Going Mobile on the Ellucian Platform

Kishwaukee College is a nationally recognized community college in northern Illinois, serving its regional community with a commitment to accessible education and institutional innovation. To position itself for optimal student service delivery, Kish recently migrated its legacy student information system (SIS) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to Ellucian's industry-leading Software as a Service (SaaS) Platform.

One year after going live on the Platform, the College's Information Technology (IT) team is rebuilding campus processes in a more integrated and efficient framework, with Ellucian Experience as the central mobile campus interface.

"That's what we're most excited about," said Michael Ebner, Application Programmer. "Students can click on the task, the task opens, they do the task, and they never have to leave Experience."

While enacting its plans for a mobile-first gateway on the front end with Experience, Kish is also planning to leverage Platform-integrated artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, such as Ellucian Forms, native to Ellucian Intelligent Processes (EIP), to support the team's back-end development.

"I like that Ellucian put the AI forms generator in Forms," said Afton Lawver, Application Programmer. "We won't have to spend so much time translating paper forms. You can prompt AI, and it should hopefully get it to 90% correctness."

Mobile-first with Ellucian Experience

Kish's long-term vision is a fully unified digital experience in which processes, data and user interactions flow seamlessly through Experience. The College views mobile alerts and real-time task visibility as crucial to addressing gaps in follow-through, particularly for processes where users previously relied on email.

"When they get an email with a link, the problem with that is if they don't act on it right away, it's out of sight, out of mind," Ebner said. "One of the things I like about EIP and Forms is the push notifications to the mobile app, so if you assign a student a task, they can get that notification in Experience."

The team has begun testing EIP to automate approval paths in areas such as student certifications and appointment workflows. They have also started building templates using the AI Forms Assistant, which generates fully editable forms in seconds from natural-language prompts or by uploading existing documents.

"If you have text fields, labels, simple things like that, it works pretty well," Lawver said. "You don't have to develop it for mobile. You develop it on the desktop, and then it will work responsively on a mobile device."

So far, the team has developed several experimental forms and processes as it looks to transition many core campus activities away from custom-built workflows to SaaS-native Intelligent Processes.

"We have a whole bunch of ideas that we're trying to scope out and see what's going to work and what's not going to work," Ebner said. "Hopefully in a year or so, we'll have six or seven of these forms rolled out."

Continuing to Innovate and Scale Unified Workflows

Kish's IT team plans to expand its use of EIP and Forms as the College’s SaaS modernization journey progresses and new Ellucian Platform capabilities become available. At the institutional level, Kish is also seeking to expand the responsible use of AI tools across campus.

"The school is looking to push AI tools because they can help us save time," Lawver said. "When it's used for the right reasons — not for everything — I think there's a lot of value in that."

Kishwaukee College's guiding vision is to provide accessible and innovative education by responding and adapting to changing student and community needs. Live on the Ellucian Platform and constantly seeking out ways to leverage emerging technology to best support its learners, Kish actively demonstrates its commitment to that aspiration.