Department/Area: Alternative Education Programs

SYSTEM MUST HAVES

Note: Representatives from Non-Traditional/Alternative Education Programs will be attending demonstrations for the various department/area modules in addition to the session scheduled specifically for Non-Traditional/Alternative Education Programs. Demonstration during the Non-Traditional/Alternative Education session should focus on those requirements unique to this area not covered in the other sessions or, if product line includes a special module to handle this area, on that module.

MET?

(Place a 0, 1, or 2 in the box next to each item to indicate how the vendor meets the requirement.)

0 = No

1 = Yes - with difficulty

2 = Yes

Admissions

Several different “programs” begin at various times of the year. Each program will have a different targeted market of potential students, and each program may have multiple starts scheduled for different times of the year. The admissions tickler system and contact management system must be simple to use and must support many separate recruitment efforts each year. The separate tickler schedules and recruitment efforts must not “interfere” with each other.

Notes:

Customer Relationship Module that will meet unique needs (scheduling, interests, track progress through admit process, ability to do performance analysis of counselors (how long for average person to enter system, number of persons attending information systems) (automated, customized, and personalized) of non-traditional students

Notes:

Form of tickler system that can be consistent with a multiple start program, including ability to pull up list of names to be contacted on a given day with detail about those persons' progress

Notes:

Evaluating pre-admission requirements (academic and experience credits) for non-traditional and graduate programs (meeting pre-admission and graduation requirements)

Notes:

On-line capability: document (a variety of forms) submission, payment of fees; e.g., ability to interact with students electronically for all pre-enrollment processes (submissionn of transcripts, references, essays, test scores, immunization records). Prospect should be able to see admissions progress on line.

Notes:

Track student who has completed one program to another program (associates to bachelors, bachelors to graduate)

Notes:

Financial Aid

See on one page all info (type of student (program in or headed for), admission & registration status, schools attended) required to make financial aid decisions

Notes:

Vendor ability/commitment to incorporate mandated changes (federal, state, etc) in a timely fashion

Notes:

Flexibility to accommodate refund policies, drop/add procedures, assess interests unique to individual programs

Notes:

Automated packaging of financial aid awards based upon school affiliation (non-traditional and graduate pgms, calendar, budget, and institutional rules and criteria)

Notes:

When financial aid info is displayed for other departments, meaningful names rather than numbers should be used

Notes:

Tickler to show when students change registration status in way that affects aid awards

Notes:

Registrar's Office

Ability to calculate dates (registration, refunds, grading periods, drop, add) from a formula based on course section. Ability to minimize the number of dates that must be entered by hand. Ability to override the calculation (such as a date calculated to fall on holiday). (Example: Ability to enter information into a student's record at any time; for example, if a student completes a course one year after starting, be able to enter grade at that time.)

Notes:

Reports and screens to be customizable down to individual user, either do it yourself or through IT, so that reports are presentable and provide exactly what user needs. Report should be exportable to other formats.

Notes:

Integrate support for non-traditional education programs - ongoing, anytime enrollment and registration, billing capabilities, ability to track and evaluate transcripts.

Notes:

Must include date-based registration by course capability in addition to term-based.

Notes:

Search capabilities on fields that support multiple criteria (null fields, and, or) simultaneously

Notes:

Rolling course catalog that maintains full access regardless of course availability. All inclusive (all courses) and perennial (on-going).

Notes:

Course prerequisites and enforcement for registration: this system should be selectable on or off, and still be able to work with information based upon course section

Notes:

Automatically inform appropriate offices when changes in student records occur. E.g., change of registration notification automatically sent. Recipients should see flags, emails, or ticklers so that they can process information when they choose.

Notes:

Ability to assign meeting locations, times, instructors based upon class meeting

Notes:

Information needs to be moved to appropriate offices (two instructors teaching a course info must be available to payroll)

Notes:

Not only master schedule of all courses in a term, but all courses associated with an instructor, student, term, department, cohort. Needs to show all appropriate dates associated with the courses.

Notes:

Capability to track students who have withdrawn from a program so we can locate them, track their progress, record data for re-enrollment

Notes:

For degree audit, ability to change general education and elective requirements for different programs.

Notes:

General

Ability to track Students as non-traditional students (an identifier by program, eg: distance ed, adult degree completion, etc.)

