Webcast Series

"Providing Student Services to Distance Learners"

Transcript of LAAP Connected Learning Solutions Project Webcast

Slide: WCET presents a Webcast Series: Providing Student Services to Distance Learners

PAT: Hello, and welcome to the WCET webcast series, "Providing Student Services to Distance Learners." I am Pat Shea, the Assistant Director for WCET and I'm coming to you today from our east coast office in Summit, New Jersey. Also joining us from WCET's headquarters in Boulder, Colorado, is my colleague Sue Armitage. Hi. Sue. I see you're saying it's pretty cold and gray there today.

SUE: Oh, it's terrible. I mean, I looked at the forecast. Snow is not predicted, but it's a very cold, gray day. I'd like to say hello to everybody who's joined us today. Looks like we've also folks from Oregon, Montana, Pennsylvania and if other folks would like to tell us where they're from, please go ahead and enter that where it says "send a message." Just type in where you are, hit enter and it'll show up in the chat box.

Slide: LAAP Project Demonstration: SCT's Connected Learning Solutions

PAT: I see we have a couple of members from Arizona with us today. Our special guest is Peggi Munkittrick, SCT's Senior Director of Teaching and Learning Strategy at SCT in Towanda, Pennsylvania. Welcome, Peggi.

PEGGI: Thank you, Pat. I'm really happy to be here today.

SUE: Just so we can get an idea about you in the audience, but, mostly we'd like to find out how familiar you are with this webcast environment. If you have participated in a WC webcast before, please click the green "yes" button — you see it's sort of in the lower right hand corner of my picture — click "yes" if you have participated in a webcast before, or "no" if you have not. And that will give us an idea about how much direction we need to provide you to be able to participate in the webcast.

So go ahead and click now, and you'll see, I just clicked "yes" and a "Y" came up by my name in the box of names to the left.

PAT: Well, during today's session, we invite you also to make comments related to this presentation in the chat box. Many of you are experts in this field of integrating technologies with student information systems and using other types of third party services. And so this is a good opportunity to share your knowledge and experiences with other people in the audience.

If you do have connectivity problems during this presentation, please click on the "help" button and send an email message to tech support, and someone from U Live and Learn will be in contact with you.

SUE: And I can tell by the quick tabulation in the gray bar down at the bottom right, we have eight people who said "yes" they have participated and three who said "no." So I think we've got a pretty good level of comfort in knowing how to participate in the webcast.

One thing that may be new to people — in the black bar there's a little icon that says "IM," that's for "Instant Messaging." If you click that, you pick someone who's name you see in the box and your message will go only to that person. I'd also like to mention a quirk of Internet technology. This webcast is not a television program where all the content — that's the voice and visuals — is broadcast in one stream. Instead, our voice and visuals are broken up into packets, so travel the Internet backbone at different rates and reassemble on your computer. So if what you see and hear don't match up exactly, please be patient knowing that it's our intent that they will all align shortly. But everybody's on a different connectivity system so probably everybody's going to have a slightly different experience, in the webcast anyway.

Slide: LAAP Project Partners/Deliverables

PAT: Okay, thanks, Sue. And I'd like to take this opportunity, too, to thank our technology sponsor and webcast producer, U Live and Learn, Denise Easton and John Pine, help us bring you this monthly webcast series, and we really appreciate all of their efforts.

This webcast series is now focussing on our LAAP Project, "Beyond the Administrative Core: Creating Web-based Student Services for Online Learners," which is funded by the US Department of Education. In July we heard from Burnie Blakeley, who helped the LAAP Project partners begin creating their new web-based student services from a technical point of view.

Over the last three months, we've heard from each of the institutional partners and now we're hearing from our corporate partner. So those four partners in the project are Kapi'olani Community College, which has about seven thousand students, and it's one of seven community colleges in the University of Hawaii system; Kansas State University which is a large land grant university with more than twenty thousand students; Regis University is a private Jesuit institution located in Denver, Colorado, and it has about ten thousand enrolments in its School for Professional Studies which was a target audience for this project; and then SCT and we're going to hear all about their approach today from Peggi.

The schools are very different in size and admission and the types of students they serve, and in addition each of them has a different student information system, and when we began this project none of them had an SCT system. So our big challenge was to find a way to help one another through the process of designing new services when we didn't have all the same commonalities. There are four deliverables in a three-year project which ends at the end of this month. They are commercial solutions for student services developed by SCT, a set of home-grown solutions developed by the institutional partners, a set of guidelines for other campuses developing student services, and case studies tracking the changes that occur as a result of implementing new web-based services.

Slide: WCET: The Cooperative advancing the effective use of technology in higher education

For those of you that are not familiar with WCET, it is a cooperative of higher education institutions, agencies, non-profit organizations and corporations involved in distance learning. And our focus is on advancing the effective use of technology in higher education, and you can see some information about us now on the screen, and I hope you will visit our website to learn more. We just had our annual conference this last month in Denver, Colorado, and we had several sessions that focussed on online student services and the slides and other materials from those session are now up on our website, so you might want to check those out.

Slide: LAAP Project Demonstration: SCT's Connected Learning Solutions

And now it's time to tell you a little bit more about Peggi. Peggi has twenty-two years experience in the education field, sixteen of them using distance education technology. She is a skilled administrator of distance education programs. Peggi implemented compressed video conferencing and web-based programs for Marywood University which is in Pennsylvania. Is that right, Peggi?

PEGGI: That's correct. Scranton, Pennsylvania.

PAT: And that's where she was the Director of Distance Education. She joined SCT in August 1999 as SCT's Senior Director of Teaching and Learning Strategy. And she plays a pivotal role there in defining SCT's connected learning strategy and in contributing to SCT's vision for an e-learning infrastructure.

