The HESS Consortium recognizes Todd Norris, Chief Information Officer at Saint Mary’s College, as a trailblazer in higher ed for his willingness to bring the most modern technology to campus to drive a first-class student experience. As a result, he takes student feedback extremely seriously.
While charting new territory as an early adopter of Oracle Cloud SIS, Norris heard a strong desire from students to access their student portal (Luminis) from mobile devices. The absence of a mobile app severely hampered students’ ability to stay on top of the latest tasks and information. Upon hearing these requests consistently, Norris mobilized his team to get to work finding a solution.
“We mostly used Luminis as a website so when students visited the portal on mobile, the responsiveness was just not there,” Norris said.
About Saint Mary’s College
Founded by the Sisters of the Holy Cross in 1844, Saint Mary’s College promotes a life of intellectual vigor, aesthetic appreciation, religious sensibility, and social responsibility. Saint Mary’s is a Catholic, residential, women’s, liberal arts college located in Indiana offering undergraduate degrees and co-educational graduate programs. As a women’s college, it offers an inclusive, academic community for students to discover and develop their talents.
Answering the (Mobile) Call
A key priority in Saint Mary’s list of requirements included complete web-mobile parity so users could access the app on any device. Luminis traditionally had proved sufficient with its desktop version by linking out to Ellucian front end systems students use daily, but with the Oracle migration planned and Luminis sunsetting in 2024, Norris looked at this as an opportunity to meet students where they are.
“As the mobile experience became more of an industry standard, we felt like it became an item we needed to look for in a new solution,” Norris said.
No Contest
After performing an exhaustive search for an enterprise user experience hub, Pathify proved to be the hands down favorite capable of delivering true mobile-web parity. Centered around Pathify, Saint Mary’s will offer students a best-in-class, unified experience by tying together Oracle Cloud’s suite with Saint Mary’s 70 other disparate systems in a widget-based, single pane of glass for users.
“With the way data passes between our core systems and our portal, widgets became very attractive to us. Pathify was the only vendor to check all the boxes.”
Todd Norris, chief information officer, saint mary’s college
Pathify also stood alone with the ability to serve the entire student lifecycle while engaging faculty and staff. This allowed Saint Mary’s to message a diverse range of constituents without needing to resort to sparsely-read emails.
“We wanted a way to create consistent messaging across various groups,” Norris said.
Finally, the ability to offer a hyper-personalized dashboard using Roles proved to be a clincher for Norris and his team.
“It’s really easy to create nuanced roles within Pathify to deliver targeted information rather than using a shotgun approach,” Norris said.
Saint Mary’s plans to fully launch in October 2023 and hopes to serve as a model for other institutions considering a migration to Oracle Cloud.
