A 20-person team was recognized at Global Campus' April staff meeting for its yearlong efforts to build and launch the Professional and Workforce Development Slate instance, a new software system that consolidates registration, reporting and email marketing for non-credit courses offered in cooperation with Global Campus into one system. This team included staff from nearly every unit of Global Campus.

This tailored instance in Slate will connect with other U of A systems to revolutionize the ability of the Global Campus and the U of A to promote, manage and report on non-credit educational programs. As workforce initiatives grow across the state and nation, the ability to efficiently manage and track U of A non-credit programs becomes more critical.

"We've never done anything like this," said Cheryl Murphy, vice provost for distance education at the U of A. "Few if any institutions across the country have built and implemented a system as robust. We are gathering information and harnessing data in ways we've never done before, and I am very proud of what this talented team and our fantastic campus partners have accomplished."

THE SLATE INITIATIVE

Slate is a customer relationship management software platform used primarily in higher education. The new PWD instance leverages Slate's functionality to improve non-credit operations in two major areas: (1) replacing several tools functioning in isolation with one centralized platform and (2) creating automations for tasks that previously required time-consuming manual entry. The new website improves the course search and checkout experience for learners and allows learners to access non-credit courses faster. The new software also provides learners with an enduring portal where they can access digital certificates for their completed courses and gain self-service access to a cumulative record of their non-credit courses.

In addition to enhancing learner experience, the Slate system significantly reduces the workload for staff across various teams within Global Campus, from marketing to finance. The new Slate instance was built to allow groups outside of Global Campus to use the system to manage registration and data reporting for their non-credit courses so that the benefits can be shared across the university and beyond.

The PWD Slate instance also supports marketing efforts, including email marketing. The first PWD Slate email marketing campaign was launched earlier this year, allowing Global Campus to cancel subscriptions to several email marketing platforms, resulting in significant cost savings for the university.

"This huge project was outside of the scope of everyone's normal job," one staff member stated in their nomination. "It is worthy of the Lightbulb award."

The leader of the project, Patty Milner, assistant vice provost for Innovation and the Online Student Experience, stated, "It has been quite an adventure leveraging the skills of our teams and an outside consultant to create something new that really met the unique needs of our programs. I am so proud of the work that we have done and the commitment of our staff to learn new skills, stretch themselves and focus on how we could really deliver an excellent experience for our learners while also meeting our administrative needs. It has really been remarkable to see what this creative and committed team can do."

In addition to the Global Campus personnel, staff from across the university collaborated to create this innovative system. Together, the teams were able to automate and integrate several systems. Working with UITS, Blackboard and Academic Technology Services, the team was able to implement new authentication and data transfer processes to automate the enrollment of non-credit learners into Blackboard courses, a process that previously required manual data handling by multiple U of A offices.

"We discovered a lot during this process about where technology barriers were creating bottlenecks," Milner said. "By working together across the campus, we were able to reduce and sometimes eliminate those barriers. It wasn't easy, but it was worth it. Now, even just a few months in, it is hard to imagine how the old processes worked."

"We still have work to do, but this project will support Global Campus and the University of Arkansas for many years to come," Murphy said.

Members of the Global Campus Slate Team, in alphabetical order, are Katrina Ball, Shelia Bowerman, Grant Brewer, Eve Canty, Gabriel Del Carmen, Mandy Eppley, Jolenda Hott, YaYa Jenkins, Stanley Jones, Miran Kang, Alex Kennetz, Benjamin Matthews, Patty Milner, Anna Phillips, Shelly Pryor, Katie Ricardo, Leonard Ridley, Rabia Shattuck, Christina Smith and Uthara Unnikrishnan.

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Global Campus instituted the Lightbulb Award to honor staff members for outstanding innovation that goes above and beyond their routine job responsibilities. This award is open to appointed and hourly staff who work for Global Campus. Previous winners of this award include the Hospitality Event Management Sim Team and the Pedagogy Toolkit Podcast Team.

The Global Campus supports the U of A academic colleges and schools in the development and delivery of online degree programs and courses, and workforce development programs. This unit provides instructional design services, learning technology support, media production services and assistance with financial administration, recruitment and marketing.

The Global Campus also supports the W.E. Manning Memorial Scholarship, which is open to undergraduate and graduate students studying in online degree programs.