by Clayton Smith, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Windsor
Have you ever tried to serve your students with only half of a student record? It is the way most of us operate. What we know is that student-serving staff see only about one-half of the student record. Wouldn’t it be great if they could see some or all of the other half? Might that enhance student success? Probably.
Chris Dorsten, Registrar at Cuyahoga Community College and Laurel Stiller, Industry Solution Manager, at OnBase shared with us how we can connect disparate databases (e.g., CRM, student information system, discipline data base, etc.) throughout campus that impact various points in the student life-cycle to give us access to the full student record. Fascinating!
There is incredible complexity in the business processes on our campuses. One institution, the University of Rochester, found 1400 business processes in place in its Registrar’s Office. With some work, it got this number down to 900, but that is still a lot of processes to manage. Many forms are manual that could be automated.
Cuyahoga Community College put in place an application to graduation work flow process, which streamlined the process and discontinued all paper documents. The process time for processing Nursing applications for graduation went from two weeks to one-half of a day! And it only took about three months to design and implement this solution.
Other applications can also be impacted by this process. Examples include the course waiver/substitution process at San Diego State University, and the change of major process at John Carroll University. It can even be applied to the tenure and promotion process!
The key is the creation of one digital record across the student experience.