Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College Case Study

Nestled in the soaring North Carolina Blue Ridge Mountains, Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College (AB Tech) serves over 10,000 degree seeking students and over 14,000 continuing education students. It offers more than 120 degrees, diplomas, and certificates. Founded in 1959, AB Tech is one of the oldest North Carolina community colleges and serves the needs of Buncombe and Madison counties across five campuses.

With hundreds of classes and varied attendance reporting requirements to different agencies, AB Tech needed to make its attendance process both efficient and timely. The institution especially wanted to go electronic, but the state auditor requires paper reports that comply with a standard format. Because electronic forms might allow actions that did not comply with ever-changing policy, AB Tech wanted to be able to enforce policy as it evolved. For example, attendance records needed to be “locked” after the census date, so that class counts could be standardized.

And above all, while meeting the administrative requirements, an attendance solution had to be easy enough to support rather than distract the teaching needs of the faculty. AB Tech’s Registrar, Scott Douglas, approached Aptron’s Mel Soriano in 2011 with the idea of bringing the WebWizard Student Attendance Software to their campus. Scott was drawn to the ease of use, as he needed full faculty participation and involvement to ensure the quality of records maintained.

The WebWizard Student Attendance Software is browser-based, customizable, and adaptable to meet the local needs of the institution. It works with the native * Ellucian Colleague database and can also support the SQL version of Colleague. Scott particularly appreciated that the data resided beside not outside the Colleague system, as he could then use their existing reporting tools to generate additional, detailed reports. “We need data”, Scott said, “not just pictures of data. We want to generate reports that can supplement our institutional research.”

Not Just Pictures of Data

Scott appreciated the availability of experiences from other institutions. WebWizard Student Attendance Software was initially developed for Central Piedmont Community College, which had far more IT resources than his institution. His institutional and financial aid reporting were greatly assisted by the ability to see the data at its lowest level. And he liked the ability to use popular reporting tools to generate outputs.

Scott found the features to be well-received. The WebWizard Student Attendance Software takes the instructor’s point of view and consolidates the various classes associated to a course that they’re teaching. Each instructor has access to the courses they teach, including courses that are taught jointly with another instructor. Lab sessions sit on the same page as lectures so that you get the “big picture” of the student’s attendance. The existing Colleague screens show only one meeting session at a time which makes data entry more labor-intensive.

The WebWizard Student Attendance Software has become a part of the teaching experience at AB Tech during the past 8 years. As changes come and go with the institution and with the Colleague System, AB Tech has been able to use WebWizard to adapt the software to meet new needs and new workflows.