Consortium and college systems today are challenged to combine technical infrastructures of the separate campuses in order to maximize benefit of the combined campus solution for students, faculty, and staff while maintaining the individuality of each campus. The CampusCruiser infrastructure creates the ideal consortium solution without the investment in high maintenance hardware or straining IT departments to create new systems and manage complicated data structures that must work between several campuses using different systems with totally separate configurations.
Key consortium and campus system benefits of CampusCruiser enterprise portal include:
- Management of systems: CampusCruiser makes it easy to manage multiple sites with out a huge infrastructure investment or more work on already strained IT staff. CampusCruiser takes the management strain away with SaaS infrastructure allowing campuses to keep their current systems, but benefit from the combined portal structure linking all systems.
- Cross Campus Course and Club Access: CampusCruiser provides the unique capability for students who register for courses offered from other campuses within the consortium to access remote classes from his or her main campus. Users can access all local and remote campus activities from one personalized information channel composite.
- Home Campus Point of View: Users can have multiple campus relationships while needing only one sign-on account where they can obtain all information. From each user's home campus point of view, CampusCruiser discerns courses, users, and communities based on their respective origin campus. CampusCruiser even recognizes the user and provides user session from their home campus no matter what campus within the consortium the log in occurs.
- Resource Sharing and Resuability: Campuses can share calendars across the consortium/system providing more opportunity for increased awareness and participation of events and activities, while also increasing collaboration among campuses and faculty.
Unique to Timecruiser's CampusCruiser, the above features are the ultimate benefit of resource sharing and reusability, increased ROI and economy of scale for all institutions within the consortium.
Additional benefits include:
- Improved Faculty Experience: CampusCruiser's SaaS infrastructure also creates communities of common areas of interest across campuses allowing for such things as a single virtual office for all faculty in a particular area to share instructional strategies, resources, and materials. Faculty are able to more effectively and positively impact the student learning experience as well as increase the collaboration and intellectual activity of the institution.
- Branding flexibility: With CampusCruiser, each campus can have their own brand while still remaining connected and working together for one unified brand and message that best communicates the benefits of the consortium and provides the information and resources related to all locations. Individual school spirit can remain in tact, but combine the strengths of each individual campus and bring together and even stronger brand and message for the consortium as a whole.
By implementing CampusCruiser network portal solution, consortiums can eliminate the need for purchasing several systems for each campus and can make one purchase that works across all campuses to provide the maximum return on investment with maximum benefits resulting in a cost effective, manageable, and easy to implement solution