Teditor

TEDitor

A Nomination for the Innovation of the Year Program, 2005

An Executive Summary of the Innovation

TEDitor helps the Training and Employee Development Center succeed as a training center for four Maricopa campuses and as a facilitator of districtwide events by saving time and effort in scheduling, registration, and web publishing, as well as providing new services such as automated evaluation processing and followup communications.

A Description of the Innovation

The Training and Employee Development (TED) Center provides comprehensive in-service training for faculty and staff at Glendale Community College, as well as Estrella Mountain Community College, Phoenix College, and Paradise Valley Community College. TED manages workshops and seminars that provide these employees with the wide variety of technology skills necessary to the tasks of teaching and learning. TED also facilitates events for the whole Maricopa County Community Colleges District, such as live satellite broadcasts on teaching and learning, and courses to promote personal and professional development.

These services amount to hundreds of scheduled sessions every year, and a series of registration, attendance, and evaluation processes to conduct for every one of those sessions. In short, it is a mammoth job for a training department staffed by only a handful of employees.

TEDitor was created by GCC web developers to streamline and improve the processes of scheduling, Web publishing, printing signage and rosters, and conducting short- and long-term evaluations for the hundreds of sessions TED manages every semester. With it, TED personnel can (using any web browser on any computer system from any Internet-connected location):

Enter training registrations for individuals.
Define, describe and catalog all training events.
Schedule training events by dates and times.
Preview lists of registrants and contact them via e-mail links.
Generate pre-formatted signage and rosters for specific events.
Obtain reports and statistics relating to past TED events.
Provide training transcripts/history for individuals and campuses.
Obtain graphed results of attendee evaluations from past TED events.

TEDitor also manages various automated functions to lighten the load on TED personnel, such as:

Automated display of upcoming events on the TED web site (http://www.gc.maricopa.edu/ted), along with links to descriptions of the training sessions.
Self-service registration via the web site, for users of any web browser on any computer with web access, from home or on campus.
Automatic delivery of on-line evaluation forms for attendants to fill out soon after the event, and a timed follow-up 30 days later.

TEDitor has a positive impact on the education of students according to the following criteria, relating to the Values, Mission, Vision, and Goals of Maricopa Community Colleges as follows:

· Quality (Value Education): TEDitor helps TED succeed in the crucial service of supporting faculty and staff as a learning community, impacting the quality of education and campus services for Maricopa students.

· Efficiency (Value Responsibility): TEDitor maximizes an extremely efficient design: multiple web-based applications that “talk” to a central database on a web server. This makes the program accessible everywhere, and capable of fulfilling multiple goals via print, e-mail, and dynamic online tools. There is no comparison between this kind of system and the typical database file or software product limited to certain workstations.

· Cost Effectiveness (Value Responsibility): TEDitor adds to the value of the institution through its support of the TED mission, yet works on the existing infrastructure of campus workstations and Internet access.

· Replication (Value Excellence): The design of TEDitor may be shared with any college in need of a similar system. Given compatible equipment and server software (e.g. ColdFusion), the program is portable to other campus systems. Various training personnel outside of GCC have evaluated TEDitor and have expressed their desire to implement the system for their use.

· Creativity (Value Excellence): TEDitor consists entirely of original programs created, maintained, and continuously improved upon by the GCC Innovation Center, customized for the specific needs and benefits of TED.

· Timeliness (Value Excellence): This innovation was implemented in November 2002, with new features added periodically ever since. Because it is a custom program created and owned by the college, timely improvements to meet specific needs are always a practical benefit of TEDitor.

· Learning (Value Students): TEDitor serves students by serving faculty and staff. Employees can look up training sessions and register for them online. The automated evaluation process, especially the timed 30-day follow-up, reaches beyond all previous methods to keep TED in fruitful communication with the employees the department serves. In this way, developments in TED always relate directly with the real learning environment of the college.

· Collaboration (Value Excellence): TEDitor is a project shared by TED and the Innovation Center, while its ongoing use pertains to the collaboration and cooperation between all departments and individuals across the District served by the training programs.

Team Members Who Developed the Innovation: