabled the school to teach online. We extended the existing TheTherapy.space app to accommodate classes and book them into Zoom for online teaching. As costs mounted, we wrote an algorithm to use the minimum number of Zoom licenses at any given time.
Enabled Online Validation
The system sends faculty members and students alike an email reminder when the School needs documentation uploading. This includes student assignments, staff qualifications and so on, so the school can stay on top of its marking and compliance requirements.
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