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Florida�s Web-Based FACTS: Joining Institutional Systems for Statewide Student Access

Linda Thanasides, Director, Florida Center for Advising and Academic Support (FCAAS)

University of South Florida

ABSTRACT

The goal of the system is to put in place the infrastructure for a statewide system that will allow real-time communication between all thirty-eight Florida institutions while maintaining the integrity of each institution�s host applications. The system will include future web applications to help the student apply to any of the institutions involved, apply for financial aid, obtain career advising, register for local and distance learning courses, and more. Independent and out-of-state schools may also be included in the future.

Florida�s Web-Based FACTS: Joining Institutional Systems for Statewide Student Access

During the 1996 session, the Florida Legislature passed a mandate requiring that the state�s ten universities and twenty eight community colleges establish a statewide system infrastructure that would allow students access to their transcripts, assess progress towards a degree, shop for degrees at each of the public institutions, and assess the impact of changing majors or institutions. This was seen as the first phase of a more comprehensive system that would also allow students to apply for admission, research financial aid options, register for classes, and pay fees at any public institution from any web browser. The system was to be available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

In Florida, a Board of Regents governs the universities; and the community colleges are separately managed and funded entities governed by a State Board of Community Colleges. There is a myriad of systems implemented at each state institution. The universities have a shared advising system infrastructure called SASS (derived from the DARS system), while the community colleges were just developing such an infrastructure at the time the legislation was passed. Each institution has implemented its own admissions, registration, financial aid, and fee payment systems. The community colleges are divided into five different system consortia where all the institutions in a consortium share development and maintenance costs for a set of shared systems. Given this type of statewide organization, the prospect of bringing together the institutions in a cogent fashion seemed completely unmanageable!

The interest of the Legislature in this issue was brought about by the projected 50% increase in college age students over the next ten years in the state of Florida. Florida has no state income tax plus a voter-driven initiative was passed a few years ago that limits new taxes and fees, so there will be no new institutions to accommodate the projected growth. Of course, it is not known how many of those students will decide to continue their education in Florida, or continue in post-secondary education at all, but it is reasonable to assume there will be a significant increase in demand for higher education in the state. The issue remains in how to deal with that increase.

The Legislature has focused on two other trends: 1) the trend for students to take five or six years to complete an undergraduate degree, and 2) the trend for students to take more hours than needed for graduation. (The two are clearly related.) Two state initiatives have been put in place to help improve the "productivity" of the existing higher education system in Florida. One is the "Out in 4" program to encourage students to complete their college education in four years by providing comprehensive academic advising. The other is to begin charging full tuition for "excess credit hours." Excess credit hours are considered any credit hours in excess of 115% of those needed to graduate. However, it became clear that these initiatives themselves would not be enough to speed students through the system.

The developing technologies associated with distance learning offer the promise of providing an alternative form and media for teaching and learning using personal computers and the web. Many states are looking at this option as a way to leverage their investment in higher education. The public is demanding many other services be provided within the boundaries of the existing tax structure, so the possibility of delivering instruction electronically without having to build additional classrooms and campuses is very attractive.

The Florida Legislature is similarly interested in this possibility and has recognized the way to accomplish such a "virtual university" is to leverage the faculty and other resources at the existing thirty-eight state institutions. In order to do this; however, we need a way for students to put together degree programs potentially with pieces from several different institutions. At some point separate accreditation will need to be considered, but that can come later once more courses are available electronically. We must start with the ability of students to easily research and pursue options at the existing institutions. Hence the interest in a statewide student information system.

In the summer of 1996, the Board of Regents and the State Board of Community Colleges hosted several focus sessions with administrators, faculty, students, and parents to gather information about user expectations and requirements for a statewide system. The technical options for a pilot implementation were also considered. Early on it was decided that a web-based delivery system would be the most desirable. A number of existing systems at different institutions were considered for the potential to serve as a basis for the system. Each had some interesting and innovative characteristics, and some may even have been comprehensive enough to provide all of the desired functionality for all of the institutions. However, there was considerable opposition by individual institutions to convert to a new system, and to turn over any responsibility or control for their data and business rules to one central system. It became clear that a distributed system design would be the only agreeable solution.