Notes:

Need the ability to customize fields in the new program. Please be sure that note or memo fields are included in this description.

Notes:

Capability to have alternate calendars that cross over the "traditional" calendar.

Notes:

Capability to see ALL of the "schools" within a college that a student is in (DE, TRAD, FOCUS) - on multiple screens (billing, Sharathon data entry, program enrollment, etc.

Notes:

Privacy flag that indicates that student has formally requested privacy - prominently displayed in all student record views (billing, admissions, etc.) Ability to adjust/select information that should be kept private.

Notes:

COMMUNICATION is key with our customers all the way from prospective to admissions to course progress to completion

Notes:

Courses identifiable as core, electives, concentrations, shared by multiple cohorts

Notes:

REMOTE ACCESS by students, faculty, staff to data 24/7

Notes:

Flexible means of managing privacy permissions appropriate to adult students.

Notes:

Capability to designate a "cohort" or learning group (degree/program specific) for specific students, cohort courses, etc.

Notes:

Capablity to track assignment completion (Distance Education)

Notes:

Ability to print out a class schedule for non-traditional students which includes courses taken with their cohort and additional courses taken with other cohorts.

Notes:

FLEXIBILITY for open-ended enrollments/completion and tuition fees

Notes:

Alt-Ed is a COLLEGE within a COLLEGE with all the functions of a traditional school

Notes:

Student Billing

Flexible billing options: refund table and interest parameters that are variable by program designation

Notes:

Holds: holds preventing registration need to be associated with the date a student was billed

Notes:

Must include date-based or course based refund capability.

Notes:

Student Services

Need the ability to email students/faculty directly from the database, using different search criteria simultaneously. If that isn’t possible, the ability to copy & paste the student email addresses from the database would be a second choice. Third choice, the ability to easily FTP the email addresses from the database.

Notes:

Program Calendar

Courses may begin almost any week of the year.

Notes:

The length of each course varies. For example, a course could meet 3 times over 3 weeks, 16 times over 8 weeks, or 4 times over 6 months.

Notes:

Course schedules need to be defined by specific meeting dates with times and locations specified for each meeting.

Notes:

Students enter the program as an identifiable group and progress through a prescribed program as a group.

Notes:

Identifiable groups of students—using the term “cohort” in this document — will share most, but not all, courses.

Notes:

A “cohort schedule” represents a grouping of courses which will be the path taken by a cohort of students. This “cohort schedule” is a vital piece of information used in recruiting students to begin a program together, and it is the guide to program completion.

Notes:

It includes more than just the meeting schedule. It actually reflects (but does not replace) “catalog requirements” for the successful completion of a program. It does this by identifying courses as required for a major, elective, or associated with a specific concentration. The cohort schedule is designed so that a group of students will share most but not necessarily all courses together.

Notes:

Many individual course schedules need to be created with each schedule requiring entry of individual meeting dates, times, classrooms, faculty, books, syllabi, delivery dates, etc. The schedule for a course section must support entry of individual meeting dates with details for each meeting date, such as deadlines for syllabi changes, deadlines for book changes, faculty contracts, cancel courses (10 days out), work due date, grades due date, incomplete work due date, incomplete grades due date, last day to add, last day to drop, last day to withdraw, book delivery dates. Since many individual schedules must be created, this process must be user friendly and as streamlined as possible.

Notes:

Within the courses identified for a cohort group, each course needs to be identified as required or as an elective for the major and whether it is associated with a particular concentration or licensure within the major. The software must support the entry of this data (majors, concentrations, and required/elective status) and must report a cohort schedule in such a way that the status of each course is indicated correctly.

Notes:

A printed schedule can be generated for a single cohort in an attractive and readable form for use as a marketing tool for that specific cohort group. This same schedule can then be generated for students who enter the program as a calendar of their course meetings. Reporting capabilities must include generating course schedules per cohort schedule. The cohort schedule reports provide sufficient information to identify the required and elective courses for the major and concentrations offered to the cohort.

Notes:

New students may begin almost any week of the year.

Notes:

Each course schedule needs to be associated with one or more cohort groups. Normally, course sections will belong to one cohort group. However, as programs become more varied to support the changing needs of adult learners, some course sections will need to be “shared” by multiple cohorts, especially elective courses. This special need may be accommodated by simply creating duplicates of a course section (one for each cohort participating in the course) and having partial enrollment in each one. However, some reporting is cleaner if the association of a course section with a cohort group is flexible enough to allow multiple cohorts to share a single course section.

