Guidelines

Final Case Study, by Karen Paulson

Kapi'olani Community College

Introduction
Kapi’olani Cultural Changes
How Kapi’olani Got Started on the Project
How Kapi’olani Moved Forward on the Project
How the Project Was Accomplished at Kapi’olani
Progression to Health Sciences Learner Support Services
Kapi’olani LAAP Grant Scale of Operations
Unique Stumbling Blocks and How They Were Overcome
Lessons Learned
Next Steps
Artifacts Collected

Introduction

In April 2000, the LAAP Grant evaluator visited Kapi’olani Community College (KCC) in Honolulu, Hawaii for a three-day site visit. The purpose of the visit was to investigate the existing institutional culture with regard to student services, specifically with the intent of understanding the baseline culture in which they would be putting some student services online. Seventeen (17) individuals — faculty, administrators, and staff — responded to questions posed by the interviewer. A second three-day site visit occurred in October 2002, two and a half years after the first visit and provided the opportunity to interview fifteen (15) administrators, faculty, and staff in-person. Another LAAP grant participant responded to questions via telephone. Approximately one-third of the respondents had been interviewed during the first site visit.

This final case study report is based on data from interview transcripts, websites, emails, and collected artifacts and focuses more than the first case study on how Kapi’olani Community College accomplished grant objectives. During a session at the WCET Annual Conference, attendees gave input on what structure would support their use of the case studies. This report follows those suggestions. This case study has a slightly different structure than the other two. Because of the tremendous amount of cultural and structural change at Kapi’olani, the case study begins with that discussion. This section is then followed by sections on how Kapi’olani got started on its project, how the institution moved forward on the project, how the project was accomplished at the College, the scale of LAAP grant operations, what unique stumbling blocks Kapi’olani faced and how it overcame them, and what lessons were learned.

Kapi’olani Cultural Changes

Many complex cultural changes happened at Kapi’olani. Campus reorganization was a disruptive innovation that happened nearly concurrently with the beginning of the grant. During the site visit in the spring of 2000 Kapi’olani administrators and faculty were adjusting to a major administrative reorganization that had just occurred at the community college. At that time, people on campus remained worried about the changes and subsequent long-term consequences at the institution. While the initial shock of the reorganization wore off during the course of the grant, there remained issues with internal operations and business processes, particularly with regard to linkages with the student information system.

Another major problem was that the entire Hawaii system has been “limping along with a crippled student information system” for quite some time and it was crucial that a change happen. In January 2002, the decision was made to use Banner; the system moved quickly ahead to implement the new SIS. This swiftness may be attributable to the many years that were given toward a system (Buzzeo) that was unusable. All of the community colleges in Hawaii abandoned their legacy student information systems in June 2002 for the new Banner system. Shortly after the second site visit, the community colleges were expecting to conduct the first system-wide use of the online registration system. This event was cause for consternation throughout all units of Kapi’olani. Despite the disruptive nature of this decision, everyone is “convinced that going to Banner was the right move and decision.” Long-standing procedures that were sacred and (often) largely based on “that’s how we’ve always done it” are now being changed (such as the requirement for an actual signature whenever a student wanted to take an overload) and adapted freely because of the need for decisions to move forward on the Banner implementation. Much of the resistance was blamed on the antiquated student information system; once Banner was selected the “no SIS” excuse was no longer valid. In addition to Banner, Campus Pipeline, the portal product will also become functional by fall 2003.

Another change happening internally to Kapi’olani is the movement toward a “one-stop shop” for student services including admissions, registration, student accounts receivable, financial aid, etc. It will begin as a physical one-stop shop and then expand to include an online one-stop for student services, generally. There are plans for secondary-level one-stops within each of the colleges, such as for Health Science students, incorporating college-specific information and interactivity for both credit and non-credit students including admissions information, career placement, recruiting, learning resources, etc.

The Health Sciences one-stop built for the LAAP grant should be implemented in spring 2003. Concerns remain about how information will be kept synchronized and current between the two levels of online one-stops. This has also led to KCC LAAP grant personnel rethinking what they are doing inside the grant. The flux in student information systems has made it difficult to build an online student service for the LAAP grant, because any service would likely have to draw information from the student information database. Even though students will now be able to register online using the new Banner information system, students will need to be trained in how to do this and they will still need support determining what they are registering for in any particular term (A.K.A. the degree plan). These changes — the new SIS and one-stop — have raised questions regarding which student services should be centralized at the system level, centralized at the community college level, or decentralized out to various programs and departments.

