Smarter Management, Stronger Experiences
Valencia College Moves to a Unified, Consolidated Digital Campus
Smarter Management, Stronger Experiences
Valencia College Moves to a Unified, Consolidated Digital Campus
Quick Summary:
The Challenge & Solution: With 70,000 students, Valencia College faced a massive bottleneck where a lean IT team manually managed all portal content. To solve this, the college launched MyVC, a Pathify-powered Campus Experience Platform (CXP) that shifted the institution from a centralized “gatekeeper” model to a modern, distributed content management system.
Operational Transformation: The move eliminated a costly, underutilized legacy mobile app in favor of Pathify’s native mobile capabilities. By empowering individual departments to manage their own digital presence, the Enterprise Application Services team reduced their “reactive firefighting,” allowing them to focus on long-term strategic planning and technical innovation.
Strategic Consolidation: The college continues to simplify its digital ecosystem, ensuring students find exactly what they need through a single, consistent, and reliable “digital front door.”
Valencia College serves approximately 70,000 students across Central Florida, placing it among the largest colleges in the United States by enrollment. For nearly two decades, all content in the college’s legacy portal flowed through a small team within Valencia’s IT department.
Melanie Hardy, Software & Integration Architect, spent years observing how the model strained both people and processes. “IT admins managed all portal content,” Hardy explained. “We had one or two people tasked to do nothing but content management.” Every announcement, every calendar listing, every content update flowed through the small team. At first, centralized control made sense, but the bottleneck eventually became impossible to ignore.
Ahead of their incumbent portal’s sunset, Valencia saw a timely opportunity to rethink its approach to content management, communication and overall usability. The college desired a more flexible, distributed model — one reducing operational dependency on a single department and, instead, laying a foundation for a true Campus Experience Platform (CXP).
A More Modern Way of Working
The first big shift came in 2017 when Valencia rolled out a new Content Management System (CMS) for its website. It marked the first real step toward distributed editing, Hardy recalled. “It changed how we allocated workloads, and we knew we wanted the same capability in our next portal experience.” The new platform needed comparable flexibility and personalization — qualities aligning closely with core CXP tenets.
Valencia’s Enterprise Application Services department remained committed to a deliberate, methodical evaluation. “We established an informal team within our IT department to evaluate student and employee portals,” said Hardy. The shortlist included the incumbent portal solution, a potential homegrown build and Pathify. Over the next year, the group attended demos, reviewed out-of-the-box functionality and built a weighted scoring system to compare every vendor and capability — from messaging and tasks to content management.
Setting the Bar for the Next Campus Platform
Certain non-negotiables stood out, including the need for a sustainable mobile app to replace a previous technology that proved costly and ineffective. Maintaining the legacy app fell to the college’s most experienced developer, despite the app serving just 5% of the user population. With limited dynamic functionality and a disconnected experience from the web version, maintaining the app no longer justified the time and cost.
Hardy desired granular, distributed editing with tighter controls and permissions. And personalization played a key role: “Hyper-personalized experiences didn’t exist before Pathify,” Hardy shared. “But we needed a fundamentally different approach to meet student needs. Personalization creates a clear differentiator in how we engage students and enables us to move beyond the archaic ways we’d been managing the student experience.”
Throughout the evaluation, Valencia kept one principle front and center: choose the right system for their current problems and future evolution. A luxury, perhaps, but also a guiding philosophy. “We wanted the best solution, no exceptions,” Hardy explained.
Pathify ultimately stood out — not only because it met the technical and functional criteria but because it aligned with Valencia’s evolving campus experience philosophy. Three main capabilities drove the decision: Pathify’s native Digital Wallet, AI Agent and something harder to quantify — the pace of development. “Pathify feels like a company building toward something, not just maintaining a static product,” Hardy remarked.
Decentralizing Content Ownership
Valencia soft-launched MyVC — its new Pathify-powered hub — in October 2024, capping an 18-month effort reshaping the college’s digital experience and its organizational rhythm.
Pathify’s distributed content management model (flexible to align with varying practices) unlocked a new level of shared ownership across campus. Content development and updates, group administration and day-to-day communications now sit with the people and business units closest to the work. “With Pathify, admins continue uncovering new ways to work, advancing how the entire institution thinks about communicating with students,” Hardy said. Departments across campus now lead their own parts of MyVC — a shift Hardy called “very gratifying.”
MyVC became the institution’s connective tissue, bridging departments and unifying communities that once operated in separate digital worlds. “What we love about Pathify comes down to how it shifts our work from reactive firefighting to proactive planning,” emphasized Hardy. “It helps free up our time, giving us space to plan ahead, instead of scrambling to catch up.”
A Hub That Amplifies and Consolidates
Like many institutions, Valencia accumulated numerous tools over time, each addressing a narrow problem but collectively contributing to a fragmented experience with redundant functionality. Utilization varied, too — certain tools weren’t easily visible to users — adding yet another layer of inconsistency to the experience.
Pathify streamlined Valencia’s disjointed tools by integrating and consolidating several standalone systems, with additional opportunities for evaluation as contracts expire. Upcoming changes include replacing Anthology Engage with Communities, transitioning Localist event and calendar management into Pathify and launching Pathify’s AI Agent in 2026.
Enterprise Application Services leads a software development reorganization that further supports unification efforts, offering the institution improved visibility into its tech stack and usage, and providing a stronger foundation for future consolidation.
“We believe the fewer pieces of technology we need to get working together, the better the results for students and staff,” Hardy shared. “We focused less on consolidating for cost savings and more on simplifying our overall tech stack to deliver the best, most consistent and reliable experience.”
Transforming the Campus Experience
After a year with the new MyVC hub, the team sees a real transformation in how users interact with campus resources. “I’m excited to continue making it easier for students to find what they need,” said Hardy. “Pathify gives us the tools to do this in a genuine, authentic way.”
“The out-of-the-box experience is fantastic,” Hardy added — a clear sign Valencia now delivers on its promise to streamline and simplify the digital experience. Beyond the technology itself, MyVC shifted how departments collaborate, empowered teams to take ownership of content and created a more connected, cohesive experience for the entire campus.
About Valencia College
Across 10 campuses and centers, Valencia College delivers high-quality, affordable education that prepares learners for workforce careers or transfer to four-year universities. The college fosters a welcoming environment and outcomes-focused programs across associate, bachelor’s and continuing education pathways. Renowned for its innovative practices and strong community impact, Valencia earned the inaugural Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence and continues playing a significant role in Central Florida economic development. Learn more at valenciacollege.edu.
