College Technology

Built 2017, rebuilt 2019 · Status Retired · Stack 2019 rebuild: Laravel 5.6, PHP 7.1, Laravel Spark, Laravel Nova, MySQL, AdminLTE

College.Technology was a reference site that pulled the state-provided resources, discounts, and licensed software available to California Community Colleges into one place. I built it for the students, faculty, and staff across the system's 114 colleges.

Purpose

It started as my final project for the CISOA (Chief Information Systems Officers' Association) certification, where I researched what the state already provided to instructional technologists. I came out of that research with a long list of tools and services that were free or heavily discounted for our colleges and that I had never heard of, and I worked in the field. If I did not know they existed, faculty did not either.

The information was not secret. It was scattered, and there was no index of it anywhere. After I gave the presentation I turned the research into a website so it would reach more people than the ones in the room.

What it did

Most of the site was curation, organized so that someone could find a tool by the problem they had rather than by which state initiative had funded it. The piece I found most interesting to build was the technology plan index, which I added later on its own subdomain.

Every California Community College published a technology plan. They were long documents, and there was no practical way to read them side by side. I collected the plans from all 114 colleges where one was available and ran each through natural language processing APIs, which parsed the text into categorized groups and pulled out individual entities: names, organizations, products, technologies. Each entity was linked to Google's Knowledge Graph, so a reader could pull up a description and see trends for it. The result was that you could tell at a glance which colleges had updated plans, which themes overlapped across the system, and which technologies were in use at each institution. Comparing 114 technology plans by hand was not something anyone was ever going to do.

The search worked on the same principle of narrowing rather than adding. It was a Google Custom Search Engine scoped to the domains of all 114 colleges, so a query returned results from community college websites and nothing else.

Features

Search all 114 community colleges, one search box backed by a Google Custom Search Engine restricted to the 114 California Community College websites.
College technology plans, an index of the technology plans from all 114 colleges, where one was published, each parsed with NLP into entities linked out to Google's Knowledge Graph.
Accessibility, the state-provided accessibility tools and websites collected in one list.
.EDU email perks, the discounts available to students, faculty, and staff with a .edu email address.
Instructional technology, technology resources focused on teaching and learning.
State-created services, tools the State Chancellor's Office built itself in response to specific initiatives and challenges.
State discounted tools, vendor products vetted by the State Chancellor's Office and offered to colleges at state-negotiated pricing.
State licensed software, software the state had already bought, available to colleges free or at a subsidized rate.
Support resources, documentation, training, and user communities for higher education systems.
News, aggregated feeds from TechEdge and the Chancellor's Office newsletters.

I took the site down in April 2021. State contracts, pricing, and licensing change constantly, and a stale directory of them is worse than no directory, because faculty and students would have trusted information that was no longer true. Retiring it was the right call.