Finally, at the end of the grant there is much more technology on campus, increased use of technology and awareness of how technology can facilitate processes, more distance education on campus, even an entirely new phone system has been implemented on campus. An example of how delayed technological change has been on campus: KCC’s phone system is version 16, currently the version is 26. The upgrade will now allow users to have more telephone lines, more station capacity, ISDN capacity, caller identification, enhanced 911, and upgraded voice mail. Increasingly faculty are using WebCT; the number of online courses is increasing approximately 10% per year; with an average of 30 to 40 courses per term and 20-25 students per course. There is a faster production cycle now for non-credit courses. The library and institutional presence on the web are also becoming much more updated and cutting edge. As people retire and are replaced with people with fresh ideas, processes and procedures are changing more. Kapi’olani has definitely leapt forward in the past few years.

How Kapi’olani Got Started on the Project

The Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications personnel asked each partner institution to name a principal investigator. At Kapi’olani Community College, this individual was Michael Tagawa, Dean of Health/Legal Education, Library, and Technology. Kapi’olani participants describe Mr. Tagawa as a visionary. The people around him say they work to keep up with his vision; when they do finally catch up he is often fifteen paces further along in his thinking than they are. His leadership has kept College participants involved in the project at times when it seemed overwhelming.

In addition, at the beginning there was hesitancy to move forward on the grant — it was very different from what had been done previously. Health Sciences was the original testing ground. One reason for doing this is because the Dean of Health Sciences is also the LAAP PI; he can encourage the Health Sciences department more and use them as a model for the rest of the campus. The people working on the LAAP project knew that they were safe to experiment because their dean was encouraging them to think innovatively. This technique also avoided the problem of having the entire institutional community come to consensus before moving forward on the project. Health is seen as a leader on campus and other colleges are watching its progress. Health was also ready for change because the departments in the college need better prepared students from high schools as well as to generate revenue for online classes because of their limited class size.

The original thought was to put tutoring services online; Hawaiian institutions had particular problems three years ago because of the time zone differences between the islands and when most tutoring or help desk services functioned (often based on the Eastern time zone). It was about at the start of the LAAP grant that two tutoring firms came online with services — Academic.com and Smarthinking.com — which meant that for-profit companies had entered the market backed with venture capital. Both could provide more services in a shorter period of time than KCC could themselves build out as a single tutoring service. Furthermore, with more thought and discussion, Kapi’olani personnel felt that they wanted more than a simple tutoring system.

KCC’s concept of what it wanted to do for the LAAP grant evolved. The Vision Team wanted to help students get the most out of their learning experiences at Kapi’olani. As more thinking went into what Medical Assisting students’ needed, the answer became “Learning Support Services,” a more integrated comprehensive approach to learner support outside of the traditional course-based structure for all types of learners — traditional, high school transition students, non-credit learners, etc. The services continued to evolve and complex thinking went into their conceptualization and development. While at first project participants worried about the technology, they came to the understanding that they wanted to take a more student-centered perspective of the institution in online services — that the technology should follow subject matter needs. One of its Lessons Learned is: “Design a scalable learning framework rather than a technology framework.”

At Kapi’olani Community College, they planned on designing a useable practical module for Medical Assisting as a prototype and then expanding to other programs. In retrospect, the PI noted that by focusing on the learning framework first, they unknowingly engaged themselves in a business redesign effort around learning support services. The portal being developed represented a vehicle for the online one-stop. As other administrative support services are adapted, a similar strategy of focusing on the key processes first may be adopted. Administrators feel that KCC personnel are more confident and capable in moving toward institution-wide business process redesign after having gone through the LAAP grant. Rather than letting technology drive the student services, another Lessons Learned identified by Kapi’olani Community College was: “Apply technology to the learning framework.”

How Kapi’olani Moved Forward on the Project

Although the original focus was on tutoring for online classes, grant and internal reviews shifted Kapi’olani’s Vision Team thinking toward online tutoring for all students as the more logical approach. Subsequent internal review began to suggest there was a need for a more systematic and rigorous approach to learning support services to have an impact on student retention.

The discussion of online student services led to broader discussions regarding use of technology for academic and campus purposes. The “nature of the discussion changed.” Participants admitted that almost all of the thinking and doing required for the LAAP grant caused them to have to think in new and fresh ways. It was all challenging to them since they did not know what to do or what the “right answer” was. It has forced Vision Team participants to be more comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity as they moved forward not knowing what the specific final outcome would be.

One activity of the LAAP grant has been to build a prototype portal for the Health Sciences that would be a portal as well as a second tier, one-stop shop for student services that would mirror the physical one-stop office for student services (Kekaulike Information and Service Center). This site would be of use for both credit and non-credit students. This website is in the planning stage right now with implementation being scheduled for spring 2003. Once the Campus Pipeline portal is functional, then this prototype will be migrated into that environment and the prototype built in MetaDot closed down. While MetaDot works now, it may not be the long-term answer. Considerable negotiation occurred back and forth between subject matter experts working on the content and web designers working on making the portal more user-friendly and inviting by adding in the necessary HTML code.