Peggi serves on the Electronic Student Services Advisory Board for WCET's EduTools Project, and on the WCET Steering Committee as the Corporate Vice-Chair. She also remains active in K-12, serving as the president of the Towanda Area School District Board of Education. Peggi holds an MF in Instructional Technology from Marywood University , as well as a Masters and Bachelors Degree in Education from Mansfield University . She is currently pursuing her doctorate in Educational Administration at Temple University . We're very pleased to have you here, Peggi, to learn all about what SCT has been doing in this project.

Slide: Agenda

PEGGI: Thank you, Pat. The agenda today, as you can see on the screen, is first, I'm going to talk about SCT's participation in the LAAP grant and talk about how that shaped our our vision for an e-education infrastructure. And then after I talk about that work, I'm going to actually share what we have contributed as a participant in this grant in terms of the e-education applications, the student service applications that we have brought and are bringing to the market. And then, finally, some of the lessons learned that we've learned, but also been able to share with the other participants in this project. And of course, we'll close with any questions or comments that the rest of you might have.

Slide: "Companies spent the 20 th century managing efficiencies. They must spend the 21 st century managing experiences."

So the first thing I want to share with you as we start this is sort of our guiding principle for how we stay focussed on the things that we believe are most important. And I'll read this to you first: "Companies spent the 20 th century managing efficiencies. They must spend the 21 st century managing experiences."

Now, I have found this particular quote particularly compelling, and for those of you that are familiar with SCT, you recognize that we have built a strong reputation on our ability to develop software and bring to market software for higher education that enables them to manage their business processes, their back office requirements. And so that was a way of managing efficiencies. And we positioned ourselves very well doing that and served the market very well.

However, the market, higher education, is changing, and as such we need to do the same. And what we've recognized is it's really no longer about managing those efficiencies and just offering back office administrative solutions to higher education. In fact, we really need to think about how we provide a total solution that meets both academic and administrative needs of higher education, and enables the end user, whether that be a faculty member or a student, staff or administration, alumni, whomever your constituents might be, that enables them to be successful and provides them with an experience that will cause them to return and take advantage of the services and the information that you want to offer. So we really let that be our guiding principle and I found that to be a particularly powerful statement that I wanted to share with all of you today.

Slide: Initial Challenges

As Pat indicated, there were some initial challenges when we first began this particular project. And the first, as she mentioned previously, was that none of the partner institutions were using SCT solutions. In fact, none of those institutions were even using the same ERP. And by ERP I mean the back office administrative system, whether that be a student information system, financial aid, human resource, finance, whatever that might be to manage those administrative tasks for an institution. None of these were using either an SCT system or even the same system between them.

There was also some initial distrust of SCT and vendors in general. And that was based upon an experience that said that they didn't trust that we had the ability to offer non-proprietary solutions. So, for example, when I sat at the table with our three institutional partners, they could not understand and, in fact, it was a struggle for us to recognize how we would work together. Because typically, what a vendor does, is they offer solutions that expand the value proposition of their own market segment. So, you know, we typically don't bring to market something that's going to work with a competitive system. Right? So that was the way it used to be. And, again, none of them had an SCT system, so that they really did distrust our ability to be able to offer them something that would be valuable for them.

There was also an existing frustration with campus solutions that didn't talk to each other. So, for example, they had systems in place at that time, student information systems, that did not talk with their e-learning systems. And by e-learning systems I'm referring to the WebCTs and the Blackboards and others that offer that type of functionality. So those were two separate systems on a campus and they were facing a very real world, where they had to maintain those two technologies, maintain those two databases, often required different sign-ons, different passwords, different URLs. And so they were very frustrated because if that was a nightmare to manage those two systems, we would begin thinking about all the other systems that would offer services that they wanted to provide to their students and faculty. It really became a very daunting task to consider.

PAT: And, Peggi, just to kind of emphasize that, at Kansas State University, for example, they had student data in seventeen different databases that didn't necessarily talk to one another.

PEGGI: And just to emphasize that a point further, we have a client right now that has one hundred and forty-four different databases. And we're working with them to make sure that they all talk to each other. So, at that time, the systems didn't. And so that was a challenge. And so, you know, just bringing student service applications to the market, for example, just giving them another twenty student service applications, was not going to solve that problem. In fact, it made the problem worse. So that was an initial challenge. Even if we were to bring these student services to the market, these student service applications, the fact of the matter was are institutions going to want to take advantage of those when it only made the problem worse? When you talk about integration.

Slide: SCT Connection for WebCT

So, I went back to Philadelphia, which is actually, Malvern, where our home office is, and we began to brainstorm about what we could do to help alleviate that and knit that core basic problem of integration and interoperability. And what you're seeing now is what we first brought to the market and we call it the SCT Connection for WebCT. And if you look on the far right of this picture, in the orange box, that's where the SCT Banner or Plus student information system would reside. And does reside. On the far left, in the blue box, is where WebCT Campus Edition would be.

So as we started thinking about how can we make an e-learning system talk to a student information system, or an ERP, of course, we looked at our own system, which is Banner and/or Plus, and then looked at initially WebCT to kind of see how this would work. So there's your two separate systems, your orange box and your blue box, and what we did then was develop what you now see in the middle, in the yellow. And that's a middleware technology that's based on standards and, in fact, this is based on the IMS standard which I'll talk about a little bit more about in the presentation.

But, imagine, if you will, this works very much like your post office works in delivering your mail. So what this technology does, this technology, and that in the middle, is that it actually takes messages from the Banner information system. Those messages occur when you change a piece of information in the database, okay? So when that piece of information is changed, there is a trigger, it triggers an event, and that event is picked up by this message gateway and delivered to the application that cares that that piece of information was changed. And in this case, it's WebCT. WebCT picks up that piece of information and applies it to its own database. And that works in the reverse as well. So much like a post office does, you can send mail or you can receive mail and the goal of the post office is to make sure it's delivered accurately and as quickly as possible to the people who need to have it, okay? So this was our first attempt at trying to make two disparate systems talk to each other. And we were very successful in doing that. We brought it to market and the first thing that we had to do — it's bulleted out on the slide for you — is that students are successfully registered, for example, in the Banner or Plus system, it automatically sends a message to WebCT and they are added to the roster within the WebCT course environment. It also gives them immediate access to that e-learning environment. So immediately upon successful registration a student can go into their course environment and begin to review the syllabus. It also synchronizes in real time the drop/add process. So, as students drop or add a course, it will automatically keep updated in real time that course roster.

