As a whole, the open enrollment technology market has benefited from a heightened interest from educators and administrators looking to improve the level of their learning community’s web 2.0 student services, and in part from a failure of enterprise providers to implement their systems to meet the needs of students and administrators. Higher education often has multiple missions: research, undergraduate and graduate ascription, and short-term enrichment and training. The challenge in managing the fulfillment of each of these missions successfully is that the key performance indicators for the primary, secondary and tertiary operations are so vastly different, and the implementation of a process that supports multiple mission critical workflows in one monolithic system (as is the norm for higher education) is either untenable or well outside the comfort zone of institutional IT personnel. As a result, the secondary or tertiary missions of higher education institutions fall victim to prevailing processes that are easily supported by the existing implementation of the enterprise’s workflows.

Depending on each institution’s unique identity and state charter the secondary missions could be to deliver high quality matriculated programming, or to provide short-term workforce training or corporate and community outreach programs. In short, higher ed. produces three or more very different and complex products for society to consume. By way of analogy if higher education was Henry Ford he would be trying to make automobiles, electric razors and microwaves on a single assembly line.

In large part, an accelerated economic recovery depends on our ability to quickly train and certify our workers with the skills that are required to participate in the new economy – and this requires a renewed focus from public education in the open enrollment arena as matriculated programming is much too slow to adapt to the changing needs of the labor force. Many Americans, and especially younger generations were excited to see higher education reform outlined as part of the national agenda early this year and it is paramount that the American people, begin to understand the structural problems that are preventing the country from getting back to work. The country’s high unemployment rate isn’t a result of failed economic policy and that there aren’t enough on shore jobs, but that our country has a knowledge gap between the skills required to fill the available, high wage positions and the parallel skills of American job seekers.

2012 is the first year in a period which will see open enrollment programs that serve secondary missions in public higher education adjust to the digital age or find themselves forced from the businesses they are currently in. 2012 is the first year in which there is enough fiscal pressure to force administrators into making decisions. Administrators will have to decide (here it makes sense to revert to Mr. Ford) whether to structurally reinvest in their dying products by buying a new assembly line that is good for making razors and microwaves or find that they can no longer make personal hygiene and small home appliances effectively.

The up or out environment CampusCE is envisioning will see more certificate-based, workforce and corporate training programming, less personal enrichment and community education, and enhanced regional competition between programs. Each State in the Union will be drawn into the reinvestment process at its own pace, depending on its unique fiscal circumstance; but, a moment of decision is inevitable in every case. As administrators looks to stretch every dollar in what will continue to be an uncertain and fiscally austere climate, institutions will need to decide whether to make the necessary investments in technology and personnel in order to refocus their efforts on executing secondary and tertiary missions or drop those missions from their charter all together.

For administrators, the necessity and urgency of making some kind of decision about whether to reinvest in short-term programming or to move out of the market will increase as the year goes on. As the demand for open enrollment, certificate and short term training programs increases over more expensive and exhaustive matriculated programs, addressing the issue of open enrollment student services workflow will become paramount in the onset of 2013, and poorly equipped programs will continue to lose out on the market opportunity and bleed money from their parent institutions. The longer the decision making process gets delayed the bigger the problem becomes – 2012 has thus far proven to be a year of action for many institutions.

At CampusCE, we hope this trend continues.

Real-Time: Data is transferred and synchronized in real-time via uni-directional or bi-directional web services.

Batch Upload – download: Data is transferred and synchronized in a batch process in various formats.

CampusCE API: API (Application Programming Interface) allows institutional developers to access open enrollment related data for import/export from the CampusCE EMS and the institutional enterprise system. The CampusCE API is designed to allow for greater flexibility and customer control while integrating with the CampusCE EMS, but assumes some technical knowledge and requires working knowledge of web services and XML.

CampusCE ERP Integration Methodology:

CampusCE meets with appropriate stakeholders in registration, finance and human resources to carefully establish all the business rules related to the integration and synchronization of data to determine which of the above integration methods is appropriate for the given module and workflow.

CampusCE meets with your institution’s IT staff to determine your particular ERP’s instance database schema for each of the modules in which integration is required. We understand every ERP installation is unique, and our team works directly with your institution’s administrators in order to coordinate with updates to the integration process as needed.

Data-warehousing a State reporting solution: The CampusCE development team has experience with reporting CE & open enrollment data for entities at the State level. Data from a state-wide CampusCE implementation of sixteen institutions and sixty-seven campuses is manipulated in a data-warehousing solution for the Kentucky Community & Technical College System.

If the ERP is offline: The CampusCE EMS accounts for the possibility that your institution’s ERP may be offline during the student’s experience. In this event the CampusCE EMS provides a seamless experience for the student, allowing the student to create a registration. Synchronization of data will occur once the ERP is back online.

Integration Audits & Logging: The CampusCE EMS is built with auditing fields to track who made changes and when. Within the integration process these fields are used to validate the data exchange process, accommodating data transfer history for auditing purposes. The Integration process incorporates detailed logging and alerting features, alerting appropriate personnel should a fault occur. The logging process provides the necessary information to the institution and CampusCE support team, allowing for triage, analysis and retries of integration attempts as needed.

CampusCE utilizes Google Analytics to enhance a customer’s ability to track website traffic and page views. This information is invaluable in determining the answers to such common marketing questions as:

“Where is our website traffic coming from?”
“Where are the users visiting once they reach our site?”
“What pages generate the most traffic?”

Our new optional enhancements allow even further granularity in analyzing the wealth of information available from your website traffic. CampusCE is now able to empower its users with e-commerce tracking. With e-commerce tracking you are now able to determine not only what pages a user visits but what they purchased, how much they spent, general conversion rates and more! Use this information to help refine marketing strategies, determine ROI of current offerings and steer future decision making with new data driven methodologies.

On a large scale, our nation demands change from higher education – colleges and universities are being asked to improve retention, increase the value of matriculated programming, cut costs and compete with for-profit, distance education, vocational and trade schools. Read more here.

The University of Delaware is one of the earliest and largest lifelong learning programs in the country and was originally founded as the Academy of Lifelong Learning and the Southern Delaware Academy of Lifelong Learning. The UD OLLI is currently a program of the Division of Professional and Continuing Studies, and has over 2,100 active members.

SF State strives to provide the most intellectually stimulating and supportive community for lifelong learners in the Bay Area. SFSU OLLI has greatly expanded its course offering over the last year and has increased its membership to 701 – an all-time high. CampusCE is looking forward in supporting SFSU to reach its goal of 1,000 members and achieving its second million dollar Bernard Osher endowment.

The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Penn State is a nonprofit, membership organization that offers noncredit courses, trips and social activities to adults in the State College, Bellefonte, Penns Valley, Philipsburg and Surrounding areas. CampusCE is looking forward to supporting the instructor volunteers that are the heartbeat of OLLI at Penn State through its unique volunteer voucher capabilities.

It’s a cliché to say that technology is changing our lives, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Many of us believe GPS, Google, and a strong cell signal are basic human needs. Our personal lives have been transformed by social media (if you don’t believe it just ask any politician)). And many of us require constant assistance from our Android or iPhones just to navigate our daily professional commitments.

Despite this, the ways in which we create and distribute knowledge at the university utilizes tools that would have been familiar to scholars in the Middle Ages. Classroom lectures, books, and printed journals are still the dominant tools of our trade. [Continue Reading at Campus Technology]