Another activity of the LAAP grant has been to begin testing pre-Health students with KeyTrain, to assess their skills prior to entering Health programs. The project will eventually expand to use WorkKeys and include post-testing of skills as well. Kapi’olani would like to put this online and provide a method for students to remediate their skills gaps via online forms of intervention. After a year data will be available to present to other colleges on campus.

A job placement website was also built based on recruiting through a private company (privatejobs.com). Initial feedback from students and employers was favorable; in June 2002 there were 30 employers listed. But when the new student information system went live in July 2002, the job placement website became inoperable during the October 2002 site visit because the website was linked to the old student information system (to confirm that people were currently enrolled or recent graduates). The service stopped almost as soon as it was functioning. Once Banner is fully up and running, they will be able to update the placement website.

The desire to put something online often does not come with much planning about who chooses which service to put online? Who decides what is put into that particular online student service? Where does the content for the website come from? Is there extant documentation that will work wholesale at the website? Will something need to be written? Re-drafted? Who will do this? These are the sorts of questions that Kapi’olani has been confronting and finding answers.

How the Project Was Accomplished at Kapi’olani

By October 2002 the worry and confusion caused by the campus reorganization had subsided; but now the focus was on the reconfiguration occurring in student services at Kapi’olani. The College had begun a radical redesign of all student services to a physical one-stop student center with the help of Darlene Burnett from Burnett and Associates, retired from IBM. The move to a one-stop center utilizes a 70-20-10 configuration, meaning that 70% of student services are delivered in a self-help model, 20% of student services are delivered by generalist staff, and 10% of student services are delivered by specialists. This change is not only a structural change, but also a major cultural change for the institution.

Administrative student services at Kapi’olani have remained extremely traditional and very resistant to any changes — convinced that doing things “the way they always have been done” was best. Now everything was changing. Staff do their best to cope with these changes and the Dean of Student Services has required extensive training be attended by everyone. To facilitate training, the Dean has suspended any transactions on Friday afternoons, giving that time over to staff training on how the new one-stop shop will work as well as for Banner training. Another cultural change being promoted is that staff are encouraged to speak up more and have more input and ownership of the various student support services. A primary point in the redesign is better customer service for everyone — students, faculty, and staff.

KCC drafted scenarios and shared them with a company to explain what KCC was hoping for out of an online activity for job placement services. Unfortunately, since using scenarios is new and still alien to the campus culture at Kapi’olani, the process has not taken hold. Determining what goes into a scenario and writing it takes a lot of work, people on campus do not have any time to put into the scenario process. When someone else (the PI) drafted the scenarios, that was a better approach and participants could react to those scenarios. In addition, the scenario process requires explanation of entrenched processes, procedures that everyone on campus “knows” so they do not understand the need to delineate them. People do not know and understand all the processes in the same ways, and that is becoming clearer as the new one-stop student services shop is implemented. The LAAP Principal Investigator is convinced of the value of scenarios for describing complex processes, but few other people on campus are equally convinced.

Progression to Health Sciences Learner Support Services

1. At Kapi’olani, the online Banner registration will be available, but it provides no advising and only minimal instruction in how to use the system.
2. The College’s new one-stop physical student services shop will be functional as will the one-stop informational website with services parallel to the physical site.
3. Finally, the functioning portal will be unveiled for Health Sciences students that will include more interactivity for the learners: “My Kapi’olani Community College” will allow learners to customize their interactions as needed.

On campus people think the potential for online student services is great because of its ability to “eliminate redundancies in the system.” Advisors will be able to spend more quality time on advising. It also allows for more people to be served. The personnel in the online learning unit make a point of introducing faculty to available online student services so they know about it and can in turn tell their students about the services. But, like its partner institutions in the grant, Kapi’olani counselors and academic advisors are worried about losing in-person interaction with students, which may also be influenced by their losing total control of the advising or counseling encounters.

Kapi’olani’s goal was to define a more comprehensive inventory of learning support services to enhance the likelihood of student success. Once the thinking about the services was accomplished, then they began to design the technology to deliver those services. What KCC found was that — however the services were designed — the underlying technology was not scalable. The prototype was shared with other departments and many have engaged in planning around that model with appropriate adaptations. Actual implementation at the campus level will need to employ a different underlying technology.

KCC administrators have been discussing development of a ‘learning objects’ database — on the premise that most instructions, procedures, guidance, advising, catalog materials, etc. can be reduced to a learning object. Once Campus Pipeline is deployed, then the appropriate learning objects can be used within individualized student portals (using a combination push and pull technology). The overall structure may be different from the prototype, but the goal will be to take a comprehensive approach to the delivery of academic support content materials. Similarly, appropriate content tied to a Banner-related transaction would be delivered to Banner. The current focus at the end of the LAAP grant is on technology scaling.

