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CBS: An online open house when campus closed

Client

CBS

Industry

Education

Services

UX Design

Development

WordPress

A choice that shapes the rest of your life

Choosing what to study is one of the hardest decisions most young people make. There are so many interesting programmes to choose from, and the choice does a lot to shape your future. CBS has roughly 20,000 students, and every one of them has stood exactly there.

That is why guiding prospective students is a high priority at CBS. The aim is to help young people make the right choice, so they don't end up on the wrong programme.

An open house without a house to hold it in

CBS has 18 bachelor's programmes and twice as many at master's level. Giving people an overview of and insight into all of them, while explaining what CBS stands for, is a huge communication task.

Experience shows that it works best when current students explain it in their own words. So one of the student guidance service's most important jobs is bringing current and prospective students together, and until COVID-19, open house events were a key tool for exactly that.

Then campus closed, and no more than five people could gather at a time. The answer was obvious: the open house "just" had to move online. That would also let CBS reach further out into the world, since 20% of its students come from abroad. But with almost 60 programmes, none of CBS's existing platforms could handle the job.

CBS in numbers

20,000students, roughly
18bachelor's programmes, and twice as many at master's level
20%of the students come from abroad

An open house online

Meet the students before you choose

We built a new portal, aabenthus.cbs.dk. Here, prospective students could meet current ones on video and hear them talk about their programmes and about life at CBS.

They could also sign up for live online events, where communication went both ways: prospective students could ask questions and meet each other.

Built just as much for the editors

The site holds a lot of content and many live events, all in two languages. So from the start we gave the backend as much attention as the frontend.

The editors in Student Affairs needed tools that made their work as quick and easy as possible, and that made it impossible for them to break anything. It was also a requirement that CBS could onboard new editors quickly, with a minimum of training.

Modules that work it out for themselves

The portal is built on a CMS where everything is a module. Editors build and publish the pages they need, but the modules follow an internal logic and automatically adapt to each other and to the context they sit in.

Take the event module. Editors drop it wherever it makes sense, and the module works out for itself which events are relevant to show in that spot.