To: The State Board for Community Colleges and Occupational Education
From: Julie Ouska, Chief Information Officer/Vice-President, Information Technologies, Colorado Community College System
Prepared: January 28, 2014 for the Board meeting February 11, 2015
Student Access Goal 1: All Coloradans shall have access to comprehensive community college programs. Performance Measure: Uptime percentage of Banner for applications during high registration periods.
Ongoing Enterprise system performance for the last 60 days (exclusive of planned maintenance):
Banner uptime is 100% VoIP uptime is 100%
WAN connectivity system-wide was 100% Portal uptime was 100%
Exchange uptime was 100% D2L uptime was 100%
Student Success Goal 3: Colorado Students shall have the opportunity to succeed through high quality, cutting-edge instruction and educational services. Performance measure: Develop additional measures of success as we move forward with the data system, including development of measures that identify students’ educational goals and their progress toward completion of these goals.
CCCOnline
Spring 2015 registration opened November 1, 2014. 15-week classes start January 26, 2015. Spring 2015 numbers are as of January 21, 2015. Spring 2014 numbers are as of January 22, 2014.
2015 spring total enrollments – 19,479
2014 spring total enrollments – 17,768 Up 9.63% compared to previous year
2015 spring Unduplicated Headcount – 12,459 2014 spring Unduplicated Headcount – 11,446 Up 8.85% compared to previous year at this time
2015 spring FTE – 2,179.07 2014 spring FTE – 1,989.00
Up 9.56% compared to previous year at this time
2014 spring number of sections offered – 856
Up 10.28% compared to previous year at this time
Fall 2014 registration opened April 1, 2014. 15-week classes started September 2, 2014. Fall 2014 numbers are as of October 27, 2014. Fall 2013 numbers are as of October 28, 2013.
2014 fall total enrollments – 20,765 2013 fall total enrollments – 19,767 Up 5.05% compared to previous year
2014 fall Unduplicated Headcount – 12,619 2013 fall Unduplicated Headcount – 12,212 Up 3.33% compared to previous year at this time
2014 fall FTE – 2,282.2 2013 fall FTE – 2,161.3
Up 5.59% compared to previous year at this time
2014 fall estimated number of sections offered – 1,006 2013 fall number of sections offered – 986
Up 2.03% compared to previous year at this time
These will be considered final Fall 2014 numbers and will not be reported going forward.
Operational Excellence Goal 1: The financial stability of the system’s institutions and the physical safety of its students shall be ensured.
Academic Initiatives: Four projects were submitted in May 2013 to support the Academic initiatives. A project charter was developed, and detailed specifications were developed in conjunction with Ed Services. User testing for the Clearinghouse report has taken precedence over the user testing for the remaining two items.
• Credit Completion Warning System: A policy has been established to warn students who complete less than 50% of their coursework, and prevent them from registering if they do not improve. A new approach, recommended by the CCCS-IT developers, has been approved by Ed Services, has been developed, and is ready for user testing.
• Colorado House Bill 13-1147 requires that all institutes of Higher Education place a link to the secretary of state voter registration site as part of the registration process. This link has already been placed into production.
• The new satisfactory academic progress standards as outlined in policy ES 4-81 require that a hold be placed on a student’s registration each time they are on suspension. This process has been developed and tested and is now live in production.
• The repeat course limit as outlined in policy ES 4-87, requires that students receive a pop up message the first time they register for a course they have already taken, and then get a new message and a have their registration blocked each subsequent time they register for the same course. This process will stop students from registering for a third time and display a custom message. Staff can use baseline banner controls to allow these
students to register. The new process will be seamless and will be supported by CCCS-IT. Schools have determined which courses will be exempt, and the data has been loaded into Banner. We are re-evaluating how repeat course grades are calculated. Once that is clarified, testing can begin again.
Algorithmic and Period Based Budgeting: Work on set up has been progressing and the use of this functionality will be ready for the 2015-2016 academic year. This functionality allows for the determination of Cost of Attendance amounts based on an academic semester and to change these amounts based on changes in the student record. This functionality carries with it the benefit of allowing for the elimination of many of the manual updates required by financial aid staff using the current approach. Training on this functionality is scheduled to take place February 6th with financial aid directors and support staff. Subsequent online training support will be offered via WebEx sessions.
Assessment/Placement Exams: CCCS has contracted with McCann Associates to develop new assessment exams for placement of students into courses. CCCS-IT had an initial technical call with representatives from McCann Associates on January 14, 2015 to gather information
regarding the assessment exams, including discussion regarding the file layout. There is a significant level of technical work involved to interface the test scores and other information with Banner since the Accuplacer scores must be maintained until those scores age out. Some of the information that needs to be stored does not have a place in Banner, thus requiring
customizations that hopefully can be done in house. In addition, there is a significant amount of business process analysis and setup that will need to take place by the colleges and Education Services, including pre-requisites, score ranges, validation of S numbers and implementation logistics.
