think it through - technical considerations of corporate partnerships - rob kingyens

University-corporate partnerships can offer higher education institu-tions many benefits, including ex-posure to new revenue channels, networking relationships with cor-porate partners, and continuing educational programming for pro-fessionals. However, before engag-ing in a corporate strategy, there are several technical considerations (and decisions) to evaluate.

Businesses tend to rely pretty heav-ily on data to drive business deci-sions. When a company sponsors training and development, they want assurance that their learning programs lead to measurable per-formance outcomes. To this end, universities should evaluate their data-sharing strategy for corporate partnerships.

Here are a few reasons why data sharing is mutually beneficial for both the university and corporate partner:

• Aligns university-provided courses and content with company-defined competencies for individu-al employees• Improves visibility about ag-gregate outcomes from company-sponsored programs with an insti-tution• Simplifies the user experience for employees by integrating (aka “federating”) university learning system logins and passwords with

employer-based systems• Expedites enrollment and pay-ment processing

Once you have determined the rea-sons for sharing data with your cor-porate partners, there are several technical questions you now need to ask; including:

• What are the technical consid-erations and risks associated with data sharing? How can they be avoided?• What kinds of data should be shared and how should it be pro-tected?• Should third-party system inte-gration be considered?

Build Your University-Corporate Strategy

Prior to the late nineties, many university-corporate partnerships were relatively simple, from a tech-nology perspective. In a typical relationship, a corporate student would enroll and attend an on-cam-pus program, and upon successful completion, the institution would issue a credential to the student and provide a transcript back to the corporate partner to go in to their HR file. In some instances, the insti-tution would tailor curricula specifi-cally for corporate partners to meet

By Rob Kingyens Chief Technology Officer, eCornell

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Think it Through: Technical Considerations of Corporate Partnerships

PHOTO BY ALPHASPIRIT

By getting out into their local community, higher education institutions can keep themselves in mind as a long-term or short-term training solution for corporations who are looking for learning partners.

SPECIAL FEATURE: CORPORATE TRAINING

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2012

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organization-learning goals. From a technical perspective, this was still a very simple, analog transaction.

Move forward to today, the techni-cal landscape in both the university and corporate learning environ-ments are vastly different—and technically complex.

For example, let’s compare two complimentary systems imple-mented in most higher and corpo-rate education environments today:

Example 1: Information Management Systems• Higher Ed: Most institutions have implemented Student Infor-mation Systems (SIS) such as Des-tinyOne to manage student data across the institution.• Corporate: Most organizations have implemented similar Enter-prise Resource Planning (ERP) sys-tems such as SAP or Oracle to man-age data across the organization, typically including learning and HR data for employees.

Although these systems are similar in function, they serve different or-ganizational needs.

Example 2: Course Management and Delivery Systems• Higher Ed: Most institutions have now implemented Course Management Systems (CMS) such as Blackboard, Moodle or Canvas that allow schools to augment and flip traditional classroom learning, providing an option for institutions to develop and deliver online dis-tance learning courses.• Corporate: Similarly, the ma-jority of corporate organizations have implemented Learning Man-agement Systems (LMS) that allow

corporations to administer, track, report and deliver online education courses or training programs—de-veloped both internally and exter-nally.

Much like SIS’ and ERPs, these sys-tems perform similar functions. However, they also serve different organizational needs.

Bridging the Data Divide

As shown in the above examples, most universities and corporations have implemented systems to man-age data and learning within their respective environments. So, it should be easy to share data be-tween these two environments, right? Well, not exactly.

Many of these systems share tech-nical standards intended for in-teroperability and sharing of data across systems (e.g. single sign-on, encryption, API, etc). However, many are not designed to seam-lessly bridge the university-corpo-rate divide out-of-the-box.

Every institution and technical envi-ronment is unique, and there is no single, correct strategy. Therefore, it’s important for each institution to carefully weigh its university-cor-porate objectives against its mis-sion, technical infrastructure and resources.

Although there are many factors to consider, the following represent some of the most common techni-

cal areas that universities should evaluate before launching their cor-porate strategy:

Course Delivery

How you intend to deliver your pro-grams to corporate partners can greatly impact the technical factors your institution must consider. Will you offer Classroom, Online and/or Blended? Depending upon your approach, consider some of the fol-lowing questions:

A. Classroom:• Can corporate partners batch enroll students?• Will partners receive comple-tion data? What formats?

B. Online:• Can corporate partners auto-matically enroll students?• How will students access your online system?• How will learning data be shared? What methods and for-mats?

C. Blended (Classroom and Online).• Will a blended approach offer consistency for classroom and on-line?

Student Information

Assuming student data needs to be shared between university-corpo-rate systems, what information is commonly shared/desired by cor-porate partners? What common data fields and formats?

