REPORTER at NC State
What is REPORTER?
NC State’s Registration Platform for Non-Credit Activity and Required Training: REPORTER, is a cross-university solution for tracking, managing and reporting non-degree credit activities. It measures external outreach, internal training and non-credit activities, to assess their impact across the university and beyond.
REPORTER is an evolving enterprise application developed at NC State from the ground up using the Mendix Business Modeler. As a result, highly customizable features were tailored to meet the requirements of both existing and future NC State business and education systems. REPORTER is built on a cloud-based platform-as-a-service, which allows the development team to create, integrate and deploy new functionality to REPORTER‘s web and mobile applications.
REPORTER provides the solution to support non-credit activities. Innovative and flexible, REPORTER is designed to increase the profile and efficiency of programs and is a secure and Payment Card Industry compliant registration system. REPORTER supports free enterprise, innovation and economic development while enhancing the institution’s ability to manage data and information to drive strategy and new business models.
What are the uses of REPORTER?
REPORTER is much more than a registration system. It is an application that provides enterprise-level non-credit activity, billing and reporting, focusing on three-prong use. The first is required training, typically safety, financial and regulatory compliance-related training such as Payment Card Industry (PCI), Conflicts of Interest and Uniform Guidance Certification Training for principal investigators.
The second use is for professional development, such as university-sponsored programs including New Employee Orientation, faculty work sessions and additional training.
Finally, outreach, extension and engagement programs and activities that leverage the academic resources of the university that market to external participants will use REPORTER to allow registrations and provide a way to track engagements and professional credits.
How does DELTA fit into REPORTER?
The goal for DELTA is to use REPORTER as the designated registration system for WolfWare Outreach enrollments. DELTA’s Enterprise Technology Services (ETS) group is working with REPORTER developers to integrate WolfWare Outreach for online courses. While DELTA is not doing any direct development, ETS works with REPORTER developers on WolfWare Project and Outreach integration for online courses.
For example, REPORTER could be a great way to determine how many online non-credit courses are offered and participation counts and contact hours production information being utilized. REPORTER will improve information collection methods, improve awareness and visibility of non-credit education and allow us to understand the scope and impact of our engagement efforts.
With the close collaboration between the REPORTER development team and DELTA’s Moodle development team, REPORTER aims to be able to seamlessly share data and functionality with Moodle Outreach and Projects environments, including such features as Moodle student registration, course enrollment and course completion status. REPORTER also integrates with PeopleSoft Human Resources, as well as university financials and Student Information System data, which helps reduce data redundancy. REPORTER is also fully PCI compliant, ensuring secure encryption of user data and online payment transactions.
What are the future goals of REPORTER?
Based on Quarter 1 of 2017, REPORTER has successfully achieved completion in several areas including billing support and reports for departments, question/label bank and form builder, use of bulk data uploads and mobile uploads. From Quarter 2 projections, REPORTER hopes to continue to create form builders, focus on merchandise and order management and course instance improvements. Looking ahead, REPORTER developers set goals of certificates and programs, document management, user roles updates, task/workflow management and merge functionality for duplicate external accounts.