Banner Production Database Moving to New SAN: CCCS-IT is planning an extended Banner production outage February 21-22, 2015 in order to migrate the Banner and Portal production databases to a new Storage Area Network (SAN). This work needs to be completed in the next few months, as our current production SAN is approaching end-of-life. Moving to the new SAN will further support performance enhancements as well as disaster recovery and business
continuity initiatives.
Banner Upgrades: Upgrades to Student, Finance Self-Service, HR/Payroll, Advancement, Banner Document Management (BDM), Web General, Web Tailor and Banner General are underway. End-user testing is tentatively scheduled for June 1-5, with promotion to Production on Sunday, June 14, 2015. Patches and Financial Aid upgrades will be ongoing.
Banner XE Planning: CCCS-IT has been working with Ellucian to develop a project plan for implementing Banner XE. XE stands for Extensible Ecosystem and is intended to be more flexible and open in terms of integration with other systems. It is built on a new web-based platform and eliminates the reliance on Oracle Forms, which is positive. Prerequisites were identified early in FY14 and the majority of these prerequisites have now been completed: move CCCS to baseline Multi-Entity Processing (MEP); install the Database Extension Utility;
implement Central Authentication System (CAS) and Banner Enterprise Identity Services (BEIS); provide training for CCCS developers on Java and Object-Oriented Programming,
Groovy & Grails and Banner XE Code Modification; determine hardware needs and include in the FY15 budget request; upgrade Banner Student and Banner General to the required versions; participate in the Ellucian led Banner XE Technical Foundations Workshop. The hardware has been ordered to support Banner XE. Software installation planning been initiated. Preliminary plans are to implement each Banner XE module in the order they were released by Ellucian. Each module would be moved into Production prior to beginning work on the next module.
• Course Catalog & Schedule • Student Attendance Tracking • Faculty Grade Entry
• Advising Student Profile • Registration
The XE Kick-Off for the Banner Student module (The first XE module released) has been scheduled for February 3-5, 2015, with the implementation of Catalog and Schedule beginning soon afterwards.
CCCS is also participating as an Ellucian development partner for the Banner XE Banner Communication Manager (BCM) module. This product is being designed to target and segment communications for a specific group or cohort based on any data in Banner by Ellucian. It also provides the ability to personalize communications, track interactions generated by
communications, and enter manual interactions to capture pertinent information about the relationship. FRCC and PPCC have agreed to pilot this project with CCCS-IT. The first controlled release is anticipated to be made available to development partners at the end of February. An introduction to the project will be provided to the pilot colleges in the near future. An Ellucian demo of Banner XE was provided to the VP Council (VPSS & VPI) on August 22 and was well received. The integration with Degree Works Academic Planner and the Self Service Registration process will be very helpful for our students and provides students with a “shopping cart” experience.
Business Intelligence Data Warehouse: Student Retention Performance (SRP) has been made available in a soft roll-out to Institutional Research across the system. IR will verify the data being returned by the delivered reports and in the delivered dashboards. This soft roll-out will also allow those who completed training last year to create custom reports and dashboards for their colleges prior to a general release later this quarter.
Operational Data Store (ODS) 8.5 has been released by Ellucian. We are putting together the upgrade plan with the goal of having production upgraded (without DegreeWorks reporting) by end of March.
Classroom Scheduling Software: CCCS has signed a master contract with Ad Astra to provide colleges with Astra Schedule (classroom scheduling software) and Platinum Analytics (Space and class utilization tool). Schools may purchase one or both options.
A meeting between CCCS-IT and Ad Astra was held on January 8, 2015 to discuss technical requirements and responsibilities.
Colorado Reverse Transfer Project (CRTP/Senate Bill 12-45 (Higher Education Associate Degree Transfer).
CCCS is working with the Colorado Department of Higher Education and eight four-year universities on the reverse transfer project: Metropolitan State University of Denver, University of Colorado at Denver, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, Colorado State University at Pueblo, Colorado State University (CSU Ft. Collins), Colorado State University - Global
Campus (CSU - Global), Western State University Colorado (WSCU), and Regis University (Regis).
The vendor solution was promoted to Production on January 5, 2015. Three colleges have reported that they have processed the electronic student academic files and have notified students regarding their status: TSJC, CCD and RRCC. NJC is awaiting their one student file from CDHE, as the file was not sent as a Production file. It has been confirmed that LCC and OJC will not have files in this first group of candidates for reverse transfer consideration.
