This article was published in CAUSE/EFFECT journal, Volume 22 Number 2 1999. Copyright EDUCAUSE. See http://www.educause.edu/copyright for additional copyright information.
Campus Profile
Raritan Valley Community CollegeLocated in central New Jersey, Raritan Valley Community College (RVCC) offers 72 associate degrees and certificates to more than 12,000 students, 89 percent of whom work while attending school. The college primarily serves two counties, Somerset and Hunterdon, and to meet a variety of needs, it offers a wide range of services, from remedial and liberal arts courses to professional development and customized training.
Since 1995 RVCC has been honored with six national awards for its integration of technology into the classrooms, its outreach with international businesses and community agencies, and its effective teaching and learning practices. The college works with an annual budget of more than $27 million, with 15 percent of that allocated to information technology. The community has not experienced a tuition increase in five years.
Raritan Valley Community College has recently rewired its campus, and every classroom is connected to the network. The institution maintains 14 computer labs, including specialized facilities to support multimedia production, networking, language and writing instruction, corporate training, and computerized testing. RVCC was the first institution in New Jersey to offer both admissions and registration via the Web, and the college has reached its objective of having a Pentium-class PC on the desktop of every faculty and staff member.
In 1995 RVCC received the IBM/American Association of Community Colleges’ Network Distributed Education Award in recognition of its Centers for Advanced Teaching and Technology (CATTs) and the use of technology in the classroom. CATT rooms feature high-resolution video projectors as well as audiovisual consoles with remote controls and computers.
The college last year opened the Advanced Technology Communication Center. Highly used by the local business community, this facility can accommodate groups as small as 15 or as large as 400. The building features a grand conference room that is divisible into three sections, a community room, breakout rooms, and a computer lab. The center boasts an assortment of technological resources: computer stations, Internet links, two-way teleconferencing capabilities, videoconferencing, and large-screen video projectors.
RVCC will break ground in the fall on a new science and technology complex, for which the college has already raised the necessary $10 million. In addition to enhancing learning opportunities for students, the facility will foster relationships with the regional pharmaceutical industry.
Outsourcing Information Services
RVCC officials determined three years ago that with the role of information technology increasing in importance, the institution did not have the capacity to meet information technology objectives on its own. After careful consideration, the college entered a five-year contract with SCT Education Systems to outsource the management of information systems.
Chuck Chulvick, dean of Academic Services for RVCC, oversees both the information technology and the library functions of the college. Chulvick served as the SCT site director before joining the college administration almost two years ago. He says that by contracting with SCT, RVCC has achieved a professionalization of practices and procedures in the management information systems (MIS) area.
One particular benefit, according to the current SCT account executive, Bob Pescinski, is the corporation’s latitude to draw on specific resources to match given pieces of a process. Pescinski explains that outsourcing the MIS function fits the mindset at Raritan Valley Community College since the institution has a natural tendency to adapt quickly, without time to train staff or update resources.
The college recently implemented the SCT Banner administrative software system on an aggressive schedule. Says Chulvick, "I don’t think anyone from SCT or the college believes that the implementation would have been possible if the outsourcing hadn’t taken place." College officials decided to conform to Banner rather than individualize the package; the decision forced an evaluation of current processes, and it will simplify upgrades. Implementing the new system has streamlined processes and enhanced user access to information.
Although it’s not common in higher education to outsource all MIS operations, Pescinski says that the relationship is transparent: "Other than myself, everyone functions like a college employee. It’s a very congenial atmosphere."
President Cary Israel notes that he has not seen a single setback in outsourcing the MIS function. "SCT has been a tremendous collaborative partner, and they have helped us rapidly move forward with a quality, responsive system," he says.
Strategic Planning
Another change for Raritan Valley Community College has been in the planning process. When Israel arrived five years ago, the college did not have a strategic plan. Now officials are approving its second plan, and information technology plays an integral role. Specific plans for technology are established within the structure of the strategic plan, and resources are allocated accordingly.
The state of New Jersey’s commitment to technology has been critical. A recent Technology Bond Act committed $550,000 to the college, a sum that the college matched, in the state’s effort to provide current technology at higher education institutions. The state also partially subsidized the involvement of New Jersey institutions with a roundtable through the Teaching, Learning, and Technology (TLT) Group, an affiliate of the American Association for Higher Education. The two-day workshop aided institutions as they created methods for planning.
RVCC’s roundtable group, put together over a year ago, is currently formulating a three-year information technology plan. The group consists of approximately 15 members, and others are consulted as needed. The technology plan will be reviewed on an annual basis.