Ownership of the pilot project was resolved by appointing the Secretary of the Department of Management Services (DMS) as pilot project manager. This was a logical choice as DMS was responsible for the state�s communications infrastructure and the Secretary was a member of a new state entity formed to foster and coordinate distance learning activities in the state. The pilot was funded by dollars allocated to the distance learning project. It was deemed important to have a working pilot by the start of the 1997 legislative session. Since we had only three months to make the deadline, DMS hired several consulting agencies to assist six designated pilot institutions with implementation. In spite of having to deal with the disorganization of many participants, policy issues, hardware issues, and a general lack of consensus, a working pilot was completed at the end of the three months and demonstrated the technical feasibility of a statewide system.

Some of the issues that arose from the pilot are as follows: 1) Accuracy of information--The output from the pilot system did not always match output from the home institutional system. 2) Security of information--There was not enough time to develop an encryption method. 3) Output Format--There were too many institutions that could not agree upon a common output format for degree audits and transcripts. 3) Response Time--The electronic data formats used were inefficient and some of the communication methods were inadequate and slow. 4) Standard Policies for Passing Data--Agreements between the community college and university systems need to be established for standard data interchange.

Although the original pilot was messy and inefficient, it was a necessary part of getting the statewide system to where it is today. We took what we learned from that pilot and began to build on those experiences to create a sound design for the "real" system. After the demonstration to the legislature, a committee was appointed from the participating pilot institutions and resources from the Board of Regents and the State Board of Community Colleges to put together an implementation plan and a budget for the statewide deployment of the system. A very important resolution of this committee, and one that is the basis for the project�s success, was that all decisions would be a consensus. A budget and project plan was developed, submitted to the legislature and funding was approved. A director was appointed for FCAAS, and the development began at the prototype institutions while hiring for permanent support staff began.

We again had a very short time frame to develop the initial system implementation. To staff a project like this that could get the job done in a short period of time required knowledgeable, productive resources to start immediately. In the beginning, the committee submitted a Request for Proposal to find a vendor or vendors that could supply us with a software solution to tie the institutional academic advising systems together. None of the vendors had a total workable solution, so we decided to use our own resources to program a solution. Each of the prototype institutions involved committed technical resources to begin designing and programming while a permanent central support staff was being assembled to eventually take over the system support. Funding was allocated to each of the prototype institutions to provide assistance in replacing resources while the present staff developed the system.

A distributed design was agreed upon that allows the institutions to have full control of their data and processes. The data remains at the local institution and local applications are run when a request is made for information from a web browser. An interface process from the host application to the communication software handles the response. The request is routed through a central server to a communication server located at the destination institution. That request is recognized at the institution and the institution�s local application is run with production data. The response is handed back to the institution�s communication server to be either sent to another communication server for further processing or routed back to the requestor�s browser for display. The diagram below depicts the data flow for the system.

Figure 1 FACTS SYSTEM DATA FLOW

The institutional systems with which FACTS interface are run on MVS mainframes, AS/400s, UNIX, and NTs. The network interfaces used are TCP/IP, DB2 remote reads (Distributed Relational Database Architecture), and CICS sockets. The communication servers located at all institutions are running Windows NT and use FACTS-developed communication software. Each server also uses an Oracle database for managing EDI formats. IBM Netfinity 5500 servers were used as the first set of implementation servers. They were chosen for speed, reliability, and the ability to monitor the networked servers from a central location. As more and more servers are implemented, monitoring of the system will become increasingly important.

To aid in making the system more useful to administrators and students, "Expert Teams" for each functional area were established to make recommendations for the system. The teams will decide what minimum and maximum functionality they will request of the system as their particular applications are implemented. They will also resolve policy issues as well.

FACTS will provide several benefits to the institutions of Florida. Institutions will benefit from the expertise of the Center staff as they implement at their site. There will be a software package offered with the system that will allow web-page generation for all institutional applications. The institutions can share data from other institutions that has been previously unavailable. All institutions can have a web presence, some maybe faster than they had planned. Institutions will also have greater exposure to potential students, both in and out-of-state.

FACTS will provide a great benefit to students as well. Students will have one web address from which to gather information about all institutions. They can gather information without having to go to several campus offices. The system will assist in making all services truly off-campus for distance learning students; and it will allow almost 24-hour-a-day access to student information.

There is much enthusiasm for the FACTS project by the Board for the Center, the Center, and the institutional participants. There is much work to be done at each institution and for future functionality for the system, but we are on track to deliver a quality product for the state of Florida!