This paper is the intellectual property of the author(s). It was presented at EDUCAUSE '99, an EDUCAUSE conference, and is part of that conference's online proceedings. See http://www.educause.edu/copyright.html for additional copyright information.
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: Building a Statewide Student Advising
System
Linda Thanasides
Florida Center for Advising and Academic Support
Tampa, Florida
The public community colleges and state universities in Florida have joined forces to deliver a distributed, platform-independent, Web-based delivery system for educational information. The Florida Academic Counseling and Tracking for Students (FACTS) system is an infrastructure for a statewide network that allows real-time communication between institutions while maintaining the integrity of each institution's host applications. Students at participating institutions are able to retrieve transcripts, receive academic advising, see what is needed to complete a degree at any other institution in the system, construct "what if" scenarios, and make coursework assumptions for educational planning. The system design and FACTS pilot were presented at CAUSE97. Since then, the system has been delivered and is now in the process of being implemented at all Florida public institutions.
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: Building a Statewide Student Advising System
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 and career options, obtain distance learning information, register for classes, perform career tracking functions, and pay fees at any public institution from any web browser. The system was requested 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, Miami of Ohio 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 an organized manner 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 also has concerns about 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 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.
A pilot project was organized to provide a proof of concept before proceeding with concrete plans (including funding) for development of a statewide system. The Secretary of the Department of Management Services (DMS) was the 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 Florida’s distance learning initiative. It was deemed important to have a working pilot by the start of the 1997 legislative session so funding could be considered for that year’s budget. 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 that 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 needed 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 a 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 created 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. The budget and project plan was submitted to the legislature and funding was approved. The Florida Center for Advising and Academic Support (FCAAS) was established as the central support staff that would implement and maintain the system. A director was appointed, and the development began at six prototype institutions while hiring for permanent support staff began.
We again had a very short time frame to develop the initial system implementation. Work began in April with a September 1998 production date for the prototype institutions. 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 the permanent FCAAS 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.
FACTS is designed to interface with any institutional platform. The current platforms with which FACTS interface are MVS mainframe, AS/400, UNIX, and NT. 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 are being used as the institutional communication 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 is becoming increasingly more 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 decide what minimum and maximum functionality will be requested of the system as their particular applications are implemented. The expert teams also resolve policy issues as well.
FACTS will provide several benefits to participating institutions. They 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 due to the assistance from the central FCAAS staff and state funding for the project. 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.
Florida has established the Florida Virtual Campus that will work closely with FCAAS in developing web services for traditional and distance learning students. By providing a one-stop web link for students to gather information on student support services, distance learning courses, and virtual library services, FACTS can assist students in planning almost all aspects of their educational experience.
Since our last presentation at CAUSE97, system functionality has been streamlined, production institutions have been added, FCAAS has been staffed, future functionality has been planned, and implementation for the FACTS network is either completed or well on the way for 28 of the 38 institutions in the Florida public post-secondary educational system. FCAAS has also been working with the private and independent colleges and universities that are interested in joining the FACTS system.
The targeted implementation plan of FCAAS is to have the initial academic advising functions available to 75% of the Florida public post-secondary student population by January 3, 2000 when the system will be officially advertised. Other functional areas of the system are already available with links to informational sites that students may use in planning their educational future, but the main focus has been the advising area for the initial project rollout.
The implementation plan over the next three years involves expanding services to students and administrators for admissions, registration, financial aid, fee payments, career planning, distance learning services, and general student services such as online orientation. Once the infrastructure for communication between the institutions is established, there are unlimited possibilities for the exchange of information.
There is much enthusiasm for the FACTS project by the Florida legislature, the FCAAS Board, FCAAS, and the institutional participants. There is much work to be done at each institution for future functionality of the system, but we are on track to deliver an ever-expanding quality product for the state of Florida!