Dear Colleagues:
I hope you all had a wonderful spring break!
This month we are excited to share with you that the Colorado Community College System was selected by Foundry’s CIO as a 2024 CIO 100 Award winner for the innovative work being done to support the Colorado Online Consortium. The annual US CIO 100 Awards celebrate 100 organizations and the teams within them that use IT in innovative ways to deliver business value, whether by creating competitive advantage, optimizing business processes, enabling growth, or improving relationships with customers.
In the award nomination Julie Ouska, the system’s CIO, wrote:
This project stands out because it was a significant business transformation that required low impact change to existing technology and development of new technology, but without making huge inconvenience for students, faculty, and staff. The development approach with the Implementation Strategy team was transformational because it was cross functional and wasn’t just IT but had a significant emphasis on business process owners and data experts. Our customers, the colleges, were a part of the team. Our goal was to accomplish the strategic goals of the project but do no harm to students, faculty and staff. Technology can be disruptive but in this case the business change of creating Colorado Online was disruptive, the technology needed to not be disruptive. And we were successful. Enrollment was not only preserved but is growing. By an inclusive team we not only took care of the day-to-day technology of registration, bill paying etc., but we also maintained data integrity and identified and met significant reporting and analysis needs and provided data for a successful financial model.
We had over 35 different scenarios that we walked through with an Implementation Strategy team that included representatives from IT, Business Technology, Application Development, Institutional Research/Business Intelligence, and Infrastructure. From the old CCCOnline model, it included key staff involved in the support of the Learning Management System (D2L) and their Student Support staff. From the colleges, the team includes three Registrars with astounding knowledge of college business practices and Banner. This committee started meeting in November 2022 every other week, and continues to this day to ensure that everything continues to operate as planned.
Congratulations to everyone involved in this important work! Coverage of the 2024 US CIO 100 award-winning projects will be available online at www.cio.com in the coming months.
Following are other highlights from March as the Colorado Online project continues to take important steps forward:
- Increased communication and collaborative leadership. Spring workgroups are bringing together faculty and staff from across colleges to discuss pain points related to course size, section distribution, course materials, and course development. Each group will meet twice in April to summarize key considerations, brainstorm solutions, and prioritize next steps in conjunction with members of the project team and subcommittees. We will provide an update on initial conversations at the April 10 Info Session, and final summaries from each group will inform the Consortium’s continuous improvement heading into the final phases of the transition.
- Expanded access to enrollment data. Summer enrollment reports for Colorado Online courses will be made available three times each week on the CCCS Colorado Online SharePoint Site starting Monday, April 8. While logged in through VPN or Citrix, college implementation leads, deans, chairs, advisors, and other key support staff can also access live enrollment data using the online Sectionizer dashboard. Training specific to deans and chairs will be offered April 18 and April 22 (invitations will be sent directly via Outlook).
- Cost-effective adoption of online tools and resources that benefit all students.
- At the March 13 info session, Frank Vazquez, Director of Academic Technology, shared updates on Simple Syllabus and Yuja Panorama, an online accessibility checker with inline training to help us all maximize the web accessibility of our online course content.
- We have begun the RFP process to select a vendor to provide online tutoring services, and are in the process of preparing a recommendation for a common online proctoring tool.
- A recommendation forexpanding Consortial support of disability services was approved at the March President’s Council meeting with the full support of Chancellor Garcia. Next steps that will serve the entire system include posting a position for a CCCS Director of Disability Services and drafting a Request for Proposals (RFP) for a Disability Services Data Management System. The Disability Services Director position will provide guidance and expertise in developing common processes and reporting, and the procurement of a Disability Services Data Management System ( will support consistent and confidential record-keeping and communication across colleges. By automating much of the administrative work, it will also allow college disability services staff to devote more time to working directly with students.
Thank you for all you do to support students and our communities every day, even in the midst of all this transformational change. Don’t hesitate to contact me or Diane Duffy, Executive Sponsor, with any questions or concerns.
Sincerely,
Tammy