INGRESS: Building Capacity Through Collaboration
Expanding Educational Opportunities
University System of Georgia (USG) institutions are exploring new ways to use online education to serve the diverse new and existing student markets. In addition, campuses must develop innovative approaches to meet enrollment demands while balancing the challenges presented by the changing economic climate. To address these challenges, campuses are increasingly engaging in collaborative partnerships to share content to meet these enrollment demands. A tool that facilitates these partnerships is the Intra-Georgia Registration Sharing System (INGRESS), a multi-institution registration tool. INGRESS enables USG institutions to build capacity by reducing the administrative overhead associated with sharing courses among multiple institutions.
An Innovative Solution for Higher Education
INGRESS is unique in that it is the only application of its kind that integrates with both Banner systems and a learning management system to enable multi-institution registration. The primary goal of INGRESS is to deliver a scalable solution that accommodates decentralized registrations among multiple institutions, while supporting a centralized seat management process. Additionally, INGRESS leverages existing functionality within the institutions’ Banner systems and takes advantage of current campus business processes to the greatest extent possible.
Main Features of the INGRESS Tool
- Enables students to register, drop, withdraw, and pay for classes taught by other USG faculty — within their home institution Banner systems
- Facilitates centralized management of course seats in shared course sections.
- Provides secure collection and distribution of attendance verification and final grade data.
- Automatically creates enrollments in a collaborative Learning Management System for students registered in shared course sections and for faculty teaching these sections.
Meeting Increasing Enrollment Demands
Institutions offering the online collaborative degree programs have scaled their program offerings to meet enrollment demands by sharing course sections among campuses. In addition, institutions provide their students with access to courses that may not be available on their home campuses by partnering with other USG institutions that either have excess seat capacity or offer a specific cognate area within a collaborative program. Students can register for courses that are shared through INGRESS without the extra time and expense associated with traditional transient enrollment. Finally, administrative staff at the campus level are managing a single registration system with an integrated back end. INGRESS was released for production on November 1, 2010 with eight institutions. As of Spring 2013, there are 17 USG institutions using INGRESS for multi-institution registration.