It also enables in WebCT for faculty members to actually submit their grades, so they can go into the WebCT environment, track grades throughout the duration of the course and then, at mid-term or final, they submit that grade, it's passed over to that middleware technology, that SCT Luminis Message Broker, and it is then delivered to the SCT Banner or Plus system where it's processed and posted. Okay? That happens in real time, eliminates the manual data re-entry, eliminates downloading and colouring in bubble sheets, eliminates the need for the technology people to worry about passwords and separate URLs and single and multiple user IDs, all of that, because it tracks all of it automatically and in real time.

Now, we brought this to market, as I said. It was very successful. We've already licensed over a hundred and fifty or have sold a hundred and fifty licenses to this technology. And so we're real happy about that because it really was a proof of concept, whether using standard space technology you could get two disparate applications talking to each other. But our goal was always not to stop at two. We recognized that there were many applications that campuses had that they needed to have talk to their student information system.

PAT: Peggi, one thing. I was just thinking about that and one of the early ideas that SCT had about this was that there would be an increasing number of institutions that wanted to collaborate in the delivery of either programs online or services to students, and they would need some kind of technology that would allow them to exchange data from unlike systems in real time, and so this responded to that early vision.

PEGGI: Absolutely. And if you look on the next slide coming up...

Slide: New SCT Connections

PAT: It would be interesting at this point to ask how many campuses out there have an SCT system.

PEGGI: Absolutely. If you're using an SCT student information system, or in fact, any of the SCT products, if you would click "yes" and, of course, if you're using any other system, including a home-grown or legacy system, click "no."

SUE: And if people don't know, they can click the question mark.

PEGGI: So while those responses are coming in, let me explain the slide as you see it. And I'm actually going to talk about that left hand side first, and then we'll talk about exactly the point that you just made, Pat.

For example, our vision was always that this technology would support multiple campus applications. So if you look again back on the left, you see that I now have three campus applications. They could be anything. It could be a library, it could be a parking system, it could be a bookstore. It could be any type of service application that you would be using at your campus. And if that application had the ability to communicate with standards-based messages, those IMS messages, then there would be nothing to technically prevent them from being able to use that same middleware technology and communicate with the back office system, in this case, a Banner or Plus.

Our vision was always to be able to support those multiple campus applications. But what Pat made a point about, it's very true, is because that middleware was based on standard technology, then it could also be potentially supportive of multiple student information systems as well.

PEGGI: You're exactly right, though, Pat. If every campus had a different student information system and they wanted to talk to, let's say library system, or they wanted to be able to exchange messages between themselves, then that technology should be able to support that, because, again, it's just like a post office. It can take that message from any one of those systems and be able to deliver it to any other institution or any other application that cared about that particular message.

PAT: So if we'd had this at the beginning of our project, we could've all worked together in a different way.

PEGGI: That's very true.

SUE: I think we have some polling results — just one. A member of our audience says they have an SCT system. The others don't have one or don't know.

PEGGI: Okay. Very interesting. Very interesting. Well, for those of you who don't use an SCT system, I'm particularly glad that you were able to join us on this call and hear more about what SCT is doing.

Slide: New Challenges

Okay. Well, we brought this to market and sure enough there were new challenges that we now had to face. One was that we recognized that it didn't fully satisfy the intent of the FIPSE LAAP grant. So, for example, one of the things that we were trying to do, where we were hoping to do as part of this grant, was to bring to the market a suite of student services. Well, certainly this technology enabled an institution to take advantage of offering in a very interoperable way that suite of student services. But it didn't actually bring that suite of student services to the market. So it didn't really fully satisfy the intent.

The other challenge was that we still had two years remaining in the life cycle of the grant. So we had done this in our first year. And so we have two more years where we could explore further how we could support higher education in offering student services in an integrated way.

Finally, as a company, we were facing the challenge that we were transforming ourselves as we were trying to meet these evolving market demands. So higher education was becoming more and more attuned to the need for integrated systems and the need for delivering services to all of their students. Not just distance ed students but for their traditional on-campus student population as well.

And as students became more demanding of the services they wanted access to, higher education institutions were becoming more demanding of us and vendors like us in terms of the technology that we could offer them in order to accomplish and meet those needs.

So we were needing to transform ourselves. We were no longer an ERP company. And we really had to look at what was it really that we needed to think about in order to bring higher education, the total solution that they needed, to meet all of the demands of all of their constituents, not only on the administrative side of the house, but on the academic side as well.

Slide: SCT's e-Education Infrastructure: A User-Centric Approach

And so, what we were able to do was to go back to the table and talk about where we needed to be moving as a company and where we needed to be moving in terms of how we offered solutions to the market. And what we developed was input from the western cooperatives and the institutional partners in this grant was the e-Education infrastructure.

Now, before I go and explain this particular graphic, I want everyone on this call to recognize that this is a vision for how SCT needs to think about how we bring solutions to the market for higher education. We really need to look at that whole big picture and how it all fits together. Each of you, as you look at this, really should promote a level of discussion on your campuses about how you set priorities for your technology planning. So I do not want you to walk away from the next few minutes of this conversation thinking that you have to do each and every thing that I talk about in this picture.

What it means to do is prompt you to have those kinds of discussions at your campus to talk about what is the mission of your institution, what are the important services that you need to provide to your faculty and to your students and how are you going to prioritize them?

