St. Petersburg College Goes Live with Student Success Plan, Enlisting Unicon for Services and Support


Gilbert, AZ – April 22, 2013— Unicon, Inc., a leading IT consulting services provider specializing in open source for the education market, announced the deployment of the open source Student Success Plan (SSP) at St. Petersburg College (SPC). SSP is a holistic intervention coaching and counseling model, with case management software. The college is taking advantage of the early alert SSP feature, in which faculty and staff identify student challenges and send early alerts with their reasons and recommendations to engage the appropriate intervention staff. The early alert tool provides a feedback loop to the originator to encourage long-term engagement.

SSP improves retention, academic performance, persistence, graduation rates, and time to degree. Through counseling, web-based support systems, and proactive intervention techniques, students are identified, supported, and monitored. SSP can be used with any targeted population of students, such as at-risk students or athletes. SSP is project of the Apereo Foundation.

“Our experience during the implementation process with Unicon was excellent. The staff at Unicon was professional, very helpful, and patient throughout the process,” said Dr. Phillip V. Nicotera, Provost of
Caruth Health Education Center, SPC. “Whenever we needed them they always responded in a timely manner.”

Unicon completed installation of the software and integrated SSP with the college’s student information system and learning management system. Unicon also conducted training for system administrators and staff. SPC also signed up for support through Unicon’s innovative Cooperative Support program. The program guarantees a dedicated team of expert development and technical support specialists for direct technical support and assistance.

About St. Petersburg College
Located in St. Petersburg, Florida, SPC was the state’s first two-year college (founded in 1927) as well as the state’s first community college to offer bachelor’s degrees (2002). Today, SPC is one of 14 State Colleges, and serves as a model for incorporating bachelor’s degree programs into traditional two-year institutions. The number of students enrolled for the 2010-2011 academic year was over 60,000. To learn more, visit http://www.spcollege.edu/.

About Apereo
The Apereo Foundation was formed by the merger of Jasig and the Sakai Foundation in late December 2012. Sakai and Jasig had been pioneers in the production and adoption of open source software for higher education for over ten years. Apereo will take that work further, providing a more rational and improved organizational umbrella for a range of projects and software communities serving higher education. The core mission of the Foundation is to “assist and facilitate educational organizations which collaborate to foster, develop, and sustain open technologies and innovation to support learning, teaching, and research.” For more information, visit http://www.apereo.org.

About Unicon’s Cooperative Support Program
Unicon’s program provides member organizations with a predictable cost support solution for their open source applications including SSP, CAS, Grouper, Sakai, Shibboleth, uMobile, and uPortal. Development work and fixes performed by the Cooperative Support program for individual organizations are contributed back and shared with the SSP community. To learn more, visit http://www.unicon.net/support/cooperative.

About Unicon
Unicon, Inc. is a leading provider of IT consulting services for education and works with institutions and organizations to find solutions to meet business challenges. Unicon specializes in using open source technologies to deliver flexible and cost-effective systems in the areas of identity and access management, student success and retention, mobile computing, learning management systems, portals, online video, calendaring, email, and collaboration. Unicon is a Sakai Commercial Affiliate; an InCommon Affiliate and Participant; an Industry Member of Internet2; a Jasig and VMware Partner; an authorized Solution Provider for CAS, SSP, uPortal, and VMware; a Solution Partner of Kaltura; and a Services Partner and reseller of Liferay and Zimbra. For more information, visit: http://www.unicon.net.

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Unicon is a Registered Trademark of Unicon, Inc. All other product or service names are the property of their respective owners.

Media Contact: Jim Layne, Unicon, 480-558-2444 or jlayne@unicon.net.

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