CCC Confer Facilitates Teaching, Learning, and Meeting for 110 Campuses with Real-time Interactive Web Conferencing
By Blaine Morrow, Director, CCC Confer
The largest higher education system in the world, the California Community College System provides educational, vocational, and transfer programs to more than 2.7 million students on 110 campuses. At CCC Confer, our job is to be the collaboration resource for 93,000 faculty, staff, and administrators, providing anywhere, anytime web conferencing with the simplest available technology.
Implementing New Educational Technology
In 2006, we conducted an extensive evaluation and competitive bid process to select a Web conferencing vendor, using close to 20 different points as a rubric for grading the products. Our goals for the project included expanding our user community, increasing the use of online learning by full-time faculty, conducting joint webinars and conferences, and integrating seamlessly into the CCC Confer portal.
While several companies did very well and were competitively priced, we felt Elluminate offered more unique tools that contributed directly to instruction. In the end, we selected Elluminate Live! for its high-quality participant experience, ease of use, ADA compliance, session archiving, and audio capabilities that include VoIP as well as support for a phone bridge and teleconferencing.
Investing in Technology that Works
When we make an education technology decision for an entire system, we almost never know whether it’s going to work. This turned out to be one technology investment that does. It saves an incredible amount of money and time, it’s used, and it grows like March Madness. No one college could experience the same benefit doing it alone.
This project is one of the good educational technology stories, and there aren’t many of them. Usually, the results are things you can’t measure. Here we can say people are meeting, are happy, are conducting classes, and keep coming back. This is an investment that makes sense. If you are a college it’s a great investment. If you are a system of colleges, this is a tremendous investment. It’s the one to make.