PAT: Peggi, we might want to point out here that your slides are actually on our site. So if people are having trouble reading this, they can get a copy of the slides later.

PEGGI: Absolutely. And thank you for reminding me of that.

SUE: The slides are currently up at the wcet.info site. And just follow the links to the LAAP Student Services Project.

PEGGI: Okay. So the first layer that you need to think about in the e-Education infrastructure is where you think about the type of constituents who are going to take advantage of the services that you want to provide.

For the purposes of this grant, we were really focused on students. But what SCT recognizes and what all of you recognize is that it doesn't stop there, that once you make a service available, there are all kinds of people who might want to take advantage of that service or get access to the information that you want to provide online.

You really need to think about who are the populations that you're trying to serve. So beside your students, you know, it's the faculty. It's administration and staff. It's prospective students. It's alumni. And the list goes on and I'm sure that this particular list is not comprehensive.

But any time you think about any particular service that you want to offer, you really need to think from all of these different perspectives, you know, is this a service that they might want to take advantage of as well, and does that have implications about resources, okay?

PAT: I think, Peggi, that's a lesson we learned at the campuses, in this project, is that we initially thought of the students as being our primary audience, and in a way they are the primary audience. But sometimes designing new student services means designing new electronic tools for the student service personnel so that they can provide better services to students.

PEGGI: That's absolutely true. And what we've learned, and you can tell from my title - I'm the Senior Director for Teaching and Learning Strategy - what we found is that there's really no service that we've discovered that that you can offer to students that your faculty aren't also going to want access to. It's just very limited, or an advisor or a student development officer, you know. But there are always going to be in any given service multiple people who are interested, maybe in a different way and we'll talk about that more as I talk about exactly the services that SCT brought to market.

In the next layer is the presentation infrastructure. Now, in the presentation infrastructure, this is where you start thinking about exactly what is that visual presentation, the visual representation of your campus online. This is also where you think about role-based access for your constituents.

In the case of a portal, do you want, when people come to your site, that it recognizes their role? And then is able then to offer them different information or different levels of access based on whether they're a faculty member, whether they're a parent of a student, whether they're a local community member, etcetera.

You also want to think about whether this presentation layer needs to be personalized. Do you want it to recognize people by name? Okay, so not only by role, but specifically by who they are.

You obviously want it to be secure, so you need to think about security issues. Single sign-on, and what levels of access that they're actually going to be given to what information.

And another really important piece of this infrastructure to think about, the presentation infrastructure, is this whole concept of customization. So do you want to be able to give the people who come to your site the ability to customize their experience in some way? Okay? So can they actually sign up to receive different pieces of information or request access to particular groups?

So those kinds of services become important to think about in terms of the level of customization you want to offer to people who would come to your site.

Then we get to the middle layer which is the application layer. This is where a great deal of my time is spent at SCT. This is where we really start to think about what are all the different kinds of applications/services that might fit into this technology or this e-Education infrastructure. And we've actually identified four major categories of applications And this is a direct result of the work we did with the Western Cooperative and this grant. What we found is that, for the most part, it fits into these four broad categories: either academic, administrative, personal or community. Now, before I talk a little bit about what types of applications would fit under each of those categories, I want you to also take note of those blue arrows, because those blue arrows mean that that list goes on and on. It is not exhaustive.

Now, under personal, there's not just three. There are many. So I've given you samples of what might fit under each of those categories, but at your own institution - and this is where part of that discussion needs to take place - you will decide for yourselves, under each of those categories, are there applications or services or information that we should be providing in an online format to our faculty, to our students, to parents, to whomever? Okay? And what should they be? Do they clearly tie to our mission and our culture? Okay? And then how do we prioritize them, then? Based on that. So this is where that discussion really becomes rich and actually becomes a critical part of the dialogue that should be happening on your campuses.

So, in the academic category, this would be those applications that directly support the teaching and learning process where the primary user would be a faculty or a student. Okay? And we'll talk more about examples of these later on.

In the administrative category this is typically where SCT has built its reputation up 'til now. So this is your ERP system. Your student information system, your financial aid, your human resource system, those kinds of things that you want to make available, maybe more to your administrators and your staff.

In the personal category, these are the kinds of applications that a single user might want to take advantage of. So I, Peggi Munkittrick, want to access a counselling resource at your institution. That's sort of a one-on-one kind of experience, and it's something that I want that's personal to me. So it would fall into that category.

In the last category, community, this is where you provide services that enable students to be able to engage in the social life of your institution. So where can I actually meet with others in my peer group and participate in some activity or some club. So, generally, this is a many-to-many kind of organization or service that you want to provide.

PAT: This might also be where your alumni fit.

PEGGI: Absolutely. Or at least, all in my applications. And then shared applications which is the red box that kind of goes underneath it, classes all of those because these are the kinds of things that support communication, so your e-mail system and how you're going to provide that service to everyone at your institution, or calendaring, or payment processing. So those kinds of things, again, that support communication or some sort of technology that will run across all of the applications and all of the services that you might want to offer.

This whole section is also where we really get concerned and pay a lot of attention to how we support the integration and interoperability of all of these applications, because again, as you make decisions about which of these are important at your institution, the secondary question needs to be how do you make sure that the technology is in place to support a very tightly integrated system, so that you're not managing all of those disparate databases. You know, so the experience, once again, for your end users is a very seamless, intuitive experience for them. They don't care about how many vendors are helping you to support this environment. They don't care that they're in WebCT or they're in the SCT self-service products or they're in a campus pipeline. They don't care. They want to know they're at your institution, taking advantage of the information and the services that you are providing to them and that their relationship is with you, it's not with us. So that becomes very critical at this layer.

