Community & Executive Education (C&EE)IT Outcomes 2024
UMass Boston is in the process of bringing continuing education courses back to campus, after years without them following the end of CAPS. In particular, the university is developing a community and executive education program that will be open to anyone looking for non-credit learning opportunities. According to Assistant Provost, Community and Executive Education Tina Chang, the goal is to have a separate academic unit that offers these continuing education courses, offering things such as certificates and micro credentials upon course completion.
This time, the school is doing so in a way that will modernize the experience of finding, enrolling for, and even paying for classes—making everything self-service and increasing efficiency. With UMass Boston’s shift to Canvas from Blackboard, a plethora of new options became available to the university. One such option was Canvas Catalog, described by the company as “a simple, modern, elegant course catalog and a branded marketplace for all of your institution’s course offerings.” The platform will allow UMass Boston to centralize the continuing education experience, in the process creating a self-service model that will replace the more laborious procedures of the past that involved multiple campus offices and required much manual labor.
According to Chang, the previous model used on campus required the registrar’s office to create student accounts and enroll students, another office to create and distribute billing, and more. It also required students to remember to pay their bills, and staff to chase after those who did not do so in a timely fashion. None of these tasks apply now that Canvas Catalog is in the picture. Students can now browse the course catalog, enroll themselves, and pay for a course upon checkout. “This reduces the redundancy and manual efforts of administrative staff,” explains project manager Sheri Ryder, who highlights the self-enrollment and checkout functions as key aspects in reducing administrative work. Canvas Catalog basically turns the process into something reminiscent of an Amazon shopping experience, which people have come to expect in all areas in today’s modern age.
UMass Boston has already piloted the credentialing piece, offering a few continuing education courses in summer 2024, such as a micro-credential in offshore wind and a program in cancer genomics. However, work is still being done to set up Canvas Catalog and an official launch of the Community and Executive Education program is currently slated for spring 2025. While Canvas does a lot of the heavy lifting, there is still work to be done to get it all set up. “To be able to host those programs, we need to build out the operational structure to support those programs,” says Chang. For instance, Associate Chief Information Office Apurva Mehta says the university’s web services team is personalizing and branding the template provided by Canvas, while the IT Department is also working on the credentialing and payment pieces of the puzzle.
The plan is for all community and executive education programs to be hosted in the catalog, which will make UMass Boston competitive with other area schools, per Mehta. The catalog will be public facing, and therefore browsable by anyone looking for potential learning opportunities, with the hope that the university can attract new students who may not have previously considered UMass Boston for continuing education. “It helps the university in the sense that we are now offering a service not just for our undergraduate or graduate students. These are offerings for anyone that wants to take a course,” says Mehta. “We are tapping a new market we have not had access to.”