Which information and just how much of it should be considered carefully when sharing with a part-ner system. Here are some common data elements shared with partner

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It’s important for each institution to carefully weigh its university-corporate objectives against its mission, technical infrastructure and resources.






organizations:

• Enrollment and payment pro-cessing• Basic student profile informa-tion• Registration information• Assignment and course comple-tion information• Attendance and basic transac-tional activity

Although this information is typi-cal, corporate partners are becom-ing more accustomed to having analytics, interactive reports and behavioral/social data (student to student, student to instructor) available for reporting or data anal-ysis. Therefore, institutions need to carefully evaluate the data they are willing and able to share with cor-porate partners, while considering future data requirements.

Third-party Integration

Many institutions and corporate or-ganization maintain various third-party systems that relate to em-ployee learning.

For example, consider some of the following third-party integrations:

Human Capital Management. Many corporate organizations have implemented Human Resource Management (HRMS) and Hu-man Capitol Management (HCM) systems such as Workday or Suc-cessFactors to manage employees, including the mapping of learning outcomes to career advancement, competencies, and rewards.

Enterprise Social Networks. With the advent of consumer social net-works such as Facebook and Twit-ter, many organizations have imple-mented Enterprise Social Networks

such as Yammer or Chatter that al-low coworkers to follow each other and share updates, including learn-ing achievements.

Industry Certifications. Many in-dustries have developed their own set of recognized learning creden-tials such as the Project Manage-ment Institute (PMI) or Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) that allow institutions to map their outcomes to core certifi-cation requirements.

Is Human Capital Management important to your core corporate prospects? Do your programs align to industry-specific certifications or competencies to provide additional value to corporate partners? Is so-cial networking important to your prospects?

Depending upon your overall uni-versity-corporate strategy and pro-spective partners, your institution may want to consider integration with other third-party systems.

Authentication

Whether your institution decides to offer programs via classroom or on-line, most of your corporate part-ners will want to either send and/or receive data from your systems, such as single sign-on for online students, automatic enrollment, student results, etc. Therefore, to do this in a secure (and compliant) manner, you’ll need to determine the authentication methods you will offer to your corporate part-ners.

If you plan to offer online delivery, most organizations (like yours) want to avoid employees maintaining




PHOTO BY ALPHASPIRIT

When sharing data between a higher education institution and a corporation, it is important to determine and define accountability.





separate usernames and passwords for various systems. To solve this, most organizations use single sign-on to seamlessly log users into in-ternal and third-party systems. This can also be used for non-human in-teraction with systems, where one application talks with another to share data.

Everyone does not use the same authentication methods. However, there are several authentication protocols (aka “federated authen-tication”) that allow organizations to authenticate with each other across the web, such as CAS, ADFS, and Crowd. If you’re just getting started, there are also cloud-based “identity” providers to consider, such as PingIdentity and Okta that strive to make these interactions easier.

Data Security and Privacy

What are the security, personal identification and privacy issues that need to be considered in a uni-versity-corporate partnership? Se-curity is one of the most important and overlooked areas surrounding integration between systems and organizations. And, as a result of serious data breaches over the past decade, there are now several in-formation security regulations that require it, including:

• Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)• Payment Card Industry Data Se-curity Standard (PCIDSS)• Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)• Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOX)

Your first reaction might be; why do we need to be concerned with non-

education specific security regula-tions such as PCI or HIPAA? Well, if you are accepting payments (e.g. PCI) and sharing data with corpo-rate partners (e.g. SOX), they are responsible for maintaining compli-ance with all information and data systems.

No two information security poli-cies look alike, and chances are one or both parties will have to compromise on one issue or an-other. Depending on the nature of the relationship, accountability is one of the most important issues to consider. Defining accountabil-ity will determine who is ultimately responsible for data loss, breach or other failure due to software or sys-tem vulnerability.

Therefore, it’s important for your institution to perform a risk analy-sis of the integration point(s) you’re considering sharing with your cor-porate partners, so that both par-ties are fully aware of their security requirements and shared responsi-bility.

Every institution and working envi-ronment is unique. There are myri-ad technical considerations and few easy solutions when working with corporate partners.

So it’s important that you carefully evaluate your overall strategy, re-sources, and systems to determine what’s best for both university and corporate partners.

Corporate partnerships can be fruit-ful and bring about huge beneficial change. But institutions need to weigh their ability and understand very clearly their capacity to meet the technical needs/requirements of the corporate environment.


Current Position and Past Experience

Since 2011, Rob Kingyens has been the Chief Technology Officer at eCornell, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Cornell Uni-versity. Prior to this, Kingyens served as the Chief Technology Officer and Chief Operating Officer at Bancroft Technol-ogy Group, where he continues to serve on the board.

In addition to speaking engagements and being cited in industry publications on the effective application of learning technologies, Kingyens has served in various management and executive level roles where he had led the analysis, de-sign, development and implementation of learning and technology initiatives for global Fortune 1000, government and non-profit organizations. These have included Microsoft, United Technolo-gies, General Electric, National Security Agency, Discovery, Red Cross, U.S. Green Building Council, Boston Consulting Group, IBM and McDonald’s.

Education, Honors and Achievements

Kingyens was named a Top 100 Producer by the Multimedia Producer Magazine, and was part of the team that won an Adobe/Macromedia’s People’s Choice Award.

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