Covey Ogden
ISYS 520-Dr Allen
Executive Summary
This semester I have been working with the director of marketing at BYU Independent Study. BYU Independent Study is an online education university that offers a variety of basic courses to students all over the country.
When a prospective student signs up for an online class, they are supposed to include the school they are currently attending. Using this information, the marketing department can more easily track the success of their advertisements that target specific schools and areas. However, this information does not come to the marketing department in a way that can be easily interpreted. But rather, it comes monthly as a jumbled .txt file with a very long list of the schools, no names or locations, and the course or courses the student signed up for. The problem with this information is that there are no validation checks on the online form that would force the prospective student to pick from a list of schools or put in some sort of standardized school code that is consistent from student to student. What I mean by this, is that a student could type “BYU” or “BYU-Provo” or “Brigham Young University”, etc. as their attended school and the web coding, as it is, cannot understand that these schools are actually the same school. Further, the marketing department does not get the location of these schools sent to them, which is important information. While the new version of the website, which is expected to come out in two years, will be better in validating data, this is what the marketing department is stuck with until then.
So my task was to create a macro that will sift through a lot of these redundancies, find the locations of these schools, and “print” the finding on a nice looking report, which then can be checked for errors. Currently, someone in the marketing department is spending about 8 hours a month doing this manually. I expect this program to cut their time to about 30 minutes or less.
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