California’s South Orange County Community College District is a leader in ed-tech innovation, with custom-developed applications that help students register for courses, buy textbooks, and find the courses that are right for them. SOCCD is working with state officials to distribute these tools to the nearly 3 million students in the state’s community college system.
For these reasons and more, we’ve chosen SOCCD as our “eCampus of the Month” for March. Here, Dr. Robert Bramucci, vice chancellor for technology and learning services, describes SOCCD’s ed-tech initiatives and its keys to success.
(Editor’s note: To nominate your college or university for this award, and to read about past award winners, go to http://ecampusnews.eschoolmedia.com/ecampus-of-the-month.)
How do you use technology to advance student learning?
South Orange County Community College District has a history of developing innovative systems for students, including:
• The first custom, Web 2.0, student-centered Student Information System (SIS) that enables our 43,000 students to spend an average of less than seven minutes registering for classes and buying their textbooks.
• MySite, one of the first community college web portals that has just been updated with student-requested features such as To-Do lists, calendars, and personalized recommendations.
• inFORM, our enterprise data warehouse that pushes “dashboards” to faculty for every class they teach, full of useful information about the students in each class; we also use inFORM to create a dashboard for our coaches, helping them increase the academic success of our student athletes.
• SHERPA (the Student Higher Education Recommendation and Personalization Assistant), a first-of-its-kind recommendation engine for courses, services, and information. No more “one size fits all”—Sherpa helps personalize each student’s college experience.
• Mobile Apps: SOCCD was the first community college in California to deploy Blackboard’s Mobile Central and Mobile Learn apps, and we’re now working on a custom mobile app that will bring Sherpa recommendations to mobile devices.
Have you noticed an increase in student performance and/or motivation? If so, how?
Yes. Students have used My Academic Plan (MAP) to create over 107,000 academic plans, and our Sherpa recommendation engine helped students find alternatives to closed classes more than 2,000 times last semester.
How do you use technology to streamline administration and aid in decision-making?
• Our “Glass House” initiative uses Microsoft SharePoint to provide “one-stop shopping” for district-wide work. For my area (IT), all college and district employees can view dynamic project lists to see what we’re working on, who’s working on it, and the status of every project.
• We’re currently deploying Perceptive’s Enterprise Content Management System end-to-end throughout our district, replacing disparate “Tower of Babel” systems that couldn’t communicate with each other. The system not only provides a single platform for electronic documents and signatures, but also allow us to re-engineer our business process for maximum efficiency.
• We recently replaced disparate ways of responding to user requests with a single integrated system (Dell’s KACE) that supports both call center and desktop management functions.
• Video conferencing: We’re cutting down on faculty and administrator travel between our campuses via new LifeSize HDTV Telepresence Meeting Rooms. Taking congestion off Southern California freeways is good for everyone (and it’s green, too).
How has this helped your administration in the long run
In a dire budget environment, we’re not cutting back on services—we’re doing more with less.
How have you financed your technology initiatives?
Through a combination of general funding, technology funding from our two colleges, and Basic Aid funds derived from property taxes.
What initiative are you most proud of, and why?
Sherpa, because even though it’s already helping us deliver services to students, it can be extended in the future to our LMS (Blackboard) and other systems used by our faculty, staff, and administrators.
Sherpa’s already helping students find classes, tailor their web portal to their interests, and providing gentle “nudges” when students make potentially bad decisions. However, in the future Sherpa will be capable of doing some mind-boggling things—imagine a student walking by the library and receiving a “proximity text” telling him the book he requested through inter-library loan is in!
This will be accomplished via Sherpa in conjunction with the opt-in GPS tracking on our mobile app.
Sherpa uses time or event-based triggers to deliver multimodal, personalized communications, which we call a “nudge.” There are three categories of nudges: Courses, Information, and Tasks. Nudges can be delivered based on absolute dates or relative dates (e.g., three days before the student’s registration appointment).
They can also be triggered by data changes—such as the appearance of a student’s grade or a class status change.
The nudges are delivered based on the students’ Sherpa profile, which is a collection of attributes (GPA, enrollment status, major, etc.). These attributes are stored in the Sherpa database and are refreshed from our SIS based on a schedule that varies based on the volatility of each attribute.
What have been your biggest ed-tech challenges, and how have you overcome these?
Bureaucracy. Neophobes. I wouldn’t say we’ve overcome them entirely, but lots of communication helps. It also helps that we develop our software with “Agile Scrum” methodologies that maximize flexibility and user involvement; for example, our design teams for each project are comprised of faculty, staff, administrators, and students. (We hire students to serve on our design teams—they’re a fantastic resource and ensure that the products remain student-centered.)
What’s your best or most useful ed-tech advice for colleagues?
Hotbeds of innovation, whether Renaissance Florence, Silicon Valley, or our network of peer innovators, arise from the heady atmosphere of innovators in different areas and environments “jamming” with each other like jazz musicians.
We couldn’t do all these things without the help of our students, faculty, staff, and administrators. We also couldn’t do it without our vendor partners—for example, the folks at Blackboard Connect were instrumental in allowing us API access, enabling us to use Blackboard Connect as a messaging engine for Sherpa that can deliver messages as eMails, texts, phone calls, or text-to-speech calls.
We’ve also been bolstered by our relationships with (1) technology leaders at elite universities like Stanford and USC, who view us as fellow innovators instead of “community college people”; (2) our state Chancellor’s Office, where friends like Dr. Jack Scott, Dr. Patrick Perry, and Tim Calhoun are discussing how we can roll out these innovations to all 2.7 million students in the 112 California community colleges; and (3) research friends like Vincent Tinto and Marc Prensky, who inform our efforts to increase student success.
We are in initial negotiations to partner with a third-party firm to offer Sherpa nationwide as a fee-based product, but those negotiations are still in their early stages. We will gladly accept queries from other schools about the software at rbramucci@socccd.edu.
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