BGSU Information Technology Services (ITS) manages a variety of technical and business process projects that support BGSU academic, physical, and digital operations, as well as specific portfolios of strategic objectives defined by Vice Presidents/Provosts and C-level staff across campus. Using Project Management Institute’s (PMI) guide to best practices, this process includes sourcing and aligning project requests to University strategic objectives through various levels of governance, providing project management and resourcing guidance to approved initiatives, delivering appropriate levels of communication throughout the project and technical lifecycles, and providing ongoing support of technical services and digital applications. ITS is built around delivering new, and maintaining existing, technologies in the classroom, in the field and throughout administrative offices by defining objectives and projects, facilitating governance and executive prioritization of initiatives and guiding each approved project to successful completion using industry standard methodologies. 

Experiential Learning Management Tool

Managing students’ experiential learning has produced a variety of management methodologies as diverse as the programs offered at Bowling Green State University. Until now, different departments have used anything ranging from traditional paper to cloud-based electronic forms. Regardless of their practices, each academic department on campus that offers an internship, practicum, or co-op was required to provide reporting data to the Career Center in addition to keeping their own records. This mandatory state reporting has increased the administrative overhead for college staff. Thus, a custom solution was necessary to alleviate the burden.

Example of a approval workflow

Using OnBase, ITS has created a flexible, customizable framework for programs which use a student-driven procedure to initiate experiential learning (EL) courses. Program-driven courses will also benefit from an improved data-reporting infrastructure. This is the largest development we have ever done in OnBase, consisting of:

• Common Online Form – Customizable webform that can be used University-wide for students to enroll in experiential learning courses.
• CSS Interface – Increase the amount of data directly imported into the experiential learning tools.
• Course Templates – OnBase functionality to allow repetitive data entry via pre-configured templates.
• Approval Workflow – Customizable, multi-step workflow for EL course registration.
• Reporting Integration – Data from the approval workflow will automatically populate the Career Center EL database.

Example of a customizable online form

No matter what a program’s current process may be, they will be able to benefit from all or parts of this new solution. With data flowing directly from EL management into reporting, requirements like NC-SARA will be faster, less time-consuming, and more accurate. The Career Center plans to roll out training and documentation for the new tools over the coming months with complete adoption for the fall experiential learning cycle.