Corning Community College Switches to WebCT, Adds e-Learning Capabilities

WebCT, the most flexible and widely used higher-ed e-learning solution, today announced that Corning Community College has selected the WebCT Campus Edition course management system as the foundation of its rapidly growing e-learning program. WebCT Campus Edition will also be a pillar of the Corning, N.Y., school's "single-sign on" campus computing infrastructure.

Corning Community College, part of the State University of New York (SUNY) system, has 40 distance-learning courses serving 1,000 distance-learning students, many of whom are juggling their educations with full-time work and family responsibilities. The College chose to switch to WebCT from its current Blackboard course management system because WebCT adds important capabilities.

WebCT Campus Edition, for example, will easily integrate with Corning Community College's Campus Pipeline portal and its SCT Banner student information system. The integration will give teachers, students and administrators single sign-on access to all three applications and will automatically register students for e-learning, saving weeks of manual data transfer.

WebCT gives Corning Community College advanced course management capabilities, including drag-and-drop content acquisition. Uploading course content -- whether PowerPoint slides, Word documents, Web pages or multimedia files -- is now a matter of dragging files across the desktop. Customers no longer have to compress files and take multiple steps to upload courses one by one. WebCT is also quickly converting course materials, including notoriously difficult-to-translate quizzes -- into WebCT format.

"WebCT Campus Edition lets us add the critical e-learning features we need without increasing our e-learning costs, and it makes the switch to WebCT painless," said Barry Garrison, director of institutional effectiveness. "From the salespeople to technical support and senior executives, WebCT understands and appreciates that we're a community college, and that e-learning is at least as important to us as residential schools."

Although the College will officially convert to WebCT in the fall, Garrison expects teachers to adopt it much earlier because of the new, easy-to-learn teaching and learning capabilities they will have, such as selective content release. "Corning Community College is a great example of a school that has worked hard to identify education challenges and answer them with a creative e-learning solution," said Carol Vallone, WebCT's president and CEO. "We conduct our product development the same way -- identifying the most pressing customer needs and squarely addressing them."

About Corning Community College

Corning Community College was founded in 1956 by the Corning-Painted Post Area School District. A gift of land from Arthur A. Houghton, Jr. and a monetary gift from Corning Glass Works Foundation enabled the College to move in 1963 from downtown Corning to its current location on Spencer Hill. CCC is now under regional sponsorship serving Chemung, Schuyler and Steuben Counties. The College offers more than 45 programs and 1,000 credit and non- credit courses. Courses are taught days, evenings, weekends and via Internet throughout the year at over 17 locations throughout the region.

About WebCT

WebCT has set the standard for e-learning systems in higher education. Based in Lynnfield, Mass., WebCT provides a highly flexible e-learning environment that empowers institutions across the educational spectrum with the ability to achieve their unique objectives. Thousands of colleges and universities around the world -- from community colleges to large university consortia -- are using WebCT to expand the boundaries of teaching and learning. For more information, please visit www.webct.com.