Dean Carolyn Dahl’s central vision, “Learning without limits,” is deeply ingrained in this college’s administration. Recognition that each off-campus learner needs access to the best possible educational experience calls for technology that delivers high-touch services to busy, time-constrained students.

PROFILE
Distance learning and non-traditional programs at The University of Alabama’s College of Continuing Studies attract more than 15,000 students each year. High school students seeking advanced placement and other courses represent 15% of enrollments. Programs include professional certifications and bachelors and masters degrees in business, education, human environmental studies, law, library sciences, nursing, and other areas.

CHALLENGES
Serving non-traditional students requires a highly responsive administrative and academic operational model. The College of Continuing Studies, located on The University of Alabama’s Tuscaloosa campus, has used Campus Management’s CampusVue™ student services technology since 1999 as a key ingredient to quickly admit and auto-register its students, schedule tests, and more.

Recently, the institution undertook implementation of another company’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Dean Carolyn Dahl challenged Associate Dean Rebecca Pow and her team to ensure the college operated in lockstep with its main campus—yet continue to sustain and evolve service levels for its non-traditional students.

TALE OF TWO SYSTEMS
Ms. Pow and her team led the project to coordinate what some might characterize as two competing software suites. The new ERP product, widely used in traditional higher education, was to become the institution’s central enterprise hub. But the distinctiveness of CampusVue, the leading administrative system in for-profit career and online higher education, made it an ingredient for success within the continuing studies program.

“We had to determine if we needed a shadow system to manage these operations,” said Ms Pow. “For-profits run very sophisticated operations, and we valued CampusVue for the high school programs, the test scheduling capability, proactive tracking of student progress, and the contact management system.”

The CampusVue system, which accommodates both rolling enrollment programs and traditional academic terms, includes built-in Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Its CRM is designed specifically for student lifecycle management, to automate and report on interactions and notations among students, parents and faculty.

“The pacing of the student in high school or independent study is key to persistency and completion of these programs,” observed Ms. Pow. “We need CampusVue’s visibility into the data and proactive advising functionality so that everyone stays on top of student progress and instructor success.”

SOLUTION
Blair Davis, project manager and Academic Services coordinator at the college, worked first-hand with Campus Management to map out and install how the two systems would interact. “We’ve linked the two applications together,” said Ms. Davis, “so we can auto-populate data between them. This is helping us connect all the main touch points, like enrollment, payroll, or relationships with counselors for our high school students.”

LINKING UP AS ONE CAMPUS
The project called for real-time streaming of data from one system to another. Campus Management’s application programming interfaces, CampusLink™, facilitate data exchanges between CampusVue at the college and the student information system at the main campus.

CampusLink software is an interoperable web services technology that connects CampusVue to third party software or custom-built applications, such as the college’s public web site, learning management systems and open source course systems like Moodle, and proprietary ERP and SIS products.

One of the project’s unexpected benefits included re-acquainting the college’s ten end-users with many previously untapped possibilities inside CampusVue—including built-in reporting and workflow automation.

“We have a very rich web site,” stated Ms. Pow, “and one thing we’re exploring is how CampusVue speeds up and automates communications back and forth with new contacts coming in from our web site.”

For more information on the University of Alabama College of Continuing Studies, visit continuingstudies.ua.edu