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Special Annual Awards
2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Student Advising Technology
8/1/2008
WITH ONE SWIPE of a student's ID card, Harford advisers are automatically notified at their desktops about the student waiting to be seen. The system also provides an online photo of the student and a copy of his or her transcript.
TECHNOLOGY AREA: STUDENT ADVISING TECHNOLOGY
Innovator: Harford Community College
To help students 'sail' through the advising office, technologists teamed an unlikely group of products and came up with a winning solution.
Monitoring and responding to student academic and campuslife needs and requirements is a challenging task for any college adviser; on the other hand, moving through the advising office is often more than a challenge for most students. At Harford Community College (MD), a new IT effort is facilitating the way students interact with that office, enhancing advising services by improving accuracy and efficiency, streamlining the process for students and staffers, and augmenting the school's ability to counsel more students more effectively each day.
The system is called SAILOR (Student Advising Information and Log On Recording), and its creators say it was designed to help students "sail" through the advising office. SAILOR utilizes Banner ERP from SunGard Higher Education, identification cards from NuVision Networks, Xerox DocuShare, PaperPort from Nuance, and a host of other technologies. Joy Hatch, VP for IT, maintains that with more than 11,000 Harford students visiting the advising office each year, something had to be done to streamline the process.
Thus SAILOR was born in spring 2007, when Application Developer Bill Merryman set out to design change for the advising process. Before beginning work on the system, he met with staffers in the Career and Transfer Services department to discuss the process and the goals of the system. He returned to meet with the same individuals throughout the development process, to share what he had created to date, and to take suggestions for improvements or changes.
According to Hatch, the final product exceeded expectations, due in large part to the willingness of advisers to participate in the development process, and Merryman's ability to incorporate that feedback. "SAILOR is an example of technology innovation designed for collaboration between the departments that produced the system, thus allowing greater service for students," she says.
Today, there are two main components to the SAILOR application: the web interface that students use to log in, and the desktop client that advisers use to manage and monitor student academics and activities.
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