CORE: The Colorado Operations Resource Engine (CORE) was designed to replace the State's existing financial system infrastructure (COFRS-Colorado Reporting System) with a modern, web-enabled, vendor-hosted Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. The state went live with their portion of the CORE system on July 7, 2014. All files through period 6 have been fed to the state. The CORE Reconciliation Report was tested by the CCCS Finance office and is currently being tested by the schools. This report will be used to reconcile Banner history to CORE extract files.
DegreeWorks: The Degree Works Revitalization committee met from October 2013 to June 2014 and successfully addressed and implemented changes to Degree Works that allowed schools to fully utilize its functionality. In addition, they developed a uniform FAQ for students and staff, came up with a change management process, documented areas to be regularly
maintained, and revisited the CCCS localizations to form consistency across all colleges. As part of the revitalization, a major upgrade to DegreeWorks, including implementation of the new planner, was successfully completed on June 10, 2014. Since the upgrade, 471,330 audits have been viewed as of January 15, 2015.
To keep schools up to date and on track, regular DegreeWorks work sessions will be held with CCCS-IT. The first session will be on November 19, 2014, at which time the interval for future sessions will be determined.
An upgrade to DegreeWorks version 4.1.4 has begun. This version will contain additional data elements needed to be able to integrate with the ODS/EDW to enable reporting from
DegreeWorks. While the elements will be present to support reporting, the integration will still require a custom interface to be developed. DegreeWorks 4.1.4 will also include significant performance enhancements to the Student Planner including the return of the split screen Audit/Plan view.
To support the upgrade, an Ellucian consultant will work with CCCS IT to determine new setup and security in February and will come on site in March to train end users on the new
functionality. The consultant will return again in June for additional follow-up end user training. The upgrade is expected to move in to Production in April.
Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity: The Request for Proposal (RFP) was released in early December and responses were due back from vendors in early January. The proposals have been reviewed by the RFP committee and three vendors have been selected to present to the RFP committee in early February.
Electronic Transcripts: Pilot schools (ACC, CCD, FRCC, and MCC) have completed the testing and are ready to go-live. Each school has selected their go-live date between the ranges of Jan 26 – Feb 10, 2015. ACC went live on January 26th and 25 transcript orders were placed the first morning of the go-live. The other schools have started testing and are having individual Web Ex refresher trainings with Parchment. The non-pilot schools will be going live between the ranges of March 2-16, 2015.
Exchange:
• Exchange 2007 servers have been completely removed from our environment.
• QuickLaunch SSO has been deployed in our development Office 365 environment, and testing continues. The decommissioning of the Microsoft SSO Toolkit has been extended to December 31, 2015, but we will maintain an aggressive schedule to get the new SSO solution into Production. Quicklaunch SSO allows single sign-on for students from the Portal to their Microsoft Office 365 email accounts.
• The new version of the Archive Manager (email archives) software has been installed. An issue was discovered with the migration piece, which is used to move archived email from the old servers to the new ones. Metalogix is working on finding a solution to the problem so that wider migration testing can be done.
Faculty Load and Compensation (FLAC): The FLAC Release Two (R-2) End User Group has finished their work to provide suggestions for the second release of FLAC Automation. The Sponsorship Team has reviewed these suggestions and approved pursuit of the vast majority of the enhancements.
Release Two software has been deployed to USRE for testing although there is still more functionality that will be released in the coming months. The move to production has been scheduled for mid-April, 2015. The following high-level priorities have been identified as part of this effort and are being addressed.
• Process Flow: Enhance the process flow of making assignments using FLAC Automation. Make the process both more effective and more efficient.
• Approval Integrity: Ensure that what is approved is what is paid by payroll and that records agree across all systems.
• Reporting Updates: Enhance reporting to increase efficiency and effectiveness of staff working with FLAC.
Financial Aid 8.22.1 – Direct Loan Processing: Ellucian is developing new forms and tables to support Direct Loan Processing in Banner. As a result, new validation tables will need to be set up and several processes, reports, population selections, letters and custom applications will need to be reviewed and revised. An Ellucian consultant has been scheduled to be onsite March 31 – April 2, 2015 to review the CCCS plan (which needs to be developed) and to assist with providing an overview for the colleges.
