BC Hosts Conference on Online Services

Brooklyn College has long been a quiet leader within the CUNY system for the incomparable array of services the College offers online. But now the rest of CUNY is well aware that the Brooklyn College staff has created applications that will help other institutions meet student and faculty demands.

Last week, the College hosted Moving From Bricks to Bits: Delivering Effective Online Services in a College Environment. Mark Gold, assistant vice president for information technology services and chief technology officer, said that roughly 140 people from every CUNY campus, CUNY’s central office, and CUNY Computing attended the all-day conference. The conference, held in the conference center of the Student Center, featured an exhibit room where College staff members demonstrated the applications that have helped them better serve students.

Gold said that ITS is often approached by other CUNY colleges seeking to implement BC tools at their campuses.

"I just thought it would be a great idea to show what we’ve been doing," said Gold, in explaining how the conference came about. The conference was designed partly to help cut down on those visits and to allow other college staffers  to see at one time most all of the service applications the College has created. Those applications include everything from online advisement scheduling, to a program that allows students to vote in student government elections online from any computer (which was first put into use last spring and helped significantly increase voter turnout), to a virtual Magner Center that allows students to manage the career workshops they’d like to attend. All together, IT has not only helped the College provide better, more convenient, services to students but they’ve also helped streamline many back-office functions for employees.

Gold said that Brooklyn College is the only institution within CUNY that has a full-featured Web services portal, though some colleges are starting to look into developing one. Most of the applications on display at the conference work within the College’s portal. Some of the other colleges have some applications that are similar to those at the College, but none have put together such a comprehensive array of services.

Varun Sehgal, assistant vice president of information technology at Hostos Community College said that his institution has some similar stand-alone applications, "but we’d like to pull them all together into a one-stop system the way that Brooklyn College has." He brought only one of his IT assistants to the conference with him but he said he’d like to bring back more "foot soldiers from the various departments" to talk to Brooklyn College staff members because he was impressed with the buy-in Brooklyn has garnered amongst faculty and staff members.

Arthur Downing, the chief information officer at Baruch College, said that he was impressed by the Brooklyn College staff. "The staff seems just as happy as the users – or the students – and I find that part amazing," he said.

During an after-lunch session, Gold told attendees that the BC community has embraced the many online services because of the College’s approach to designing new applications. "When we design these tools, we try to make sure that we are meeting the needs of the customers and the service offices and communicate the benefits,” he told the group.

Gold explained that Brooklyn College has been able to be so comprehensive because of tremendous support from the administration and because he has a very hard-working and knowledgeable staff. "We set out to use technology to improve customer service and make the College more efficient.  It became easier and more productive as we became more proficient at it and our customers embraced the advantages," he explained.

He said he wasn’t sure if the College would repeat the conference but he said that if another one occurs, he’d like to have all CUNY campuses participate to show off some of the applications they’ve designed. (CUNY currently does sponsor an academic-focused IT conference but not one that showcases applications that can help aid student services.)

"All of the CUNY campuses have similar needs," says Gold. "It just makes sense that we share what we’re doing."