Technology review: Educator by Ucompass.com(R)

Community College Enterprise, The, Fall 2003 by Callaghan, Patrick, Mirabito, Donna

New Educator faculty learn in one-on-one sessions and in refresher sessions. Feature enhancements require updates to faculty in meetings or through documentation. In a 90-minute online or on site orientation, students see how an actual Educator course looks from within the Educator course framework, making it an easy transition to an actual online course.

Limitations

There are no new "releases" of Educator, so it's always evolving. This has its good and bad points. It's good in that users always have a fresh product which is continually being improved. In fact, UCompass welcomes ideas from its users. Many Walsh users' ideas have been implemented as new features, sometimes within 24 hours.

The downside of the continuous evolution is a lack of timely documentation. Because system administrators need to get the word out to students and faculty quickly, they've frequently had to write their own documentation, and that often changes rapidly when features are expanded or fine-tuned. However, the lack of documentation is due to

growing pains in a company whose owner and CEO is also the inventor of the product. UCompass has recently hired someone to oversee documentation, so that should not be an issue in the future. One other small thing: when new features have been rolled out, users have encountered minor inconsistencies in nomenclature or in things such as submit buttons appearing on different sides in different functions. However, these are slated for fixes in 2004, according to Ed Mansouri.

Unexpected results

A positive unexpected result would certainly be the recommendation by the Michigan Community College Virtual Learning Consortium (MCCVLC) that Educator be the Michigan community college vendor of choice for online course delivery as a result of Walsh's demonstrating Educator at various articulation agreements. As the trainers of choice to teach Educator to Michigan community colleges, Walsh staff have so far conducted training at Mid Michigan, Henry Ford, St. Clair County, Macomb, Jackson, and Kalamazoo Valley community colleges.

Conclusion

Ucompass makes its clients feel their working relationship is special. They listen, respond, and deliver. For the client it's comforting to have a close professional relationship with an organization that understands the users' needs.

Reviewed by

Patrick Callaghan

Donna Mirabito

Dr. Callaghan is Strategic Director of the Office of Online Learning at Walsh College in Troy, Michigan.

Ms. Mirabito is online comunications coordinator for the Office of Online Learning at Walsh College in Troy, Michigan.