As I'm going to go through the next three very briefly. The data storage infrastructure is where you begin talking about the databases that you have on campus and what your strategy is for choosing and maintaining those databases, as well as your directory servers, you know, e-mail systems, you know, etcetera, etcetera. So you do need to think about what the implications are for those decisions are for at your institution and plan for those in the future.

Obviously, to support that, you also need to think about the hardware. Now, when you're thinking about your hardware and planning for hardware, you're thinking of things like the servers that you're going to have at your campus, how you're going to support desktop use, how many computer labs do you standardize on a particular type of computer, are you going to support wireless devices, and do you need to worry about a wireless network, for example? Speaking of networks, you've got to talk about that. You know, hubs and routers and Internet access and broadband and all of those kinds of things need to be planned for from an IT perspective.

And then finally, up the left hand side of this graphic, is where we really think about the services that you need to think about offering in order to support all of this and to ensure that your faculty, your students, your administrators, your staff, are going to be successful in this online environment.

Now, when I talk about these particular services, I'm really talking about the training and the support that you're going to give to your users or provide to your users so that they can be successful. So it might be product training, to make sure that they're comfortable with the products and the tools that you're going to offer them. But it could be all kinds of other consulting services as well - academic planning, for example. So you need to think about — it could be a help desk service would be another one — so you need to think about what are all the kinds of services. Another one that was particularly important at Marywood University is instructional design and being able to provide instructional design services to our faculty as they were developing online courses.

So those are the kinds of things you need to think about how you're going to support those, as well. It's not a piece of computer, it's a piece of equipment, right? It's not a wire, but it's critically important to everyone's overall success.

Slide: e-Education Applications: Academic

So, that's the e-Education infrastructure, that's our vision for how we are thinking about how all of this needs to fit in terms of how we're going to bring solutions to the higher education market. What I want to share with you now in the next few slides are exactly some of the things we've begun to do to actually meet that vision. And to help you tie back to that, if you look in the lower right hand corner of this visual you will see a very small snapshot of that e-Education infrastructure.

And if you look in the middle section, again, the little box that's got the purple lines in it, and right above it there's a white arrow. So right now I'm going to share with you some of the things we've done to bring some services to the market that support the academic category of that application layer. Okay?

So the first thing we did, and I've actually already talked to you about it is in the area of course management we brought to the market the SCT connection for WebCT. So working very closely with Campus Pipeline and with WebCT we were able to take three disparate applications and bring them into one integrated environment for higher education. And again, I've already mentioned that we've licensed over a hundred and fifty of these. People are up and running and it's working very successfully and we're very pleased about that.

PAT: And this is the Luminis middle layer. That makes this possible.

PEGGI: Yes. Then, we didn't stop there, though. So what we also did was we did some work in the area of academic advising.

Now, with academic advising, and I will stop here just briefly to tell everyone that one of the things we really had to think about as a company as we talked about what we were going to do in each of these areas, we had to think about whether it was a build, buy or a partner decision.

In every case, we had to think is this a service that we want to build - actually build the functionality into our existing applications or as a new product? Do we want to buy or acquire the technology from someplace else or do we want to partner and, via that partnership, bring that service to the market?

So those were the kinds of decisions and discussions we had to have at SCT. In the area of academic advising we determined that we were going to build the functionality, and the reason why is because we already had existing applications — they're the SCT self-service applications — that had some academic advising capability in them already.

So, really, what we wanted to do was to extend that functionality even further. And in this case we built in "what-if" degree analysis. And with this functionality, a student's actually able to come into the online environment and actually plan out what would happen if they were to change their major. So if instead of being a Business Administration Major, they wanted to be an Education Major, they actually could play that game out online and see exactly what it would mean in terms of their program plan. So they could see exactly how the courses that they've already taken would map in that new major. And so they could actually do that any number of times.

This became an example of a tool that was not only particularly useful to the student but also became very useful to the faculty advisor as well, because they could do the same thing. They could go in for their advisees and actually look at a "what-if" degree analysis in terms of making an advising recommendation for a degree or major changes.

PAT: Peggi, I have to tell you that this is a very popular new application at my daughter's campus that happens to have an SCT system. She called about six weeks or so ago to say, "Hey, Mom, we've got this great new thing here where we can run these 'what-ifs'." And I think we're now on the fourth major that she's decided upon using this system.

PEGGI: And what's really nice about it is that you can play that as much as you want. It doesn't change your major. It just gives you additional information to think about.

And, of course, in some cases, we have students who actually then go in and change their majors. But, anyway, I'm glad to hear that. Thanks, Pat.

The other area that we've worked on is in assessment. In this particular case, we've chosen to partner. We've partnered with a company called NuVentive. And with NuVentive we're bringing to market a digital portfolio application. And with this digital portfolio now any individual at your institution can take advantage of creating as many portfolios as they would wish and any number or variety of portfolios, and actually use them to manage, to store, to document all of their personal and professional learning achievements over a lifetime. So not only for the time that they're at your institution but they could start this at any time before and carry it on even after they leave your institution, and be able to not only manage those achievements but also have the ability to give access to anyone that they feel is relevant in terms of being able to review and/or evaluate any of the documentation or the pieces of learning evidence that they've placed within their portfolio.

An example of this is, as Pat had mentioned earlier, I'm in a doctoral program at Temple University. I'm actually ABD status — I'm working on my dissertation now. And so I'm using this portfolio system for my dissertation. And not only have I placed, you know, the progress I'm making on my dissertation, I'm tracking within the portfolio, but I've given access then to my portfolio to my dissertation committee. So they're able to come in whenever they want and see what I'm doing, see what progress I'm making, make comment, provide evaluation, and it works as a very nice communication vehicle between us.

At the same time, I've also given access to my mother who lives in North Carolina and thinks that she needs to know what I'm doing on my dissertation as well.

PAT: Of course. Peggi, we probably should point out here that while the "what-if" degree analysis is a component or proprietary to SCT, that the assessment module is not.