Chulvick notes that since technology planning is relatively new to RVCC, the college is currently working to formalize and streamline the process. "We don’t want to get bogged down in a bureaucratic approach, but we also need to make sure we are more coordinated in how we go about it," he says. "You can implement new technologies too far ahead of cultural change, and then you’re not getting a good return on your investment." At Raritan Valley Community College, that gap has been minimal.
Regional Education Center
Through the help of the new Advanced Technology Communication Center, RVCC officials hope to make the college a regional education center. The college has established relationships with other New Jersey institutions to offer higher degrees, and RVCC works with the local community to offer professional development and specialized training opportunities.
The New Jersey Institute for Technology (NJIT) and RVCC have collaborated to offer students a master of science degree in management. Students register and take all the required classes at RVCC’s campus to earn the degree from NJIT. Through a similar effort, students can receive a master of arts in education with a concentration in professional development through Seton Hall University. Classes are delivered on the RVCC campus, and students get a reduction in Seton Hall’s standard tuition rate. RVCC plans to continue to make such programs more accessible to its community.
The Advanced Technology Communication Center is heavily used by local corporations and not-for-profit agencies through RVCC’s Institute for Business and Professional Development. The institute has customized training, professional development, and international business departments to help local businesses remain competitive. Programs are quite flexible, usually tailored to meet specific company needs.
Computer workshop with the college's Institute for Business and Professional Development.Also in its effort to make education more accessible to the region, RVCC has launched a program to develop an online curriculum. The institution offered seven Web-based online courses during the spring 1999 semester, and more courses are in development. Chulvick explains that the college plans to increase its distance education opportunities as more faculty are trained and feel comfortable teaching in that environment. "We want to offer online programs, online certificates, and eventually online associate degrees," he says.
The college uses its Faculty Research Center as one method to support faculty in an online learning environment. In existence for a year, the center houses faculty offices for those interested in using technology in their teaching. The center is nondepartmental and fosters collaboration and mentoring among faculty. RVCC also has two staff members who help faculty integrate technology into their courses.
As information technology transforms the educational environment at Raritan Valley Community College, the library has played a significant role. RVCC participates in the Virtual Academic Library Environment (VALE) project, which provides funds for assisting academic libraries to access online full-text databases. The institution also participates in the State Library of New Jersey’s Hub Library project. The project provides funding to establish hub libraries across the state, connecting public libraries to the Internet at no cost and providing basic technical assistance. RVCC is the only higher education institution to provide that service for its region.
Surprisingly, as remote access and online capabilities are enhanced at RVCC, the school’s book collections have increased and more people are visiting the library. Mary Ann Ryer, assistant professor and reference librarian, explains, "As we make things available online and people come through the doors less frequently, we are giving them other reasons to come use the facility and meet people." The library has increased its computer resources as well as its programming, featuring speakers for events such as Black History Month.
Chulvick credits such collaborative projects and innovative thinking to the college staff. "The overwhelming majority of the folks here are very mission-oriented," Chulvick says. That, in combination with the support of the board of trustees, has had a significant impact on the success of information technology at the college. The trustees, he says, "are not only technology friendly, they’re technologically competent."
Sidebar
President Cary Israel
The Raritan Valley Community College Board of Trustees and community decided that technology was critical to the success of the college. So we developed new goals and priorities, and we reallocated resources to accomplish our plan of action. We discontinued some programs that no longer met our needs, and we stopped duplicating programs that existed in our community. Our students are now working in a sophisticated technological environment, an environment that that they will find when they go out to work for the Fortune 500 companies that surround our college.
The Advanced Technology Communication Center has been a powerful development in blending the academy with the business community. We have contracts with Chanel, 3M, Merck, and Lucent Technology, to name a few. Their employees will come to our facility and receive training via the technology, and in the same room two hours later we will have a communications class, an undergraduate credit class, talking about how to communicate in this new environment. And now in the same room we have 300 senior citizens learning Internet navigation through our Older and Wiser program. It’s beautiful that we’re helping people be closer to their families, and it is wonderful to observe how readily they embrace the new technology. We’re not a college in the community, we’re a true community college.
Corporate training in the Advanced Technology Communication Center community room.
CAUSE/EFFECT’s Campus Profile department regularly focuses on the information resources environment--information, technology, and services--of an EDUCAUSE member institution to promote a better understanding of how information resources are organized, managed, planned for, and used in colleges and universities of various sizes and types. This article was written by EDUCAUSE writer/reporter Shannon Burgert, based on a visit to Raritan Valley Community College.
