IMS Global Learning Consortium

2010 Learning Impact Awards

Categories: Course and Content Management,

Student Information System, PortalProduct: CAMS EnterpriseDeveloper: Three Rivers Systems, Inc.Implementer: Covenant Theological Seminary

Three Rivers Systems is a leading provider of fully integrated, Web-native administrative solutions for higher education. CAMS Enterprise is its flagship product:

Three Rivers Systems has been serving higher education exclusively since 1985. With a worldwide client-base, the company is a trusted partner of public and private institutions: community colleges, baccalaureate, liberal arts, masters, doctoral, medical, law, business, theological, engineering and other special-focus colleges.

CAMS Enterprise’s unique academic ERP solution is the next generation of higher education management systems. By uniting administrative (SIS) and instructional systems (CMS) in one database with one set of shared code, CAMS offers institutions the only truly integrated system for managing the entire student lifecycle.

About Three Rivers Systems

Covenant Theological Seminary is the denominational seminary of the Presbyterian Church in America. Its purpose is to train leaders for work in the church and the world: Covenant implemented CAMS Enterprise in 2001 and has steadily adopted new features and functionality to streamline its administrative processes.

A built-in Course Management System in CAMS Enterprise was developed as a partnership between Covenant Seminary and Three Rivers Systems in 2005. It was designed to eliminate administrative overhead for online courses and to be easy and intuitive to use.

About Covenant Seminary

Course Management is embedded in CAMS Enterprise, a complete administrative system for colleges and universities replacing multiple stand-alone applications with one integrated solution. CAMS helps institutions of all sizes provide information and services 24/7 and manage the entire student lifecycle.

Built-in Course Management

Portals & Course Management

Course documents. Interactive communications

tools. Online testing. Grade books and grades. Course evaluations. Online registration.

Financial aid. Payments. Document tracking. Advising. Transcripts. Course rosters. And more.

Through the integrated portals, students and faculty access Course Management and everything else they need including:

Access

CAMS Portals and CMS are:

100% Web-native applications. OS and browser independent. Accessible 24/7 from any device

with a browser: Section 8 compliant, enabling

access to screen readers — like JAWS — and other assistive technology for users.

Affordability

Course Management is built into CAMS Enterprise, making it an exceptionally low-cost system and saving countless hours of faculty and staff time because:

The CMS is available to all clients at no additional charge.

The system-level integration eliminates all “housekeeping” work for managing online courses, eliminating the need to create course shells, add/drop students from the class, maintain rosters, maintain e-mail lists, enter grades manually, or even conduct paper-and-pencil course evaluations.

Affordability

CAMS Enterprise offers truly exceptional on-going cost savings to institutions (often 50-75% reductions) because:

As a 100% server-based system with low overhead / maintenance costs, it reduces direct costs of operation and a wide variety of system maintenance and related costs like consulting and printing.

Affordability

CAMS Enterprise is a fully integrated solution including functionality to replace six to eight stand-alone systems, thus eliminating the cost of maintaining separate systems.

CAMS Enterprise is licensed for unlimited institution-wide use, with no fees, no per-seat license cost and no penalty for growth.

Quality

CAMS Enterprise CMS provides all tools instructors need to communicate clearly with students and track learning outcomes:

Faculty can easily share course announcements, course information, assignments and any type of electronic file.

Instructors set goals for each class in an online syllabus, embedding them in an electronic grade book as assignments.

Quality

CAMS Forum Portal provides rich tools for asynchronous and synchronous interaction and collaboration, enabling instructors to work with students throughout the course to maximize understanding and achievement.

Quality

CAMS online testing component gives instructors the tools to conduct both formative and summative assessments of student learning because:Instructors can use regular class surveys and online quizzes to engage in simple classroom assessment techniques. Course Management includes comprehensive and highly configurable grading, testing, surveys, quizzes, course evaluation tools, and more.

It frees teacher time for instruction and attention to students by minimizing system maintenance and set-up time for professors, and approaches student learning from the design perspective of placing pedagogical tools in the hands of instructors so they can best manage the learning process.

Quality

CAMS built-in class communication system allows faculty to send a student, a class, all students in all classes or any subgroup materials to help communicate or clarify requirements:

No need to build a mailing list from scratch or keep it updated. System supports all standard file formats (pdf, doc, ppt, mp3 and more). Can easily distribute all course information, hyperlinks, textbook lists,

announcements or documents. Course content can be time released. Includes complete assessment tools.

Quality

CAMS Course Management simplifies the process of running online classes because:

Students can upload assignments directly to the course “drop-box,” and faculty can return commented papers while preserving the integrity of the original submission.

Its unique preview functionality lets faculty see what their students will see.

Online testing automates the administration and marking on tests, freeing class time for in-depth engagement.

Instructional Benefits

CAMS Course Management puts faculty in control of assessments because:

It creates online tests with unlimited sections and unlimited questions. Instructors can make tests available for a specified time frame only and

automatically lock if student exceeds the time limit. Its easy-to-use copy functions allow faculty to copy previous tests to new

tests, and then modify them. It supports automatic grading of objective test items, and automatic

recording of tests in grade book.

