To help address that growth, the college is using CampusCruiser PORTAL as part of a tightly integrated suite from CampusCruiser that includes the CampusCruiser ALERT emergency management system, and CampusCruiser LMS learning management solution for hybrid courses. The close integration among all of the products -- branded "Ocean Cruiser" at OCC - has resulted in big savings in training and management, according to CIO August "Chip" Stoll. In addition, because CampusCruiser products are closely integrated with Datatel, information from the college's financial system and student services, both of which run on Datatel, are easily accessible via the CampusCruiser PORTAL.
As the value of the portal has become more and more apparent, the college has moved additional content into it, according to James McGinty, the college's executive vice president. "The longer we have [CampusCruiser PORTAL], the more we're making use of it," McGinty says, which is driving the product's already low cost per student down even further. Content behind the portal is secure, easy to manage, and can be reached by students, faculty or staff through a single sign-on process. OCC now stocks the portal with content ranging from all course descriptions to HR forms to proceedings of the college board to information on student services, grades, registration and course requirements. One cost-saving example: Many OCC instructors no longer print paper syllabi for their courses - instead, using the portal mechanism, they can electronically make the course syllabus available to all students, who can then download it at their leisure.
The fact that CampusCruiser products are software-as-a-service, meaning there is no hardware to buy, no software to install, and no upgrades to manage as they are managed off-site by the vendor, has been critical to the project's high return on investment. "It's hosted, so there are no physical servers to maintain," Stoll says. "It's someone else's problem if something goes wrong."
One benefit of the portal for faculty, according to Interim Vice President for Academic Affairs Richard Strada, is consolidation of email addresses. Faculty no longer have to deal with constantly changing student email addresses - through Ocean Cruiser, each student is assigned a "lifetime" email address upon registration that is used for all school communication. Similarly, faculty no longer use personal email addresses for communication with students - they use a single assigned Ocean Cruiser address only. Accessing any content in the portal, including email, is simple and can be done anywhere with Internet access. That let students remotely access online library content, for example, 24 hours a day.
OCC has also seen great success with its emergency notification system. The CampusCruiser ALERT system installed in 2007 has been used numerous times already to broadcast class cancellations due to weather. In the latest instance, Strada says, a message appeared on his phone within minutes after a "snow cancellation" alert was sent.
Because CampusCruiser ALERT is integrated with the CampusCruiser PORTAL, the college has set up a highly effective carrot-and-stick approach to encourage students to sign up for emergency notifications. Grades are now sent out electronically rather than on paper, but to receive them, students must first register in the notification system. The result: fully 98 percent of full-time students at OCC have submitted their emergency notification information. That contrasts sharply with an average for full-time community colleges nationwide of just 66 percent enrollment in notification systems. Go to CampusTechnology FOCUS newsletter.
Portal Applications for Higher Education - by Kelly Walsh, College of Westchester
This week and next I will be discussing two distinct approaches to implementing portal applications in a higher education environment.
I am going to divert from the type of tools and resources I typically post about (free or low cost web based resources and apps for educators and the instructional process) to take a look a powerful type of application that is becoming increasingly popular in higher education (as well as K-12). Portal applications allow designers and users to integrate a variety of tools and information into a centralized interface. Users, be they students, faculty, or administrative staff, can have one consistent web-based gateway for accessing many of the applications, and much of the information, they need on a daily basis.
The first application that I will discuss is the feature-rich hosted suite of tools from CampusCruiser LMS, Inc. CampusCruiser LMS has been around since 1995, and boasts millions of higher education users (CampusCruiser LMS’s application is sold exclusively to Higher Ed). CampusCruiser LMS offers a variety of tools that are integrated within the overarching hosted (Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS) Campus Cruiser portal application. The other portal application we will review (next week) is the markedly different Campus EAI Consortium myCampus portal tool set.
The CampusCruiser LMS application suite
We are pretty far along in our implementation of the CampusCruiser LMS application suite at the institution where I work as Director of II&T. We selected this tool from a wide variety of alternatives, and continue to be impressed with the tool as we work through our configuration and roll out process. We are looking forward to taking full advantage of all it has to offer. The modules we are using include the robust Campus Cruiser Portal, the Cruiser Alert emergency notification and messaging application, and the Course Cruiser course management system. CampusCruiser LMS also offers a Course Evaluation tool, and they are constantly evolving and enhancing their offerings.
The CampusCruiser LMS applications can be licensed together or separately. Licensing costs are very attractive - we licensed the product for less than the cost of just one of the products that it displaced, and incurred no costs at all for infrastructure thanks to the application’s SaaS model (in fact, we are freeing up several servers that were used to run displaced apps, which can now be redeployed elsewhere)! The hosted, SaaS model is the only way CampusCruiser LMS offers the application, and it is very cost effective, eliminating any need for servers and all associated maintenance. Of course, in this model, one needs a reliable Internet connection. The applications performance has been thoroughly impressive - it always comes up immediately and it seems to outperform most other web sites in terms of speed. Their Service Level Agreement clearly spells out their reliability assurances.
This extensive combination of tools and functionality is unique and powerful, and has resulted in CampusCruiser LMS being named CODiE award winner as “Best Postsecondary Enterprise Solution” for two consecutive years by the Software & Information Industry Association. If you are considering putting up a Portal (or any one of the above tools) at your institution of Higher Education, or evaluating replacement of an existing tool, you would be well advised to look into CampusCruiser LMS’s offerings.
WCCC Cancels Classes After Water Main Breaks