Industry Insights

Re: FCC/U.S. Dept. of Ed. Highlight Drive for K-12 E Textbooks

- Michael Mark, CEO

During a work day I probably receive and read a couple dozen pieces of information on emerging e-textbook technology, on-line learning, education, federal activities in education, etc., that are relevant to the products and services we provide our clients. On a good day we gain affirmation that our company and people are on the right path. But on a bad day the articles bring to mind the story of Chicken Little proclaiming that the sky is falling.

When I have the time, I’ll dig through the references and links in an article and often gain even more knowledge than I anticipated. And that experience is what brings me to today’s observations – an article with the subject line, FCC/U.S. Dept. of Ed. Highlight Drive for K-12 E-Textbooks. The headline was simple enough but there were an unusually large number of embedded links within the two paragraph e-mail.  more...

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Client Spotlight

Achieving Good Service for Faculty, Staff and Students Alike – Community College of Vermont

With 12 academic centers across the state of Vermont, an online program, 700+ faculty members per semester, many students attending multiple locations and many students purchasing course materials with financial aid, one could understand how textbook procurement at Community College of Vermont (CCV) could be chaotic.

But for CCV faculty, administrators and students, the system runs as smoothly as rain off a mortarboard, according to the unflappable Barbara Martin, the college’s dean of administration.

It wasn’t always that way.  more...

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Solution Highlight

How well do you know ED MAP? Each issue we’ll highlight another ED MAP product or service to keep you informed about what we’ve developed to meet changing industry needs. In this issue we’re highlighting ED MAP’s validation storefronts.

Online portal provides control for you and choice for your students

 - Sarah Riddlebarger, Vice President, Client Services

ED MAP isn’t just a bookstore. Our course materials solutions include online portal options that allow clients to control costs and maintain learning resource integrity while providing students with choice – an important factor in student satisfaction.

While it may seem counter-intuitive, control and choice can be harnessed jointly to achieve successful outcomes for both educational institution and student by leveraging business rules. Further, these rules can be applied to specific segments of your student population. more...

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ED MAP Calendar – Can We Talk?

  Webinar – Register Now

Save five staff FTEs! And other benefits of managing your learning resources

NEW DATE! June 7 @ 2 pm ET

Log into this Career College Central webinar for a discussion of best practices and lessons learned when integrating your SIS with your bookstore. Done properly, integrations save you time – and money – and can help reduce errors that often creep in when manipulating spreadsheets. But integrations should support more than pulling orders. ED MAP’s VP of Technology Kelby Kostival will join panelists Pinnacle Career College’s Jennifer Vidacak and Delta Career Education Corporation’s Steve Rossiter.

Click here to register for this timely discussion.

Conferences we're planning to attend:

April 25-26 – The Pacific Institute’s Best Practices & Great Ideas Conference,Kansas City, MO
We’re a Silver Sponsor and will have a booth there, too. Join Director of Sales Erin Carter. Be sure to catch her during our sponsored event!

April 25-27, 2012 – CampusInsight Conference, Orlando, FL
We’re a Gold Sponsor and will have a booth there, too. In addition, please join Vice President of Technology Kelby Kostival, Director of Product Management Sylvia Mickunas and IT Project Manager Jen Van Nostran with other panelists April 26 at an ED MAP-sponsored session, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Integrations.

June 20-22, 2012 – APSCU Annual Convention and Expo, Las Vegas, NV
In addition to the usual suspects, we’re sending a slew of senior staff to meet and greet you at Booth 651 and at a session we’re moderating, Going Digital: Lessons Learned.

July 25 & 26, 2012 – PAPSA Annual Conference, Pittsburgh, PA
We’ll be there at our exhibit booth, so please stop by to visit.

July 24-27, 2010 – FAPSC Annual Conference, Aventura, FL
Come visit us while we pull off the neat trick of being two places at the same time!

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What’s New @ ED MAP

Campus Technology has archived our sponsored March webinar, Digital Course Materials: Successful School-Wide Adoptions. Here's where you can download our white paper on the topic or review answers to the questions we weren’t able to answer during the webinar. Don’t miss these new resources of digital migration information.

Not resting on our laurels, we’ve been busy enhancing our systems integration capabilities. We’ve developed a standard process for integrating the CampusVue® SIS with our OpenVue® platform for bookstore services and are finalizing the option of writing back to the student ledger after the orders are fulfilled. Meanwhile, our open integrations, based on web services, are ready to be adopted by any client who’s ready to streamline their book ordering processes. Drop us a note at connect@edmap.com if you’d like to learn more about any of our integration services.

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Focus On: ED MAP’s Nontraditional Students

Many of the schools that ED MAP works with serve nontraditional students, a demographic that includes people older than 21 who often are attending classes while also working full- or part-time. Add in family or relationship obligations and you are looking at a very busy group of individuals. ED MAP understands their needs; over the past few years we have employed a number of nontraditional students, providing some tuition assistance. Currently, we have at least six employees continuing their education.

Human Resources Assistant Cecelia (Cea) Huston is pursuing her bachelor’s degree, majoring in human resources management, to “gain more knowledge in the field I enjoy doing.” Planning to graduate by the end of this year, she’s found her work both builds on her studies as well as helps inform them. A former call center representative, she notes that “going to school gave me insight into what students calling in were saying. I could relate to them and encourage them to stay with their studies despite the hard work.”

Account Associate Josh Eskey, who is pursuing an associate’s degree in accounting, has similar work/study experiences. He notes that he now “understands the reasoning behind why certain things have to be done in certain ways according to accounting principles. I can take on more tasks where need to work independently and, more so than when I started, I now have a deeper understanding of what I’m looking at.”

Account Manager Becky Bunting sees herself as a lifelong learner who is currently pursuing two bachelor’s degrees, one in business administration and one in human resources management. Like Cea, she draws upon her work, having used ED MAP as a case study for her HR courses. She also draws upon her studies at work. “I’m currently taking a course on decision making and problem solving that has helped me analyze decisions I have to make at work every day.”

Fellow Account Manager Robin Webb is interested in the public sector and how policy affects private and public enterprises. This self-described “policy junkie” recently matriculated in a master’s program in public administration and she also finds her works and studies complement one another. “I’m taking a financial management course. It relates to the analysis I’m expected to perform in my job, while it also strengthens my Excel abilities beyond what I had normally used.”

Account Associate Ashley Knippa is a student who also works in the client services department while taking classes to earn a bachelor’s degree in business administration, a degree that she feels will offer her “endless possibilities.” In the meantime, she notes that her writing classes help her to “draft more professional emails” and that working at ED MAP gives her “lots of real-life experiences that she can use when writing papers.”

While her fellow students are enrolled in schools closer to home, Account Associate Sally Blake is taking classes with ED MAP client Ashford University to earn her bachelor’s degree in business administration and hopes her degree will hope her “move up” within ED MAP. In the meantime, she notes that she’s been able to bring the content of all of her classes to work, becoming more effective on the job. Continuing a theme that all ED MAP working students observed, she adds that she must be very efficient at work as she doesn’t have time to take work home. “I have a two-year old, so I usually can’t start studying until about 9 p.m. in the evening, and then I’ll work until about 2 a.m.” She notes that Ashford now has a phone app that she finds very useful for studying.

These colleagues, as well as other ED MAP staff, certainly help explain ED MAP’s focus on customer service: we not only serve students, we are students. We have an insider’s understanding of the stresses —and joys – of being a student and are committed to doing our part to help students succeed!

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Want to review the Winter 2012 Newsletter? Click here!