PEGGI: That's correct. Since we partnered with NuVentive to bring that to market, it is available to SCT clients as a stand-alone application, though obviously we also offer the value-add opportunity to have it integrated with the Banner or Plus student information system. But its value is still strong for any other institution regardless of the student information system they're using. Okay? It truly again, because it's the end user, it's controlled by the student or the faculty member who is maintaining that portfolio, that person and this application doesn't care what student information database you're using.

Slide: e-Education Applications: Administrative

PEGGI: Okay, so as we move on, and we're going to have to move a little more quickly, I'm going to go now into the administrative category. And in the admissions area, we've actually enhanced again existing functionality to support a Quick Admit process. And this Quick Admit process actually enables students to come into the web site, your web environment, your online environment, and apply for admittance into the institution so that they can register, typically, for some sort of non-credit or training opportunity that you're offering.

So very quickly they can go through. They can fill out the form. It tracks where they are in submitting the information that's needed to make an admissions decision, and then informs them at the end — typically the decision — all of this can happen within, like, a three- to five-minute timeframe — will let them know immediately whether they have been accepted into the institution based on the rules that the institution has set forth, and then give them immediate access to register for some of those non-credit and/or training applications, and even pay for them online so that they can immediately get started.

PAT: Now, I think you mentioned earlier, though, that it would recognize if students needed to go through the full admissions process, and would kick them over into that more extended process, is that right?

PEGGI: That is true. As they're going through and they're talking, they have to identify, the kinds of things that they're interested in doing, and, of course, if they're looking for full-time admittance into the freshman program, then that's going to kick them over into a different process, and more information is going to be provided or, going to be required in order to get to that admissions decision, and that wouldn't happen then as quickly. Then you would be tossed over into your formal admissions process.

PAT: Right. But the Quick Admit is good for many distance students who are coming back just for enrichment or, lifelong learning opportunities.

PEGGI: Some institutions, for example, will enable you to take up to twelve credits before you have to formally admit into a program, so this would be a way to enable that to happen as well. And it would do a check. It would know how many credits you've taken up to that point, and would allow you to take, through a Quick Admit process, up to those twelve credits. And then once you tried to sign up for that fifth course, assuming that they're all three-credit courses, it would trigger you over, and say, you have to go through the formal admissions process.

PAT: Very nice.

PEGGI: We also enhanced our academic advising functionality. So now students can go online and request their transcripts. They can indicate where they want their transcripts to be sent, so it can be sent directly to them and in an unofficial capacity, or they can have it sent officially to a graduate school or any other program that would require an official transcript. They can have it displayed on the web. If the institution chooses, they can attach fees to those various methods of delivery and collect those fees online.

We've also enhanced functionality through a degree audit and so now both faculty - and again, this is a case where students and where, again, faculty also want to access, to the ability to actually run either a comprehensive or a summary report about where that student stands in their degree. So you actually can go online at any time and request that summary or comprehensive report and get a readout you can print it or you can view it online, and see exactly how your program plan is going. You can see where the courses you've taken are mapped against courses that are required. You could see what requirements they fulfil. You could see what courses or what requirements still exist that need to be taken. And you can run that as many times as you want. And it also saves. So you once you've run a degree compliance report, you can save it and view it at your leisure if you so choose, or pull it back up. When you need to, you can go ahead and run a brand new report as well.

And then, finally, in the area of administration, we also have institutional assessment functionality. This again is a partner of ours. It's NuVentive once again. This tool, called TrackThat, enables an institution to manage all of their academic planning processes and assessment processes for the entire institution.

Now where this is particularly important is if your institution is involved with any kind of an accreditation review, whether that be for institutional accreditation or program accreditation. This enables you to actually track all of your goals, your objectives and be able to report, not only internally on how you're achieving those as an institution, but also be able to report to those external agencies who are coming in for those accreditation reviews.

From an internal perspective, it's a particularly nice application because it helps you to make sure that you have aligned all of the learning activities and it doesn't have to be actually restricted even to academic. You can actually align all of your administrative and academic activities at an institution and make sure that they all marry up to the mission of the institution.

So you would document the mission statement and then look at different programs and identify the goals and objectives at that level, as well as at the department level, as well as at the course level, and make sure that they're all married up and so that internally you're able to look either across a particular goal or down through a the department program and course to see how the institution is contributing to the achievement of the mission. So it's a very powerful application and one we're really excited to be able to bring to the market.

SUE: Peggi, Gerard has a question in the chat box about printouts being available regarding the institutional assessment aspect.

PEGGI: Well, absolutely. And I guess I would need to ask a little bit more detail from him as to what he's looking for, but we can do a variety of different things. I mean, obviously, we have more information available that we can provide. You can go to the Nuventive website, which is www.nuventive.com and there is a static demo that you can look at their web site, as well as additional information.

But the other thing we can do is we have the ability using technology much like this to actually do live demos of the software. So virtually, so you can stay at your institution and we can stay in Malvern and you can actually look at the live software. We would be glad to provide you with all of that information. You can take advantage of whatever it is that you want in whatever form that you want. All you'd need to do, and there is a slide here at the end, you'll see my e-mail address. Send me an e-mail and I'll make sure that gets off to you right away.

Slide: e-Education Applications: Personal

Okay. I am going to go through these real briefly. In the personal category, quite frankly, this is an emerging category. We really looked to a lot of our client institutions as well as our LAAP partners to help us identify what is happening in this particular area.

There are a lot of best practices out there that we try to monitor. We try to pay attention to the kinds of personal service applications that seem to be coming to the market from other vendors. And really look to see what is occurring in that area.

One of the primary areas is career, and there's a couple of screen shots of institutions who have offered some of these online career advising services online. But also in the area of personal, the personal services there, you can go out and see where institutions have begun to offer information about a wide variety of topics that would support people who have very personal needs in terms of information around alcohol abuse, eating disorders, and that list goes on.

