Background
The Peralta Summer Institute is a part of the Peralta Community College District, which spans over four community colleges throughout northern Alameda County, California. The Peralta Summer Institute brings high school students from the region to participate in various Career and Technical Education (CTE) programs at each community college.
Challenges
The process of connecting high school students to courses at the colleges can create a complicated enrollment process due to the many different institutions and districts that must be worked with. For students, there are a multitude of different steps to work through, the staff must communicate across programs, and the information must be presented in a way that can be processed at each level. When collecting information for students, it was extremely common for there to be errors in completion of the forms, creating more work for those dealing with the information. In addition to this, people from each separate school, district, and program needed access to information and the ability to make reports of the data. This created a clamoring for access and reporting that was difficult to manage for their previous system.
Solution
As a solution, Grouptrail created an intake form that collected data from the students and pre-populates the college forms. This eliminates the chance for errors in the information processing and collection. This was a huge game-changer for Peralta, who stated that, “Every form was legible, none sent back, signatures were great. All the forms were perfect.” Getting rid of the time-consuming process of constantly trying to reach students and clarify statements allowed for Peralta to get on track with their missions that mattered the most.
Benefits
With errors in reports so dramatically reduced, a huge amount of time is saved. In addition, with the now clarified and centralized data in Grouptrail, reporting across departments and roles is much easier. No longer must they report data in multiple different places - it is now all easily accessible in a singular location. This also allowed for features that improved the overall efficiency of the program, such as trackers that indicated where missing signatures were. With the help of the texting system from Grouptrail, Peralta was able to communicate much better with students, and take full advantage of the benefits of the tracking system. Overall, using Grouptrail made Peralta much more confident in their data and processes; they found that producing data reflection took 1/10 of the time that it used to take.