Using an unmatched ed-tech resource over a daunting distance


Ivy Tech has more than 120,000 students across Indiana.

Ivy Tech Community College is not only Indiana’s largest, public post-secondary institution, but it’s also our nation’s biggest, single-accredited statewide community college. To put that in perspective, each semester our community college educates roughly 120,000 students on 30 degree-granting locations and more than 75 community locations across Indiana.

Providing consistent access to high-quality education across such a great distance has been one of our biggest challenges – we have campuses located all over the state.

Ivy Tech has long stood for promoting affordable, open-access education and training programs. Our chief goal is to enhance the development of Indiana’s citizens and communities along with strengthening the state economy.

For that very reason, one in three students at Ivy Tech takes an online class each semester. And while many student learners are now accustomed to plugging in, a large number of our faculty and administrators have traditionally relied on in-room interaction for planning purposes.

To better connect our faculty and administrators, and overcome our challenge of distance, we knew we had to engage a platform that provided decentralized support and made interaction easier for our faculty members.

Employing real-time, remote interaction

The first thing Ivy Tech needed to do to improve efficiencies for faculty was to enhance the ability to collaborate across campuses. Our faculty members operate as single entities on their campuses across the state.

For example, we might have a handful of full-time English professors on one of our campuses who need to connect with the hundreds of other English professors at our 29 other sites. We wanted, and needed, to promote new kinds of teamwork across our staff, and we wanted them to be able to interact on their own terms – comfortably.

Our solution had to be a tool that was easy to use and one that would integrate our resources in a better, faster, and more efficient way. In the past, we relied on our learning management system (LMS) for a great deal of resources.

Why not factor instant messaging (IM), along with voice and web conferencing, into that equation? Since we trusted our LMS – Blackboard Learn – and our faculty was more than satisfied with it as an engagement platform, we looked to leverage that platform as a base for a range of other tools.

Ivy Tech adopted Wimba in 2006 to meet our basic needs in instant messaging.

In 2010, in order to satisfy our growing requirement for more robust and resourceful engagement tools, we made the decision to adopt Blackboard Collaborate, a new interactive learning environment combining the strengths of Wimba and Elluminate. A driving force behind our decision to adopt this new type of social learning technology was the fact that the platform was built solely for education.

Instantly, we saw a transformation in the way our faculty worked together at our institution. Blackboard Collaborate gives our staff members the tools they need to create audio and video presentations quickly and effectively.

Our goal was to allow faculty to move ahead with their planning, teaching, and meetings without wasting time. One of the most powerful elements of using collaborative, real-time solutions is that our faculty can now access any part of any campus at any time, a reality that improves education on an individual level and enhances instructor effectiveness.

Avoiding costs with every click

By supplementing our LMS with a collaborative learning platform, we are now able to provide faculty with a new, innovative outlet to meet, interact, plan, and engage while avoiding tremendous costs.

The savings start with travel: If one faculty member from each region made arrangements to gather for a planning session, which equates to 14 people, we would be required to provide a minimum of $2,000 per meeting for travel reimbursements. Every time faculty members meet over our digital collaboration platform, we avoid the unnecessary $2,000 cost; time saved is dollars saved.

By using audio, video, and IM as engagement tools, there’s a huge time recovery.

For Ivy Tech’s faculty and administrators, the drive from Evansville to Indianapolis takes more than three hours each way. By collaborating online, we’re able to give our faculty back a six- to seven-hour window of time to meet in a much more productive way.

Enabling effective meetings – anytime, anywhere – is a chief benefit for our instructional program.

The benefits of being able to provide direct access to digital collaboration tools for faculty have also eliminated a range of other processes that were a burden from a cost and time savings perspective.

Ivy Tech welcomes 25,000 new students each semester and anywhere from 300 to 600 new faculty during the same period of time. Because Blackboard Collaborate is built directly into Blackboard Learn, we can put all of our new materials in a single access point.

Our administrators no longer need to give faculty extraneous information to access a range of procedural and course-centric materials. Since faculty members have already received training on our software tools, we can tell them where to go for access and they’re all set.

Our use of collaboration tools goes beyond faculty coursework planning. Our administrators also leverage the Ivy Tech statewide support network through help desks, which we can now run in comprehensive learning platform.

This helpful type of engagement keeps giving back, because our administrators need to provide real-time support to students 24/7. With collaborative solutions such as enterprise instant messaging, our help desks provide instant feedback to students and are able to solve their issues immediately.

A new horizon for Ivy Tech

Adopting a blended, online learning platform specifically designed for education has been an exceptional exercise in how collaboration can benefit the user community.

With such a full suite of tools and offerings now available to faculty and administrators, Ivy Tech is able to build on its previous web conferencing architecture with a dynamic, user-friendly interface accessible anytime, anywhere.

Starting in the summer of 2012, we are requiring our students and faculty to use our LMS, which includes our new integrated collaboration tools. Ivy Tech already relies on interactive, synchronous learning tools for teaching and learning, and in the future we believe that collaborative platforms will be a chief aid for contingencies like weather and other types of emergency planning.

Ivy Tech’s strategic plan, “Accelerating Greatness 2013,” includes a sizeable goal of serving a student enrollment of 200,000 students, per semester, by 2020. We can achieve this goal by adopting and offering a mix of online and on-campus educational experiences.

Collaboration tools will play a huge role in the planning, execution and delivery of this strategic plan for Ivy Tech.

Dr. Kara Monroe has been with Ivy Tech Community College for nearly 14 years serving in roles ranging from campus distance education to campus finance to her current position as assistant vice president of the Center for Instructional Technology – a division of Ivy Tech Online.

Sign up for our newsletter

Newsletter: Innovations in K12 Education
By submitting your information, you agree to our Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.

eCampus News Staff

Oops! We could not locate your form.

Sign up for our newsletter

Newsletter: Innovations in K12 Education
By submitting your information, you agree to our Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.