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.
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