Quickly giving students access to course apps and content is a huge challenge for college and university IT teams. Until now.
At EDUCAUSE this week, VMware announced a new integration between the VMware Secure Digital Backpack for Education, powered by VMware Workspace ONE, and Colleague, Ellucian’s widely-adopted student information system (SIS).
This integration is another proof-point showcasing VMware’s continued commitment to limitless learning.
The new Ellucian Connector from VMware is game-changing for institutions looking to deliver digital learning environments to students for two reasons:
- In near real-time, students can now access a single dynamic personalized learning workspace with all the apps and resources they need on any device. Their learning management system (LMS), helpful web pages, class-related documents and any application they need are at their fingertips.
- IT staff can spend less time on system administration and more time being a partner to faculty and staff in the learning experience.
“As an open enrollment environment with more than 30,000 students pursuing traditional education, continuing education and professional development across more than 70 study areas, Schoolcraft College operates in one of the most diverse and dynamic learning environments,” said Patrick Turner, vice president and Chief Information Officer, Schoolcraft College, in the press release. “This new solution for Ellucian from VMware will help us deliver a secure and consumer-simple experience to our students while streamlining our costs.”
From Complex & Time-Consuming to Automated & Near-Instantaneous Entitlements
For some time now, traditional academic institutions have been challenged to enhance support for more diverse student populations, including online students. VMware’s Ellucian Connector provides maximum flexibility, allowing schools to support:
- The widest range of applications, from web-based and SaaS to cloud-native and mobile-native apps.
- For the widest variety of student populations, including those enrolled on campus and online.
Entitlements can be automatically and quickly added or removed remotely throughout a student’s academic career. After students enroll in a class, they receive everything in their workspace without having to step foot on campus. Should a student drop the class, those same resources are quickly removed from that individual’s workspace. And our consumer simple, enterprise secure solution enables the same process to happen course after course, year after year, until graduation.
Technically, this means VMware syncs Ellucian class rostering information, maps it back to Active Directory (AD) groups and keeps it in sync as course enrollments change. That means change in the SIS is automatically reflected in AD groups, which is then reflected in Workspace ONE.
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VMware in Higher Education
Nearly every academic institution today looks for ways to increase education accessibility, affordability and quality, while personalizing the resources shared with individual students. They want to attract and retain students and faculty, and we can help.
Our Secure Digital Backpack moves with students, faculty and staff throughout their day across their many devices. This innovative digital workspace unifies identity, application, desktop and mobile device management to enable limitless learning. Our education solutions f support new models of teaching and learning. They also provide seamless mobile access, strengthen and simplify IT infrastructure and protect against threats that are evolving in both number and complexity.
Today, we are very happy to be teaming with Ellucian in an effort to further student success, while improving the operational efficiency of IT organizations in higher education institutions across the world.
If your institution uses the Ellucian SIS, get in touch. We look forward to working with you!
