Collaboration Brings Students, Schools Closer Together
- By Linda L. Briggs
- 10/07/04
Lansing Community College
As with Cal Poly, looking ahead at the big picture drove the move to new collaborative
software at Lansing State Community College.
Lansing, just an hour outside Detroit, wanted to save money by consolidating
and simplifying its systems. A quick move and immediate savings characterized
the school’s move to Oracle Collaboration Suite. Lansing immediately cut
direct IT costs by $600,000 a year by consolidating its infrastructure.
CIO Glenn Cerny says the school also wanted to enhance the quality of its data,
and allow different aspects of the school to work together. Whatever software
choices the school made needed to drive its strategic plan as well. That meant
all decisions needed to feed into “using data more wisely, having it more
accessible, and having quality data in general,” Cerny says.
The data needs were important—the school registers 20,000 students a semester,
and as a community college, sees lots of turnover.
Lansing’s multiple databases in the previous system meant that collaboration
between systems was impossible. “We had multiple systems, and obviously
with multiple systems you’re getting multiple answers to the same question,”
Cerny says. For example, Lansing had over 4,000 Access databases querying the
same information but getting different results.
Now, Lansing couldn’t be more please with its solution. The integrated
system means data is accessible by different people at Lansing with different
needs—meaning that collaboration between various workgroups who need to
share data can happen. E-mail, calendars, and files are all stored in the same
database. That also makes maintenance much easier. “Integration was our
key,” Cerny says. “We wanted things to be simple and integrated
for the user and also simple for our staff to be able to maintain.”
As an example of how the collaboration possible with file-sharing is saving
Lansing time and money, Cerny cites monthly board meetings. Documents can now
be distributed electronically by pointing all attendees to a central shared
document, where they can review and comment on them well before the meeting.
That saves someone having to pass out paper copies by hand at the last minute,
and allows comment and discussion beforehand. That kind of collaboration “has
been a tremendous win for our campus,” Cerny says.
USD: Reaching Students Early and Often
At the University of San Diego, a 4,800-student private Catholic university
in San Diego, the desire to make a dramatic change in how the school reaches
out to prospective students was a key factor in moving to new, collaborative
software. The school was looking for nothing less than “the ability to
change how higher education d'es business,” says Director of Admissions
Steve Pultz. After extensive research, the school selected Oracle Collaboration
Suite, and is gradually implementing more and more modules.
Before moving to the Oracle system, USD was running a number of individual
homemade systems on a mainframe. “We had [separate] systems for admissions,
financial age, records—all sil'ed,” Pultz says. Although some of
the systems were best-of-breed vendor products and did their individual jobs
well, USD lacked the ability to integrate completely, to grow effectively and
efficiently, and to provide an all-important Web interface.
It was what Pultz calls “just an information collection system”—very
limiting in terms of growth, and not Web-compatible.
Education has become “a very competitive business environment,”
Pultz says, and the school wanted a system that let them apply standard business
practices to areas like recruiting and student services. Prospective students
and their parents are bringing a certain consumer mentality to the college selection
process, Pultz says. “They’re shopping… Schools need to be
out front about their message.”
USD has done that in a number of ways. First of all, Pultz says, Oracle’s
software has allowed more automation of many tasks in the admissions office.
Because the system is now integrated with the Internet, students can apply to
USD online. Close to 70 percent of applicants took advantage of that last year,
thus reducing the school’s data entry requirements by 75 to 80 percent.
That efficiency is important because applications to USD have been rising steadily,
and “the volume of applications was increasing faster than our ability
to process them,” Pultz said.
One portion of the system, for example, Oracle’s CRM module, has allowed
USD to personalize its messages to students. The school can now develop different
messages based on an individual student’s needs. Someone interested in
engineering, for example, can receive targeted messages focusing on USD’s
engineering programs, while someone inquiring about financial aide can be reached
with a specific message. “We can talk about that much earlier than we
could before,” Pultz says. “We’re using a business model to
target the market.”
“We’ve been able to send probably 30 percent more communication
to students than before—electronically.” With the previous system,
the school didn’t even have a way to capture and store students’
e-mail addresses.
In many ways, USD is ahead of the curve in its creative uses of software for
truly collaborating with students. “Other schools are using CRM products
for recruiting…” Pultz says. “We’re one of the few schools
to implement a CRM system as a principle means of communicating with students.”
Collaboration Pushes Ahead
Despite their variety, true collaboration tools are similar in that they make
it seem to users that they’re working together. Sharing thoughts, notes,
and documents becomes much easier, including outside the classroom, as Lansing
Community College has discovered. Good collaboration products make it possible
for schools to manage complex data far more effectively and to share communication
with incoming students, as the University of San Diego is doing. And at Cal
Poly, the software system will soon allow students to access e-mail and share
documents using wireless devices virtually anywhere.
For colleges and universities, those sorts of tools are becoming more efficient,
effective and relevant in today’s high-tech world. Changes in how universities
are managed, and in the ways that students select a school, are pushing changes
in information management. As these examples show, schools that are embrace
collaboration technologies will find themselves better able to let students
connect inside and outside the classroom. That can help make information sharing
seem almost natural—the way it should be.