Protecting Campuses Against Financial Improprieties (Press Release)
Software solutions to increase transparency and guard Student Activities and Student Government Associations (SGA’s) against fiscal misconduct
16 Nov 2007, Cambridge, MA – Colleges and universities across the United States and Canada are implementing software solutions to streamline processes, enforce policies, and archive information about budgetary and purchase decisions in student activities and student government. These software solutions provide the checks and balances to protect institutions against the types of financial improprieties that have struck a number of institutions recently.
CollegiateLink, a leading solutions provider to colleges and universities, has worked with student affairs departments for the past two years to implement and improve upon SA Finance, a technology product and workflow solution to track funding and purchase processes, comply to audit requirements, and improve financial reporting.
SA Finance, first implemented at “charter” client Wentworth Institute of Technology in 2004, has been recently updated as part of the SA LINK 2.1 software release this fall. SA Finance provides a combination of 1) an accounting system to track departmental allocations to student organizations and 2) a configurable financial requests function that builds an audit trail around the purchase process.
Other features of the SA LINK solution address the desire of higher education institutions to assess student engagement in programs, to facilitate student organization compliance with university policies, and to help students identify how to get involved outside the classroom. SA LINK is able to integrate with campus ERP and authentication systems to make it a secure and extendable technology platform.
A combination of accountability and convenience are major benefits identified by SA LINK institutions. “[We] enjoy the control both the students and staff / faculty advisors have over their budgets…[SA LINK] has enabled us to give the students more responsibility and accountability,” Todd Foley, Associate Director of Student Leadership Programs at Wentworth Institute of Technology said.
“Before SA LINK…students never kept a ledger as requested. Now, students can just log on, day or night, and get account balances, process a payment and request funds,” Dave Hahn, Office Manager of the Rosenberg Center for Student Involvement at University of Baltimore said.
For additional information on SA LINK 2.1, contact Mark Miller, VP Business Development at (877) 733-8335 or visit www.collegiatelink.net.
Article for CollegiateLink - Technology in Student Affairs Newsletter: Vol 1, Nov. 2007
Web-based technology services have been almost uniformly embraced by higher education institutions and students across the world. In fact, your students probably expect an online component to almost every course or academic program. This expectation can be attributed to both the high utilization of systems such as WebCT, Blackboard, and web portals, as well as students’ overwhelming preference for online communication – IM, Facebook, the Daily Jolt, and other messaging / social networking tools.
For Student Involvement, Service Learning, and Leadership Development professionals, this expectation gives rise to a new challenge – the information technology (IT) infrastructure of most colleges and universities focuses primarily on addressing the needs of academic departments and auxiliary services such as course management, student information, and facilities. More often than not, co-curricular programming departments will need to look outside of their campus IT division to address their needs.
What to look for when planning projects
There are three primary ways that technology can be used to directly impact student engagement.
Technology can: 1. lower the barriers to getting involved 2. raise awareness of opportunities 3. provide new incentives for students to get involved
Lowering barriers
A primary student complaint is that they simply don’t know where to go to find out how to get involved. The best solution to address this is a single, cross-departmental website to serve as the central source of information on all co-curricular programs and events. Just as it makes sense for all available courses from multiple academic departments to be listed in one course catalog, your co-curricular opportunities - everything from service learning to leadership and organizations should be easy to browse. Furthermore, a simple online form should be all that is required for a student to RSVP, register, or express interest in any particular program, workshop, or group.
Increasing awareness
Social networks like Facebook and websites like MeetUp, Evite, and The Daily Jolt are very popular with today’s college students. Using social networking and online communities is the single best way to bring attention to your programs and resources and to leverage the centralized web resource advocated for in the previous section.
SA LINK, CollegiateLink’s technology offering, allow you to both facilitate your own online involvement gateway and syndicate content to other sites, but even your department’s website can become a popular destination with some social networking-based publicity. As a start, you could set up your own Facebook group to post weekly updates linking back to your website. Use e-mail as a publicity tool only sparingly – and always reference back to both your website and Facebook group for the most up to date information.
Providing new incentives
For better or for worse, students put a lot of effort into posting information about themselves online. They take great pride in their profile, pictures, and other information they choose to share. As a student affairs professional, you may already be familiar with ways encourage them to use these websites wisely, but what about actually providing content they can post about their own involvement?
If your institution actively tracks student participation using a tool like SA LINK, providing a guide for students to publicize certain items from their involvement record if they wish to (with a special logo or picture they can post on their profile, for instance) will give students an added benefit to participating. New technologies like Facebook Applications even make it possible to provide every student with a leadership section of their profile that links back to your website.
Ultimately you can use online systems to track membership, leadership, and service to power robust co-curricular transcripts that can serve as an important part of their portfolio for graduate school applications, internships, and job searches.
How do we get there from here?
Implementing new technology or enhancing your existing online presence should be done at least annually – students embrace new services and features as they emerge and so should you! Below are some options for implementing technology projects:
1. DIY or Do It Yourself – Even if your department doesn’t have the software design and programming resources to build sophisticated systems, you should build a plan for using what is already available to you: campus web space and social networking sites. Focus on showcasing what is available in one central website before trying to build a system to accomodate complicated processes such as online forms and databases.
2. Work with your campus IT department – while some schools have successfully built their own complicated systems, manage your expectations. You may want to hire a web design firm to work with IT to build an interface compelling enough to meet the expectations of your students. Campus IT departments also tend to have large backlogs of work so it could take several months, or even years, to get to the head of the queue.
3. Find a proven, vendor-supplied solution – moving from today’s manual systems and out-of-date website to an entirely new platform is what is generally classed as a “make or buy” decision. There are software development firms that specialize in Student Affairs technology. There are also flexible, pre-built platforms like SA LINK that have already been designed to address many needs.
Your best approach to evaluating your options is to put together a technology assessment committee of both staff and students to identify your short and long term goals, work with campus IT, and examine what vendors have to offer.
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