Financial Aid is Hard. Is Your Legacy System Making it Harder?
Financial aid is critical for many students to make higher education accessible. It’s also vital for the financial sustainability of the many institutions that serve those students. But as essential as it is, many colleges are still using legacy systems with complex user interfaces and little or no workflow capabilities to guide students through the […]
Getting the Most Out of Your Technology
During my time as a university professor in a college of education, I taught several courses on integrating technology into teaching. One of the frameworks discussed often was the SAMR (Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, Redefinition) model, which categorizes technology according to its transformative power. Each level within the model represents increased sophistication and ability to make […]
The Use of ChatGPT in Higher Education Advancement
You can’t listen to the news or pick up a news publication without hearing about the newest sensation, ChatGPT. As many of you already know, ChatGPT is a public chatbot launched by OpenAI that leverages a machine language learning model to converse with humans, answer complex questions, and even write content and application code. In […]
The Data Problem in Higher Ed
“Life comes at you fast.” The quote from those Nationwide commercials of the past might feel current for higher education leaders facing critical strategic decisions based on today’s strong economic, demographic, and political headwinds. The speed and criticality of decisions that must be made to ensure institutions’ long-term health and viability are unrelenting. Many leaders […]
The Futures of Continuing Education
Continuing education is experiencing something of a renaissance. In the years immediately preceding the pandemic, continuing education programs were already seeing significant growth as corporate demand for workforce training, certifications, skills development, and specialization increased. Although higher education enrollments experienced significant declines, especially among community colleges, interest in and demand for continuing education did not […]
Keeping it Personal: Technology and the Student Experience
The definition of student experience is an ever-changing one. As technology advances, students’ expectations shift to newly introduced possibilities. Inevitably, this affects student experience. However, what’s important to consider is whether implementing a solution just because it’s available is worthwhile to your institution. In this episode, new show host Elizabeth Farrell talks to Dr. Melissa […]
IT Campaign Playbook: CIOs Share Tips for a Successful CRM Enterprise Transition
Election day may have come and gone, but political experts will continue to examine and pick apart every candidate’s results to make sense of why their campaigns worked or failed. While higher education technology leaders aren’t elected officials, the most effective ones know that the path to a successful digital transformation begins with a strong […]
What Did I Forget?! Top 5 Non-Implementation Issues to Think About During a Cloud Application Transition
After living through three generations of technology that have swept through higher education administrative systems over the last 30+ years, I have added the unique experience of stepping out of the institutions and into my role as an industry analyst. Thinking about my own experiences as I listen to many of you talk about what’s […]
The Deployment Journey: Learning from the Past to Shape the Future
We learned about project management and change management at enterprise scale. We learned about conversion for very large systems. And we learned that customizing systems to meet our needs led to disastrous long-term costs, locked us into decades-old decisions, and prevented business innovation. The experiences from those years inform the work we do today in […]
Business Process Optimization Before an ERP Project?
For many, the idea that software would drive business processes is problematic. The thinking is that software should support good processes, not drive their design. This made great sense when software was designed to meet the need from scratch or could easily be customized to meet the process design. The result, however, was custom software […]
