Ellucian

Jeff Ray has more than three decades of experience in the technology space and has served in executive leadership roles at various prominent software companies such as IBM, VentyxDS and SolidWorks Corp. Although his career was growing leaps and bounds, he never lost his penchant for the education arena and longed to offer schools/colleges a way to enhance their potential. “I have been interested in this industry owing to my core passion to help educators and administrators assist students learn and it’s a lifelong commitment that I made,” says Ray. This ultimately led him to found Ellucian—a pioneering company providing enterprise-class SIS solutions and services that remove information barriers, helping higher education institutions achieve student success. “Through Ellucian, we want to channel that passion for education and learning into making sure that we’re adopting new tools and technologies that remove any barriers that come between educations,” remarks Ray, the President and CEO of the company. Today, he leads a skilled team of more than 3,000 higher education technology professionals at Ellucian, serving 2,400 institutions and 18 million students in 40 countries around the globe.

"There is so much more that we can do to work with our customers to make technology a transformative force in driving the evolution of higher education"

Built on the latest technologies, Ellucian’s wide range of products is focused on enhancing every aspect of the modern connected campus, fulfilling students’ and faculty’s expectations. For instance, St. Peter’s University, located in Jersey City, NJ wanted to establish an online BA/BS in business to reach out to adult learners and for students who were unable to attend traditional college courses. “What we wanted to do was to put the entire program online,” says Elizabeth Kane, Dean of St. Peter’s School of Professional and Continuing Studies. “We needed something to differentiate the program from all the others available.” By partnering with Ellucian’s Academic and Grant Services’ instructional design team, the University developed an attractive online degree program that helped in retaining their high academic standards.

Cutting Edge Solution

Ellucian offers three core student information products—Banner Student, Colleague Student, and PowerCampus Student. Today’s students have high expectations for services and performance. Higher education leaders around the world are thinking more creatively about how their people, processes, and technology can work together more efficiently to meet and exceed those expectations. This work has never been more critical, or more challenging. Banner, by Ellucian is designed to solve challenges specific to higher education and help clients thrive.

Ellucian’s Banner tackles the changing needs of students— from admissions, registration, and curriculum management to advising and assessment, aiding institutes in delivering enterprise-class experiences that help in keeping students engaged and on track for success. The robust solution provides dynamic, self-service access to the application, registration, and financial aid services, and helps faculty and advisors manage courses and give more personalized advice, ultimately strengthening student teacher relationship. Banner is a comprehensive student information system that delivers a full range of functions from strategic management to records processing.

Our solutions are ready for the cloud, can scale up or down efficiently and are flexible enough to meet customer specific requirements

With more than 1,400 customers around the globe, Banner is one of the world’s leading higher education ERP systems providing a central repository for an institute’s current student information. The solution provides easier access to information from any device and support for more flexible class schedules and diverse credentialing processes, ultimately aiding institutes to serve new student populations effectively. It also helps in streamlining operations so that the institute can focus on offering the services that help students graduate on time. Banner comes with an intuitive registration tool that helps students and advisors to plan and monitor progress toward academic goals.

Ellucian has designed Banner to simplify daily processes so institutes can offer students and staff the support they need to succeed. Banner’s solid foundation has stood the test of time supporting multiple learning modes which need not be changed in order to evolve owing to its adaptive and flexible feature. It’s the heart of Ellucian’s extensibility approach. The company has created a more flexible technology on top of the leading higher education data model—one that can be configured easily to support the way users want to do business. Additionally, Ellucian Integration Hub and Ellucian Solution Manager ease application management and provide services and support to manage everything for customers. “Our solutions are ready for the cloud, can scale up or down efficiently and are flexible enough to meet customer specific requirements. Even better, they are all quick and easy to download and implement. These attributes are critical to ensuring clients make the most of their existing resources,” adds Ray.

The American University of Kuwait (AUK) has been breaking new ground since its partnership with Ellucian. Forming the core of AUK’s leading-edge technology infrastructure is Banner by Ellucian, the Ellucian Luminis Platform, and Ellucian Mobile. The company worked closely with the staff at AUK to bring up Banner, at the same time the university building was being constructed. A rapid implementation made it possible for the university to offer the necessary administrative processes when it first opened. As the needs of AUK and its students evolved, the institution has been able to bring on new functionality and integrate third-party software into the scalable and extensible Banner platform.

Today, students, faculty, and administrators can access all the resources they need through the university’s Luminis portal. They can also execute many of their administrative processes through self-service applications.

Superior Additions for the Future

Ellucian provides technology solutions and services that remove barriers and help higher education institutions achieve student success. Today, Ellucian serves 2,400 institutions and 18 million students in 40 countries around the globe, leveraging its experience of more than four decades in the higher education space. PowerCampus Student—one of Ellucian’s offerings—delivers student-centered solutions that can help institutes deliver superior student services and meet aggressive enrollment goals. With PowerCampus Student, the recruiting and admissions staff can create effective admission campaigns; target and recruit prime prospective students, and manage more tailored communications with them throughout the admission process.

Ellucian also crafted a business curriculum using gamification including gameful-learning that successfully made the online courses exciting. Scoring and rewarding students as they progressed resulted in a more positive and self-motivated learning experience.

For students, Ellucian offers interconnected software and services designed to access registration and financial aid. Ellucian’s integrated solutions connect administrative systems with Learning Management Systems (LMS), making it easier to manage online course content and reuse course materials. Using the company’s robust set of constituent relationship management solutions, institutes establish and cultivate relationships throughout the student lifecycle and beyond. These solutions enable organizations to view comprehensive details of interactions over time and make faster and better decisions about strategies with integrated and consistent data for improved education facilities. Further, Ellucian Brainstorm is a Competency-based Education (CBE) solution that offers a personalized experience for students.

With a zeal for empowering institutions to extend, configure, and add technologies as campuses evolve— without sacrificing existing investments, the company has designed the Ellucian Extensible Ecosystem (XE). Ellucian XE is a technology strategy developed to protect institutions’ investments and help them expand or adopt solutions as priorities shift. Ellucian XE delivers a seamless experience to casual users and power users alike—whether they’re accessing applications via mobile, portal, or self-service interfaces.

With a positive outlook toward educating the world, Ellucian’s team believes in the power of collaboration, drawing on the collective insight of a global education community to help move education forward. In the days to come, the firm is evolving and all set to ensure that they leverage latest technologies to efficiently serve the higher education system. The company has introduced a number of innovative new software solutions, increased the investment in enhancing its enterprise platforms, and has established itself as a leader in the Cloud for higher education. “While Ellucian has achieved so much in the past years, I also believe there is so much more that we can do to work with our customers to make technology a transformative force in driving the evolution of higher education and making more students achieve their educational dreams,” concludes Ray.