Administrative Benefits

CAMS CMS offers many administrative benefits:

It eliminates the need to create course shells. Course areas are automatically created by the system

with a default layout, menus and control panel. Students are automatically added to courses and rosters

are always up-to-date and based on the latest registration information.

Administrative Benefits

Instructors and teaching assistants are automatically assigned, with faculty controlling TA access permissions for each course.

Support for multiple instructors and assistants for team teaching.

Student records and information automatically created and updated.

Faculty can view up-to-date student photos and directory information.

Support for faculty defined student small groups in each course.

Administrative Benefits

Grade submission through the faculty portal makes it simple to calculate final grades and submit them to the registrar from anywhere.

System automatically collects course evaluations from students as they check their final grades in the portal, ensuring participating and saving hours of staff time.

Faculty can copy courses (along with the course contents) within a term or from term to term, greatly simplifying the set-up of multiple sections or regularly offered classes.

Adoption

During the past 25 years, CAMS Enterprise has been widely adopted by institutions

worldwide:

Three Rivers Systems has been exclusively serving institutions of higher education since 1985. CAMS was developed just for the higher education environment.

Since the CAMS Course Management capabilities are fully integrated within the system, it is widely used to replace both the SIS and standalone CMS’s, eliminating the administrative overhead associated with setting-up users and classes in separate systems.

Adoption

Built on a foundation of Microsoft technology, CAMS Enterprise has been designed to operate reliably 24/7, and to scale as needed to support institutional growth. CAMS Enterprise provides unmatched institution-wide integration:

Course Management has been created to be intuitive to learn and use, making it easy to bring faculty and students up to speed on the system and rollout new classes, programs and entire institutions.

Adoption

CAMS Enterprise scales successfully for any sized institution. Many clients operate multi-branch campuses with students, faculty and administrators scattered around the globe:

As a 100% Web-based system built on SQL and Microsoft technologies that are more than capable of handling high transaction volume and heavy usage, CAMS supports institutions that operate statewide, countrywide, or worldwide. Fully Web-native, the system can be accessed from anywhere in the world with a simple browser.

CAMS Enterprise has been deployed by institutions serving from a few hundred students to more than 30,000. CAMS tightly integrated architecture is unmatched in the industry, making it the largest deployment of a fully integrated administrative and academic system.

Accountability

CAMS Enterprise helps institutions create accountability by bringing together all of an institution’s data (administrative and academic) in one system:

With CAMS Enterprise’s single database and easy-to-use reporting, institutions have a unique tool that unifies all their data in a real-time business intelligence system they can use to identify trends and plan.

CAMS Enterprise helps institutions improve their accountability structures, student retention and graduation rates by making a completely integrated dataset accessible to administrators so they can use a variety of institutional indicators to proactively identify students who are at risk of failing and allocate resources to prevent it.

Accountability

CAMS Enterprise’s unique convergence of SIS and CMS enables college administrators to see the big picture by bringing all student data together in one place.

Information collected throughout the students’ time at the institution (like entrance exam scores, first person in the family to attend college, attendance, grades on assignments, total course load) is available to help inform decision-makers.

Accountability

CAMS’ easy-to-use point-and-click reporting tools make it simple for authorized user to run reports or access data in any area of the system or system-wide. All data is available in real-time and without duplication.

Interoperability

CAMS Enterprise’s architecture is built on sharing and lends itself to making data accessible because:

It is entirely standards-based and built with modern Web-native technology (without proprietary or legacy components), ensuring maximum interoperability

It uses standard import/export formats and protocols (like SCORM and XML) to move data into or out of the system easily.

Interoperability

CAMS’ interoperability is unique and unmatched because:

It operates on a single, relational, normalized SQL Server database and is a Web-native application built with standard Web application protocols.

It is easily able to share content or services through processes ranging from a simple import/export to a Web service.

It eliminates the need to piece together a system from various applications.

It offers flexible built-in integrations to dozens of products ranging from accounting systems and campus ID cards, to scheduling software and more.

Its open data structure enables new integrations to be quickly built and rolled-out.

Innovation

CAMS Enterprise academic ERP solution is unique in the industry and represents the next generation of higher education administrative systems because:

It unites administrative (SIS) and instructional systems (CMS) in one database, with one set of shared code for seamless integration.

Its deep-level integration eliminates the wasteful practice of creating and maintaining patchwork integration points between multiple applications from various vendors.

Conclusion

CAMS Enterprise breaks new ground by fully integrating CM with a student information system to make the administration of online courses quick and easy while providing students with immediate access to courses when they register.

CAMS Enterprise is the only truly integrated, entirely Web-native higher education management solution that uses one set of shared code and one database to provide a complete academic Enterprise Resource Planning — ERP — solution that is easy to learn, use and maintain.

Conclusion

Course Management offers all the functionality needed for synchronous or asynchronous learning including online testing, shared video lectures, electronic document exchange, grade book, automatic course evaluations and much more.

CAMS Enterprise provides unlimited Web-based access to students, faculty, and staff, making all aspects of student administration, including comprehensive online course delivery, fully accessible in real-time from any Web-browser.