Notes:

Each cohort schedule needs to be reviewable and modifiable before being entered as “official”. (In the same way that the academic calendar for a traditional program must be reviewed carefully for compliance with all academic, scheduling, and financial aid requirements, every individual cohort schedule must be reviewed for all of the same requirements before it can be accepted as official.) The software must make it possible to generate and distribute copies of each tentative schedule for review by faculty, administration, and financial aid specialists for review and feedback.After final approval of each schedule and any appropriate modifications, the schedule can be marked as official.

Notes:

Faculty Compensation

Individual contracts (or contract letters) need to be generated for one or more instructors for each course section (rather than for each academic year). The system must support the automatic and accurate generation of teaching contracts for each course section. These contracts must allow assignments for one or more instructors per course, for different rates of pay for each instructor, and for different “faculty loads” per instructor in team teaching situations. The system must provide appropriate reporting capabilities summarizing the course assignments and total faculty costs per course, per faculty, per major, per cohort, or per date range. Ideally, the system will also support the accurate tracking of annual contracts where a “teaching assignment” or certain administrative responsibilities will earn credit against the annual contract which must be fully satisfied by the end of the contract year. The system must provide a tight security system for maintaining the highly confidential salary data.

Notes:

Some administrative or lead teaching faculty are hired with a contract that resembles a traditional program.

Notes:

Most faculty are contracted to teach courses individually. Therefore, multiple contracts are issued to each instructor during the course of the year.

Notes:

Compensation for each individual course will vary based on the “faculty load” for the specific course being taught and the pay scale of each faculty member.

Notes:

Some courses may be team-taught. In these cases the “faculty load” for each of the instructors may not be equal—for example, lab courses where different numbers of students are assigned to different instructors.

Notes:

Course Evaluations

Audience is adult students (normally over age 25) with professional experience and adult learning needs.

Notes:

Course evaluations are done at the end of every course, which means they occur within the program almost every week.

Notes:

Evaluation questions must be appropriate to the adult student experience and demographic. Students object to inappropriate questions. This functionality could be provided through an external service that provides course evaluation questions for adult continuing education program with similar curricula. However, the need could also be met with a custom evaluation developed by the faculty and administration of the college.

Notes:

Evaluation responses must be statistically compared with other evaluations having the same questions answered by a comparable student demographic in order to be valid and meaningful. (Adult students answer similar evaluative questions significantly differently than traditional college age students.) Faculty object to invalid statistical comparisons. This functionality could be provided through an external service that provides course evaluation questions for adult continuing education program with similar curricula. However, the need could also be met by a system which can scan and score the student evaluations and generate a statistical report comparing the results with aggregated averages for categories of courses within the program such as the same course, other courses within the same major, and all courses in the program. A system which already tracks the course sections and assigned faculty only needs to add tables to store raw and calculated data for the course evaluations using the key fields of the course sections and faculty assignments.

Course evaluation results can be provided promptly. After initial setup, the ongoing functionality requires support of an optical bubble read scanner, the ability to write the rows scanned to a “raw data” table, the ability to perform a predefined set of statistical comparisons of that data against previously accumulated data, the ability to print a report, and the ability to track when evaluations are scheduled so that forms and identifying codes (for students to enter on the forms) can be distributed.

Notes:

Student Use of Bookstore

Adult students in an evening program are unable to come to the college to purchase books between 9:00 and 5:00 due to work schedules. To meet the needs of adult students, alternative means of providing students is required. Evening bookstore hours for 12 months out of the year are one possible solution. If this is not feasible, an on-line ordering service or an automatic ordering service would help meet the student needs.

Notes:

Courses start almost every week of the year. Keeping the required books in stock (even for the first courses in a program) requires placing orders at least monthly. Students need to be informed of required books in time to order or purchase them. Since the schedule for course starts is complex for a non-traditional program, this process needs to be automated. If the institution (through a bookstore or a vendor) is going to provide any assistance to the student in acquiring the required books, the bookstore or student service must also know exactly what books are required for each approaching course. The bookstore or service will then be able to acquire the books, inform the students, and/or notify a vendor of the required books so the vendor can acquire them in a timely fashion.

Notes: