Technology is a critical and integral part of every piece of our comprehensive college redesign – and the progress we have made, and will continue to make in the months and years ahead, will reshape how we interact with students, and how students interact with the college.
This semester, we’ve capitalized on foundational work to take concrete first steps in our technology implementation. Here’s what we’ve accomplished so far:
Kennedy & Company
We’ve engaged consulting firm Kennedy & Company to guide us through the discovery phase to determine exactly what technologies we need and where we need them. They’ve already embarked on exploration by holding forums with campus stakeholders, asking questions about key needs and identifying existing holes in our capabilities that need to be filled.
From here, Kennedy & Company will provide recommendations on Customer Management Systems (CMS) that can help to meet our needs. This may be a single tool that involves additional plug-ins, or it may be a combination of several different tools. The District will be looking to move to the Request For Proposal (RFP) process around April 2018.
The ultimate goal with any CMS solution, is to create streamlined user interfaces for both faculty/staff and for the students we serve. These interfaces will allow students to easily navigate between a variety of information all in one place – things like notes from their counselor, access to degree progression, and browsing student services could all be in one web-based portal. And admissions staff could have easy access to information from the entire lifespan of a student’s Skyline College experience.
Ad Astra
AdAstra is a new, easy-to-use software that all faculty and staff will use to schedule events on campus and book event space. Launched just last week, this technology will allow faculty and staff to be more efficient and will eliminate a paper-based system that can often be slow and cumbersome.
It’s now easier then ever to see exactly when a room is booked and what’s available across campus at any given moment. The tool also allows us to be more accountable with our space, providing us with a mile-high view of our campus spaces at any given moment.
Funnelback
The Skyline College website launched a brand new search engine this semester. The new engine, called Funnelback, provides students, faculty and staff a vastly improved search experience. With this search engine, available on every page of the website, our campus community will now be able to quickly and efficiently find and sort any information within our site.
The advanced search function allows students to filter by professor, degrees, .pdf, class schedule, course number, phone number etc. Funnelback also offers powerful backend tools we can use to analyze trends and statistics on our website to customize the results, and ultimately provide a better, more cohesive experience to students, faculty and staff.