Kapi’olani LAAP Grant Scale of Operations

Of the three partner institutions, Kapi’olani Community College had the fewest institutional resources that could be brought to bear on the project and the largest cultural change. It was serendipitous that the decision to convert the Hawaii system to Banner came at the beginning of the final year of the grant. Even so, a number of individuals at KCC were drawn away from their day-to-day jobs (and the LAAP grant) to fast-track implementation of the new student information system. This depletion left the remaining programmers on campus “stretched too thin.” As one person said, “I think we are moving ahead, but not without cost.” “Some people outside might not be realizing how much it’s taking out of the people who work there.”

The amount of time, effort, and money that Kapi’olani Community College put into this project is a mixture of sweat equity on the part of salaried individuals, well-timed energy boosts and focusing from consultants paid by the grant, and limited grant funding for tool development and programming. Vision Team members, as well as the principal investigator, spent hours in meetings, determining content for the portal, thinking about how a student comes to the content in the portal, and writing code for the portal.

Of the three institutions involved in the LAAP grant, by far Kapi’olani experienced the most disruptive changes to its culture during the grant. Three primary changes occurred that affected the entire campus, not just individual units of the campus: a) the campus reorganization in 2000, b) implementation of the Banner student information system in January 2002, and c) the redesign of all student support services on campus begun in 2002. In addition, the new System president wants the seven community colleges and three universities to act and function more as a system so there is restructuring occurring at upper administrative levels. The chancellor for community colleges position is being eliminated, and each of the seven community college provosts will now report directly to the president.

In a culture undergoing so much flux, communications are the key to progress on a grant and critical to overall operations. No one can rely on information “trickling” down because often there is “selective information disclosure” from one individual to the next. When so much is changing, information and communication can either be a tool for progress or a way to control the situation. Communications between units came out as an issue not only within Kapi’olani but also in the Hawaii postsecondary system overall: “We are a system but we don’t work as a system…. We had to work that out before we could do data extracts and move forward with Banner.”

One problem that remains is that even though they are putting substantial more student support online, there is still a population of students who do not have computers, or whose computer skills are not advanced enough that they can use online services with any facility. Training is still needed for college personnel as well as for students: “new students need guided training; continuing students are okay.” Students who are using an online service will often use the “help” email function to ask questions about information that is provided on the page; students are not sure that the information given in the web-based environment is “correct.” This problem is exacerbated by the student culture that a) does not think to check the web first, although this is changing and b) wants to make sure that what they read on the web is indeed “right” so they call up to double-check the information that’s found at the web. This problem will continue and indeed, will worsen, if an error is ever found in web-based information; that event will reinforce this perspective.

People’s perspectives may be one of the biggest stumbling blocks. Counselors and academic advisors who have been involved in the grant have wholeheartedly embraced it, but they are only a small portion of the campus population who needs to come to this understanding and acceptance. The PI noted that on campus generally there is counselor resistance to online advising, a lack of any clear definition of what learning support services are required to enhance student learning, and a loose planning culture. One-stop student services seem to be the major catalyst for moving KCC personnel forward. The prototype portal is facilitating the adjustment for the rest of the campus, since it provides a working model. Using external contractors, the College is moving toward a much more formalized planning process for developing services online.

Finally, the technology infrastructure is a challenge. As the discussion evolved about online services as well as the one-stop delivery there was a growing realization of the need for an adequate infrastructure. The one-stop was perhaps the major catalyst in moving the campus toward recognition that student services online was a reality rather than an academic point of discussion. Now KCC is working on the technology to accomplish what they envisioned.

LAAP participants felt that the project took a lot of time. The consultant time was useful. In order to move forward, individuals at Kapi’olani “begged, borrowed, and stole from other institutions” to avoid re-inventing the wheel.

Administrators on campus confirm that their perceptions of student support services have changed dramatically over the course of the grant. The result is that there are significant changes underway at Kapi’olani, which although there may not necessarily be a direct cause and effect, there is definitively an influence factor that the LAAP grant brought about. There is still much work to be done with rank and file student support services personnel who are ingrained in the old way of doing business. One respondent said, “I never thought we would have something like this.”

Next Steps

Kapi’olani Community College is definitely a survivor of extreme cultural changes. These changes may have allowed for more progress to be made on the LAAP grant than might have been possible in the previous culture. As the disruptions caused by these changes subside, KCC faculty, staff, and administrators will be able to focus more on how best to tailor student services for their students needs.

Artifacts Collected

WCET, “Report of Site Visit to Kapi’olani Community College,” March 5 and 6, 2002.

Website: www.wcet.info/projects/laap/partners/kcc.asp