One of the things that I've already talked to you about, and I'll just mention it briefly here, that we believe is a very powerful personal tool, is that digital portfolio. What's important about this is that I as a user can not only establish a wide variety of portfolios to meet my own personal needs, but the institution can also set up portfolio templates in order to meet needs of the institution. So different programs can set up portfolios that meet, for example, and I gave you some examples there, but the English department could set up a portfolio for writing samples and be able to track how students are evolving over time in their ability to write.

There are institutions who are using the portfolio technology for admissions decisions. There are institutions who are using the portfolio to ask students to report on graduation requirements around community service, for example. In the professional development area or the student affairs area, they are using these portfolios for students to be able to put together career or professional portfolios, and they supply career advising around them. And that list goes on. So, again, we found that to be a very powerful personal tool, but also extremely powerful for the institution, as well.

Slide: e-Education Applications: Community

In the community area, we have a research and development project going on and we refer to it as Project Socrates. And this is a dynamic community tool and it actually combines instant messaging, artificial intelligence, chat room technology, into one application that actually supports serendipitous encounters or dynamic communities for your online students.

So what happens is that as I enter your online environment, I might go to a particular area — let's say the admissions area. And there's a little indicator in the corner of the web page that I can click on that will let me know if there's anyone else in that same place on your web site. And if they are, I can actually engage in a conversation with them. So I actually can talk to them about, you know, that admissions area and ask them where do I go for certain information, or, you know, can they help me with something. And actually, it began to have those serendipitous encounters with people that normally you get to experience when you're on campus. An example is if you're standing in line at the registration window, you might start talking to the person in front of you, or the person in back of you, but when you're an online student, you don't get that same opportunity. But with this tool, you do.

You also have the ability to staff it, so it can help with your help desk functions for example. So you can actually make people available and they could actually then pose a question to your staff, and get immediate assistance, and/or with that artificial intelligence, you can also make available a virtual assistant. And in this case, it maintains a database of the more routine questions and responses that students would typically ask. And so they can go to the virtual assistant and ask, for example, what is the prerequisite for Math 201? And it would be able to give them that information.

PAT: Without having to scroll a whole list of FAQs, you can ask your question and it will provide the answer.

PEGGI: Absolutely. And it will either provide it to you immediately online, so that you see it actually within a window. Or it will e-mail the response to you.

PAT: Great. Much more user-friendly than the FAQ.

PEGGI: Oh, yes. And then we've also been participating with several professional organizations, and I've mentioned several of them here. And, again, in light of the time, I think I'm going to skip through these, other than to say you're very familiar with the Western Cooperative and the very important organization to SCT, and helping us to really understand how higher education is changing and using technology to support learning. And so it's just been a very important resource to us. Of course, the FIPSE/LAAP grant has been very important and FIPSE itself, the fund for improvement of post-secondary education does a lot through funding, to support what colleges and universities are doing in this area.

The EduTools Project we mentioned briefly and is actually a place where you can look at independently reviewed analysis of selected course management software today but it is also going to expand to cover the student services we've been talking about, as well as e-Learning policies and other instructional technologies.

HEKATE was formed - that's an organization that was formed to support an international exchange of dialogue regarding the next generation of products and services for the 21 st century learner. This organization is unique in that it really makes its central mission to encourage discussion between higher education institutions and vendors in order to kind of close that gap between the needs of higher education and the technology that vendors are bringing to the market.

And then finally the IMS, PESC and others are those standards-based organizations that actually recommend, defined and promote the use of technical specifications and standards across all of these software applications so that that whole vision of the e-Education infrastructure can be realized.

Slide: Lessons Learned

So if we can skip now to the lessons learned — some of the lessons we've learned in the past three years at SCT and, for me particularly, is that commitment and passion does not replace dependable processes and resources.

And this is going to hold true for the higher education institutions as well. You can get a lot of committed and passionate people, but you really do need to have that plan and you have to identify the resources that are going to be needed to support these efforts. They can't happen in a vacuum. And commitment and passion are wonderful things and you want to have those kinds of folks on your teams, but if you don't have the right support, the right processes and the right resources, both people and financial, then the project is ultimately going to stall.

"Communication! Communication! Communication!" And I put that down three times because I had to constantly be thinking of communicating not only internally at the SCT organization, but communicating also from an administrative perspective to Pat and the folks at that supported the LAAP grant funding. And then finally I needed to make sure that I was communicating with the other participants in this particular grant. So I learned a lot from them. And so I say the word "communicate," and in fact that last one probably should be "listen," because the more I listened to Kapi'olani, to Regis and to Kansas , the more we learned. And it was a wonderful opportunity for SCT and I can't thank them enough for all of the open communication and all of the wonderful ideas they shared with us over the past three years.

And then ultimately the lesson we learned, that it is really about the user experience, not product functionality. So it's really easy to get caught up into the technology, to be caught up in code and functional requirements, and isn't that cool? And user interface and all of that kind of thing. But the reality is that's not what it's about. It's about the user experience and that's what's important and that's what we need to keep our focus on. And the more we do that, the better quality product we're able to bring to market.

Slide: Lessons Shared

The lessons we shared with the institutions and that we discovered together was that that build by partner discussion, it's a valuable exercise for institutions and vendors alike. So even as institutions, whenever you identified that there is a particular student service that you want to offer, that you really need to think about whether that is something you can build yourself or whether that's something that you buy or even partner with other institutions to offer. So that's a very valuable discussion for yourself as well.

The Universal Modelling Language — and we really didn't talk about that in this particular presentation a lot, but it is a type of visual representation that offers a useful framework for promoting dialogue between your subject matter experts and the development team — the people that are going to code or build that software for you. So it really helps using that UML to actually use that as a way to bridge the communication gap between potentially your faculty or your student affairs people, and your programmers.

