Soft Market Testing Exercise for the Provision of an Attendance Monitoring Software Solution

The University of Southampton wishes to explore a range of options to meet its need for the provision of an attendance monitoring solution through a soft market testing exercise. The University would like to be able to monitor the academic engagement of students, whilst partaking in academic activities on campus, off campus or academic activities whilst working online. Monitoring academic engagement has also been introduced as part of the new immigration system on 5 October 2020 by the Home Office (UKVI). The new academic engagement policy requires sponsors (University of Southampton) to ensure that all sponsored students are academically engaged for the entirety of their course, including activities they consider would indicate academic engagement such as: • Attending required lectures, seminars, or tutorials • Undertaking required laboratory work • Undertaking research or fieldwork • Submitting essays, assignments and attending examinations The University currently has a number of systems and processes in place for the purposes of monitoring attendance of sponsored students. The University records student engagement through BlackBoard, Eduroam, log on to university workstations, entry access (including Library), PGR Tracker, use of printers, eAssignment and remote study log entries, access to the MySouthampton App and logins to SUSSED. These show electronic and on campus activity, but do not include data on exam, tutorial, seminar, lecture, and practical class attendance. The monitoring needs to be simple for students to use and give visibility to the student of academic engagement information being collected. The university needs to be able collect the data required, use appropriate technology and to be able to report on the data quickly and efficiently. Our plan is to have the appropriate, technological solution in place for September 2023/24, in the first instance for sponsored students and then scale the solution for all students during Semester 1 2023/24. The University is keen to explore all options that may be available in the marketplace and interested parties are invited to complete and return a questionnaire and attend a Soft Market Testing event to demonstrate an end to end system walk through from both the student and visa team perspective. The deadline for the receipt of completed questionnaires and requests to attend a Soft Market Testing event is 12:00 (Noon) 27th September 2022. Information received as part of this soft market testing exercise shall be used to help shape the University's final specification of requirements and scope any resulting procurement process. Please Note: The University is conducting this soft market testing exercise to allow interested parties, with appropriate experience, to outline their views and provide impartial information to the University with no commitment to themselves or the University. This is not a call for competition at this stage.