EDUCATION CASE STUDY:

National Student Exchange

ORGANIZATION: National Student Exchange ( www.nse.org )

BUSINESS DESCRIPTION: The National Student Exchange is a consortium of colleges and universities in the United States, its territories, and Canada designed to facilitate exchange opportunities for students among its member campuses. Founded in 1968 as a not-for-profit education association, NSE has established a reputation for quality service, and has placed more than 70,000 students. The program is a model for sharing of academic resources among a nationwide network of colleges and universities.

PROBLEMS: NSE had a process of placing students nationally that involves approximately 6,180 people and uses 28,850 pieces of paper in just 2 days. Post-placement paper processing could take a week or more. All papers involved had to be manually checked for accuracy. All these pieces of paper eventually had to be entered into the computer and filed for reference. They needed to automate this process so that errors, hassle, and time spent would be minimized or eliminated.

SOLUTIONS:

• Built a placement engine capable of condensing a 3 week batch of activities into 2 days.
• Eliminated the need for paper in the process.
• Cut costs by 40% across the board.
• Created automated reporting tools that produce statistics and other context specific content on the Intranet (Coordinator Center) that we built for them.
• Built in scalability so that the process will grow along with the organization. New modules can be installed based upon future requirements.

TECHNOLOGY NOTES: This project uses:

• Active Server Pages (ASP) for all web pages.
• Microsoft Access as a content storage backend.
• TyCoMa content management tools.
• Macromedia Flash for all animated site components.