With twenty residential campuses throughout the United States, Tidewater Tech helps adult students gain the skills and confidence to start a career in local industry and government. Headquartered in Virginia Beach, VA, Tidewater Tech serves more than 4500 students annually, providing degrees and certificates in aviation maintenance, business, computer networking, massage therapy, nursing, criminal justice, and a variety of other trades.

Because many people in the areas it serves are challenged to balance work life and family time, Tidewater Tech launched the online programs four years ago to ensure access to academics for even the busiest students. Tidewater Tech Online now serves 900 students within its distance learning programs.

On demand creates new demands
The launch of an all-online degree program presented a host of new issues to overcome, requiring creative re-evaluation of technology and infrastructure. Staff, instructors and students would need to interact and collaborate virtually—and the operational side of the institution never closes.

“We needed a permanent, stable, and robust student information system that also could centralize all 20 campus locations as well as the online college”, said Joel English, Director Tidewater Tech Online. “In terms of institutional effectiveness, financial aid, billing and so on, we wanted one central data structure to drive all of our reporting, because accountability is key to our mission.”

Since all of Tidewater Tech’s campuses operate interdependently with shared policies, procedures, and structure, English needed to ensure that the systems and services were identical—while also permitting the online group the flexibilities and rich functions required to compete for the hearts and minds of busy learners and demanding faculty.

Technology makeover
Tidewater Tech had been using Campus Management Corporation’s CLASS administrative solution since 1999. In 2005, based on their growing number of campuses and the need to provide an integrated, comprehensive portal for students and staff, Tidewater Tech embarked on a migration project to upgrade from CLASS to Campus Management’s CampusVue™ and CampusPortal™ enterprise administrative solution. To support their rapid growth, Tidewater Tech required a number of CampusVue features including consolidated reporting, parent/child terms, applicant processing and SEVIS support.

The migration process and implementation of the new administrative system, portal and business processes took less than a year and were led by Campus Management’s professional services group. Much of the work was performed remotely using Citrix software. Thorough business analysis and configuration touched every aspect of Tidewater’s business rules. Tidewater Tech identified and improved a number of institutional processes with help from experienced Campus Management personnel. A critical part of the migration was converting more than 8 years of data.

“Campus Management’s integrated administrative solution allows each of our campuses to adjust their processes independently, but all the data is housed under one umbrella and can be uniformly reported upon in real time without re-work by administrators,” said English. “This allows the campuses to maintain an independent identity through how they serve local students, while the executive group can access processes and workflows to work cohesively.”

For more information about Tidewater Tech Online visit www.tidewatertech.edu