The Experience

Northampton Community College Joins the Syllabus Geeks to Launch Concourse Lite

Early adopters save time and resources while increasing retention

Troy, NY, April 20, 2011 – Intellidemia, Inc. formally announced their partnership with Northampton Community College (NCC) in launching Concourse Lite, an introductory syllabus management solution. As a college that strives for accessibility, with courses available at multiple locations, day, evening, and on weekends and online, NCC couldn't wait to abandon their time consuming syllabus workflow and auditing processes for a simpler, more efficient online solution that would position its school as a model of efficiency and collaboration. Concourse Lite is built off the same great fully-featured Concourse platform, but at a fraction of the complexity, manpower, and cost.

The announcement at the Villanova University Technology Expo showcased how NCC and Intellidemia plan to address the problems colleges face in the era of new legislation, stricter accreditation standards, and the requirement to be more efficient on tighter budgets. As a result, many schools are looking to take their first steps toward manage syllabi better by getting them online and in one place fast.

NCC's Online Learning department offers 150 courses across 20 degree and certificate programs to over 4,000 online students. The newly appointed Director of Online Learning and Instructional Technology, Dr. Doreen Fisher, along with the online learning team, determined they needed to streamline the syllabus collection, audit, and accreditation process. This included having to pull every syllabus in their learning management system to review before classes start each semester. Fisher reached out to the syllabus geeks at Intellidemia after learning that their syllabus management tool would organize and centralize their existing syllabi and help NCC establish a simple protocol for sharing and auditing future syllabi.

"We were looking for a tool that would save the online department time and money through having a macro-view of syllabi so we can audit courses in a less cumbersome and time consuming way," stated Fisher. "Eliminating costly manual processes with Concourse Lite, a central syllabus repository was without a doubt, the solution for achieving our goals."

Concourse Lite was a project kicked off in the fall of 2010 in response to an increasing number of schools looking for a commercially available solution to get syllabi organized and online without the overhead of infrastructure, maintenance, or programming. Concourse Lite provides schools with a technology that is simple, fast, and uses their already existing syllabi. The need for an introductory syllabus tool was reinforced by Texas House Bill 2504, the first education legislation of its kind that mandates syllabi be online and accessible by the public.

"Everything we've been seeing in higher ed, whether by institute or legislative mandate, indicates that colleges need a simple solution for better managing syllabi by getting them in one place, online, " stated Judd Rattner, CEO of Intellidemia. "We've developed a tool that specifically addresses the demands of academic and technology administrators while incorporating benefits for instructors and students."

Northampton Community College approached Intellidemia after learning of their new "lite" syllabus management platform. After a 30 minute training and demo, it was clear to Fisher that it was going to be easy to approval for the adoption and implementation of Concourse Lite at NCC. The online learning department determined that Concourse Lite would help distribute administrative duties and lighten the load for everyone by putting faculty back in the driver's seat. By allowing faculty members to upload their syllabi to a single location, where they can be accessed by students and administrators, Concourse Lite alleviates the burden managing syllabi without sacrificing quality.

"Concourse Lite provides us with a central online syllabus repository with the capability to bring our 10 step, 80+ hour catalog and audit process down to five steps that take no more than a few hours of time," said Online Learning Assistant, Dawn Dzienis.

The Online Learning Department at NCC plans to transition the upcoming adjunct and fulltime faculty members to Concourse for the first summer session, starting with the two largest programs at NCC, early childhood education and English. Concourse Lite will be the central platform to collect, store access, audit, and analyze syllabi.

"Concourse Lite addresses a number of the challenges in our current online learning syllabus management process such as improving retention, advising, and archiving, but the chief reason for adopting this tool was for administrative efficiency, " stated Fisher. "We also see great potential deploying Concourse Lite across the entire institution so we increase collaboration between online and face-to-face classrooms by introducing faculty to an easy and effortless was to get online."

When syllabi are in a central location, they can be accessed anytime, anywhere, and be utilized in ways that benefit everyone in the academic community. Specifically, Concourse Lite, a turn-key solution that takes advantage of an institution's existing syllabi and processes, allowing faculty to create syllabi in the format they're used to and upload their syllabi to one place where they can be searched by student, easily audited by accreditors, and assessed by division administrators.

"The timing could not have been better. Northampton needed to organize their syllabi and alleviate the faculty and staff from an inefficient process," said Judd Rattner, CEO of Intellidemia. "Northampton was seeking a solution to streamline workflow and infrastructure on an increasingly limited budget, which is precisely why we developed Concourse Lite."

To learn more about Concourse Lite, visit: www.intellidemia.com. And explore the flexibility and convenience of online education at Northampton Community College, www.northampton.edu/online.

About Northampton Community College

Northampton Community College is one of the fastest growing community colleges in Pennsylvania, serving more than 16,000 students each year in degree and certificate programs, and an additional 21,000 community residents in workforce training, adult literacy or personal enrichment classes. The College offers more than 100 majors in allied health and sciences, business and technology, education and humanities and social sciences. Its student body is among the most diverse in the region in terms of academic interests, age and ethnicity. The college's alumni include a four-time Pulitzer Prize winner, an Oscar recipient, and thousands of nurses, teachers, business people, scientists, artists, chefs, emergency services personnel, dental hygienists, funeral home directors, doctors, lawyers, and community leaders and volunteers.

About Intellidemia

Intellidemia™, the "syllabus geeks" of ed technology, works with schools to streamline workflow and enhance collaboration with smart, bleeding-edge solutions that address accreditation, compliance, and retention. As the experts in syllabus management, Intellidemia supports higher education with Concourse, an easy-to-use platform that improves student performance, faculty productivity, and administrative efficiency by getting syllabi online fast, making it easy to organize, share, and analyze course information. Founded in 2007 and headquartered in Troy, NY, Intellidemia maintains the belief in developing technology that will be valuable to the entire academic community. For more information, visit www.intellidemia.com or call 518.444.2060. For more information, visit www.intellidemia.com or call 518.444.2060.

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