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SCC
receives $950,000 grant
Through
a grant of over $950,000, students at Southwestern Community
College will soon take a giant step toward interconnectivity.
In an announcement made today, officials at Southwestern
celebrated the launch of a project that will combine
the very best in technology with the college's unique
student-centered culture to create a "high tech-high
touch" learning environment for all students.
Funded through CampusEAI Consortium, telecommunications
giants Oracle Corporation, Dell Computers and others,
Southwestern will create an intranet portal that will
serve as a virtual gathering place and one-stop resource
center for students, faculty and staff. The grant includes
software, hardware, installation, configuration, training,
upgrades and many other services associated with implementation
of the leading intranet portal.
As
a Southwestern Community College New Century Scholar,
Theo Hoyle of Whittier will soon have "high
tech-high touch" access when SCC's intranet
portal project launches. "It will be like a
virtual gathering place," said this Smoky Mountain
High School sophomore. |
The
portal will allow the college to seamlessly integrate
key student information systems, online learning and
administrative computing, thereby reducing costs and
making online services simpler for the entire learning
community.
"Currently, users sign on to a web site that is
generic and static. Then they have to access and sequentially
sign on to a number of individual sites to access different
kinds of information they may need," said Jim Campbell,
vice president for Information Technology and Telecommunications.
"The new intranet portal will make it possible
for users to instantly access key learning and teaching
resources, student services, the Internet and many other
campus resources - anytime, day or night - all with
a single sign on."
"When I'm on line and want to access several sites
at SCC, it's time consuming to move form one site to
another, searching for everything I need," said
SCC freshman Sarah Dickerson. "With this new portal,
we'll have an electronic space where we can rapidly
access information about registration, grades and transcripts,
announcements from our advisors, messages about upcoming
deadlines and special events and hook up with other
students with common interests. It's really an exciting
change."
According to Laura Pennington, director of Community
and Resource Development, Southwestern applied for the
grant through CampusEAI Consortium, a Cleveland-based,
non-profit organization dedicated to helping its members
reduce the cost and increase the speed of providing
information technology services.
"CampusEAI facilitates the development, exchange,
delivery and support of community-source software and
digital content," Pennington said. "SCC and
UNC-Chapel Hill are the only colleges in North Carolina
to be part of CampusEAI's nationwide portal initiative.
We are thrilled to have been selected to be part of
such a prestigious effort and to know how much our students,
faculty and staff will benefit from the improvements."
As a grant recipient, the college also becomes a member
of the CampusEAI community, a consortium of over 140
leading institutions and organizations dedicated to
the common goal of delivering advanced teaching, learning
and research technologies through community source collaboration.
"This is an opportunity to keep our students informed
and engaged, something we know will greatly enhance
their learning experience at SCC," said Cecil Groves,
president of Southwestern. "The portal is like
a web site - only better. A web site displays information
that any visitor might need to view. Students, overloaded
with information, might leave the site without finding
the help they needed. The content on the portal will
be personalized for each student with dynamic information
just for them."
Installation of the new portal and integration of SCC
records, data and programs will be a major undertaking,
according to Jim Campbell.
"We have begun implementation of the new portal
and will start testing it in the near future,"
he said. "We anticipate it will take about a year
to be complete and that it will be fully operational
by summer/fall of 2007."
For more information on SCC, visit www.southwesterncc.edu
or to learn more about CampusEAI, visit http://www.campuseai.org.
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