PAT: Peggi, we have a presentation on UML, which Burnie Blakeley did, which has been archived. It's our July webcast. If people are interested in that they can still click on to it.

PEGGI: Great. Please, please, please use cross-functional teams for your decision-making. That was the other important thing that the more you can involve people from across the organization, because remember, when I first started out, I said that it's really easy to think about a student service, and really just pull in the people that what you believe to be directly impacted by that service.

The reality is that I've yet to find a student service that doesn't have an impact on a broad range of people across your institution. So get their input right from the very beginning. You know, so if you can involve your students, do so. If you can involve faculty, if you can involve people from student affairs, involve your technology people, involve administrators, you know, and really try to put together a cross-functional team, and that way you'll be more successful in coming up with requirements that are going to meet the broad spectrum of users.

And then finally, if you do choose to build, ensure that your subject matter experts own that functional requirement process. Again, it's about the experience and your subject matter experts understand what that experience is like. They understand how the user is going to use that software, how they want to get access to information. And what their motivation is.

So it's very important that they own that functional requirement process. Do not pass that away to your technical folks. Do not, you know, let them drive what that user experience is going to be like. Do they need to be involved? Absolutely. Are they important and critical to the success? Absolutely. But make sure that the subject matter experts really stay involved and if, in fact, you believe as I do that that user experience is ultimately the strongest measure of success.

On the last slide...

PAT: Peggi, keeping the focus on the "what you want to do" versus letting the "how you're going to do it" lead the project.

Slide: Resources

PEGGI: The perfect summary, Pat. On this last slide, I give you some of the web sites for some of those organizations that SCT finds particularly valuable.

And again, rather than expect all of you to write those down, if you go to the web site, it is there, and you can pull that up and use it.

Slide: For more information

On the very last slide, is my contact information. So, again, if there's anyone who wants information about any of the applications or any of the e-Education infrastructure that I've talked about today, please feel free to e-mail me and I will be glad to follow up with you with any other similar information that you require.

Slide: This is series is brought to you as part of WCET's work on its Learning Anytime Anywhere Partnership Project

PAT: Peggi, on behalf of WCET and our attendees today, thank you for an excellent presentation. I also want to thank you for being such a wonderful partner for this three-year period. We've been very fortunate — we've had the same project directors at all three campuses and Peggi has been with us from the very beginning. So I think we've all been very fortunate to learn a great deal from one another.

Slide: Resources

PEGGI: And I thank you, Pat. I would like to ask Sue, if you could just pull up the URLs one more time.

SUE: Sure.

PEGGI: So that we're ending this up, that people can write those down if they want to. But, thank you, Pat, it's been a wonderful experience, and I know that SCT and myself, specifically, have every intent to continue working with the Western Cooperative.

SUE: I'd also like to once again point to everybody to our WCET web site. Follow the links to the LAAP Student Services Project, and in the webcast section, you'll see all the webcasts that we have done over the last year. They've all been archived, and we are also in the process of having them all transcribed. So all the information is there. This webcast has also been recorded and will be archived on our site very soon. So it's just a plethora of information, so I encourage everyone to check it out.

PAT: And I'd like to say a special thank you to Sue who makes sure that everything runs technically, so that you can take advantage of this technology. And it's time, Sue, if you could put up the evaluation, we'll ask people to give us a little bit of feedback about today's presentation, that will help us in doing future presentations. We're hoping to have another series after this one. And we'll keep you posted about what that might be, and we'll just give you a few minutes to respond.

SUE: In the chat box, Gerard says, "This is great, thank you." Thank you for your kind comments, Gerard. Does anybody else have some questions that they'd like to ask now? Before or after they fill out the evaluation?

Slide: WCET Evaluation

PAT: We have Phyllis Wong here, from North Dakota . Art Ashton, is from Arizona , and I think Ted Christenson's from Arizona . I'm not sure where Wayne Huber is from. We have several WCET members there.

SUE: Well, I have a question for you, Peggi. I think a lot of people are interested in the emerging of SCT and Campus Pipeline. Can you tell us a little bit more about what's going on with that?

PEGGI: Well, obviously we have acquired Campus Pipeline. If folks hadn't heard of that yet, it's true. We've reorganized once more and that reorganization is now complete, and they are actually part of our culture and our organization now. We're working very diligently to map a more closely integrated plan for how we move forward our products. Obviously, this is good news for that Luminis technology that sits in the middle. It's going to continue to be standards-based, and it will support not only what we're doing very closely at SCT with the student information products that we bring to the market, but continue to support all the other disparate databases that are out there, as well.

We recognized how important integration was to the market, and so they've really become our sort of business line for integration. And how that's all going to happen and how that's all going to be supported, so it becomes much more central and critical to SCT's vision going forward, than they did formerly as a partner.

Everyone should see that as extremely exciting and very positive news for SCT's direction and for what we can bring to the market in the future.

PAT: Peggi, there's another question here from Ted Christensen, asking about any experience involving SCT products across consortial efforts involving multiple institutions, using different database products.

PEGGI: You know, my quick answer to that is yes, but then, when you ask me to actually articulate is specifically what they are, I would have to go back and do a little bit of research. I do know that we have supported some consortial efforts and, in fact, in some cases they were using different products. But in order to get more detail I would have to go back and do that additional research, which I would be more than happy to do. I apologize for just not having that information directly off the top of my head.

So, again, Ted, if you would please just give me an e-mail and just say, "Remember my question, you know, what are you doing about this?" I would be glad to, again, do that research and get that information to you.

PAT: I know that, as we talked earlier, that was one of the early visions, so it could be that in the licenses that there are some institutions using it in that way. It would be very interesting to know that.

SUE: Well, I have gotten the word from U Live and Learn that we need to wrap up. I wanted to thank everyone. Peggi, you're fabulous. You've done a great job at SCT. Thank you very much. And thanks for everybody who was able to join us today.

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