CDI is Boston Reed’s web application for adult education data management. Here are eleven top reasons we believe that, for adult education required reporting, internal management and class marketing, CDI is the best solution available today.
1. Comprehensive and Integrated
2. Access from Anywhere
3. Real-time Information
4. No Servers to Purchase
5. Scalable for Large Schools and Small
6. Effortless System Updates
7. Unparalleled Integration of TOPSpro/NRS Data
8. Customer Service Record
9. Low-Risk Trial
10. Comprehensive and Integrated
11. “By Adult Educators, For Adult Education.”
Key in, for example, a course title. That title appears in your registration/attendance database, on your public website, in your print brochure, in your TOPSpro/NRS records, on teacher payroll records, in reports for Perkins funding, and on student registration forms and transcripts. The integration this demonstrates means you have consistent data throughout your operation, And you’ve eliminated the redundancy involved in handling overlapping data sets separately. CDI can free up your staff to engage in less bean counting and bubbling, and more tasks that contribute directly to meeting your school’s mission.
As an application “native” to the Web, CDI can be accessed from a web browser on a desktop computer, laptop or handheld device. No specialized, expensive, proprietary clients are required on the user’s computer. If you are an administrator on a business trip, wanting to check in on things back at the school, you can log in to CDI from any computer in a hotel business center. Likewise a student can browse through your website and, using her preferred web browser, sign herself up for classes, paying fees securely with her bank card. Where ever you are, CDI can be there too.
CDI allows the right people the right access to the right information about your school, classes and students, at the right time. Therefore, any action performed in CDI – a class registration, a fee collection, an attendance record – can be seen immediately by those who need to know. No need to wait for that stack of bubble sheets to be processed, the attendance data is in CDI already. So you can get an accurate summary of attendance right now.
Boston Reed hosts CDI on their servers in a Tier 1 collocation facility. That means you incur no costs for the purchase – or maintenance – of server hardware. No surprise capital expenditures when you discover you need new hardware to support the software upgrade you just purchased. And it also means that your data is safer than it would be on a server in almost any school district’s facility.
It is the expense of a server that has traditionally made automation out of reach for the smaller school. As a hosted application, CDI can make financial sense for the smaller school. Now smaller schools have opportunity to redirect some of their very limited support staff time to activities that are ore student-centered. Meanwhile, an enterprise-scale database engine (Oracle) powers the system, so large schools need not worry about being too large. (Schools implenting CDI this year range in size from 3,000 ADA to 13 ADA.)
When Boston Reed creates enhancements to CDI, we deploy them to our servers. Immediately, all schools have access to these enhanced features. No need for school staff to download a patch or install new code on a school-managed server. You know you always have the latest version. Effortlessly. (In spring 2005, when the Department of Education announced new categories for course titles, all CDI users had the new categories in their systems within five days of when Boston Reed recieved the announcement of the change.)
CDI gives you new options for collecting TOPSpro Entry and Update Record data and transferring the entire set into TOPSpro. For examle, students may log in to a web page to record "Learner Outcomes" for the TOPSpro Update Record. (No “pre-slugging” or scanning of bubble forms.) We know of no other application offering this degree of integration with TOPSpro.
“Thanks for always listening to and meeting our needs.”
“I appreciate your quick response to our needs.”
This is the sort of feedback Boston Reed has been getting since we rolled out the first modules of CDI in 2002. We know your adult school’s success depends very much on your giving quality customer service. We try to treat you as well as you treat your customers.
Adult schools and other organizations can use CDI Lite, the system components for an online catalog and registration system, for free. Besides providing a customer service that results in new students in your classes, you will gain first-hand experience with Boston Reed and CDI. Or, consider this: Our web application design makes it quite simple for us to set up pilot tests if you would like to take a “test drive” of the full application. ...Changing your core application is a big move. We'll help you think through the steps.
We said it already, but it’s worth saying again. With CDI, school staff handle data only once, eliminating redundant tasks and ensuring consistency throughout your data operations. What student-success-promoting activity might one of your office staff pursue with time relieved from re-handling the same old information?
Boston Reed’s staff team includes adult educators who have worked in public adult schools. (“We know your pain!”) We have carefully listened to the field through more formal focus group processes and through many conversations with school people of every position. Result: CDI is solidly grounded on the needs of the field.
1. Comprehensive and IntegratedTo explore Boston Reed's hosted web application for integrated adult educatiaon data management, Call (707) 688-4338 or email Tom Reid.