Building an Academic Program API with Contentful and Amazon Web Services
Monday, Oct 22 3:15 - 4:00
Presented by Dave OlsenHow many degree listings does your institution’s website have? How robust is that information? How consistent and on-brand is it? The amount of information related to academic programs is vast and varied. Tuition, scholarships, plans of study, facilities, profiles, media and more. Having clear and consistent academic information would be a differentiator for many schools. A single source-of-truth for academic content might be the holy grail.
Dave will show you how West Virginia University has started to tackle this problem. Their Academic Programs API combines Contentful, a headless CMS, with Amazon Web Services. This has led to a flexible, easy-to-update system for authors, developers and designers.
In this session, you’ll learn how to:
* Work with content owners to show them the importance of centralized content and how to source it
* Define content models and relationships in Contentful
* Use AWS’s Lambda, DynamoDB and API Gateway services to build an API
* Expand your efforts beyond academic information
* Take control of your institution’s content
About
Dave Olsen
Professional TechnologistDave Olsen has been a programmer with the University Relations - Digital Services unit at West Virginia University (WVU) for the last fifteen years. Over that time he has worked on and led projects that range from developing a university-wide CMS to creating award-winning marketing websites. For the last two years he has worked on building a "central source of truth" for academic and institutional information. In addition to his work at WVU, Olsen has released and contributed to a number of open source projects with the most recent being Pattern Lab.