Health Care Reform: Specifications for the design of a process for tracking instructional and non-instructional workload across the system have been developed. The BI Team has begun developing reports based on these specifications. These reports are currently being reviewed by CCCS-IT and system Human Resources personnel. An overview of the report being developed for use by the Instructional areas was provided at the October 24th VP Council meeting. The report format met with VP approval. On December 9, 2014, the VPIs were provided with a sample draft report for each of their respective colleges in order to gather feedback. Information collected from the colleges was used to further refine the reports. An overview of the updated report will be presented to the VPIs and VPSSs on January 23, 2015.
Benefits must be made available to applicable employees whose workload hours exceed the threshold identified in the Health Care Reform bill. The need for changes (including additions) to the current employee classes was identified in relation to this project. The new employee classes were tested and then loaded into Production on 5/27/14. The new eClasses were
available for use starting 7/1/2014. Identifying the appropriate number of contact hours for each course, to be used solely for the purpose of determining eligibility for benefits, has been an on-going project with the VPIs. Over 3000 individual courses have been reviewed thus far and work is underway to determine any remaining courses that need to be reviewed.
Higher One: 9 schools are live on eBill. The eBill kickoff for the 4 remaining schools (CNCC, LCC, OJC, RRCC) was Tuesday, November 18 with a plan to go live March 1, 2015. At that point, all schools will be live on eBill.
Imaging: Banner Document Management (BDM) will be upgraded to version 7.0 with the help of an Ellucian consultant in March for the test environment and April, 2015 for production. Maxient (Student Discipline/Title IX Tracking): No new activity.
Mobile Apps: Current college participants now include ACC, CCA, CCD, FRCC, LCC, MCC, NJC, PCC, PPCC, RRCC and TSJC. Five colleges are live. PPCC and TSJC went live in Fall 2013, ACC in Spring 2014 and FRCC in Summer 2014. CCD, PCC and NJC went live in January 2015 All colleges have had a successful launch and received positive feedback from students.
We plan to upgrade the mobile app to the latest version by end of Spring 2015. We are waiting for the version that has the Wait-listed notification feature to be released before
upgrading. Ellucian plans to release that version in Spring 2015. A project charter has been drafted for the wait-list
Notifications feature will be released during Spring 2015. The current process requires staff to run processes in Banner to obtain data on these students, and then email a notification to students.
CCCS-IT has obtained an Apple Developer license which lets CCCS submit apps to the Apple App Store. Next we will be obtaining an Android license which allow CCCS to submit apps to the Google's App Store. Once we have the Android license we can move the apps to the App Store under each college.
The first college developed mobile app, Fraction Lore, using the newly acquired CCCS Apple Developer license has been published to the Apple App Store. Fraction Lore is an iPad app developed by Red Rocks Community College to teach students arithmetic of fractions. Julie Schneider (Full-Tim Faculty at RRCC), Jeff Manning (developer student at RRCC) and Carrie Carrigan (design student at RRCC) devoted their skills and time this summer and fall to implement the Fraction Lore app that was started because of the Immersive Game Based Learning Grant, M-Apps.
Portal: Approving leave and FLAC requests through the Portal from outside the CCCS network went live on November 23rd without any issues. Users will no longer need to be on campus or use VPN to approve requests. Also with this change, fixes the issue where only certain browsers can be used to approve leave or FLAC requests.
Recruiter: The Recruiter kick-off was held March 18-20, 2014. All colleges participated in the initial meeting. Implementation efforts have been focused on the pilot schools: RRCC, PPCC, CCD, OJC and ACC. Pilot colleges have provided documentation necessary for the internet branding of the new application as well as communication plans which will be used to define how the Recruiter application will function.
The work to integrate the more than 60 custom fields into the CCCS Recruiter application continues to be a primary focus with CCCS IT and Ellucian Support Staff working through the mapping of these custom fields from the Recruiter Application to the Banner Database.
The project plan has been reworked to account for needed development work. Instead of having one pilot group and three additional implementation groups, the revised project plan will reflect one pilot group and two additional implementation groups. Once the pilot colleges have tested and signed off on the template, it will be copied and branded for subsequent implementation groups. This approach will accommodate having all colleges live on Recruiter by the end of June 2015.
Student Photo IDs on Class Rosters in Self-Service Banner (SSB) and Banner INB: The process to load photo IDs into INB, and the photo ID Roster in SSB, are both live in production. Schools may begin uploading ID photos as they are ready.
CCA, MCC, CCD, PCC, ACC, RRCC and PPCC are all live in production, FRCC is currently testing. 111,716 photo IDs have been loaded as of January 15.
Voice Over Internet Telephony (VOIP): No new updates for VoIP at this time. The system is running and stable.
Wide Area Network Bandwidth Upgrades: No new upgrades are planned at this time, however we continue to look at ways to increase connection reliability and lower costs.
