Customer Spotlight

Western Iowa Tech Community College

TECHNOLOGIES: Critical Communications

Background

Western Iowa Tech Community College, founded in 1966, is a publicly supported community college serving Cherokee, Crawford, Ida, Monona, Plymouth, and Woodbury counties. The college’s main campus is in Sioux City, IA, on 200 acres. During the past school year, enrollment of students seeking college credits reached 7,570. Enrollment for students in non-credit learning experiences totaled more than 17,000.

Customer Needs

Western Iowa Tech Community College (WITCC) first connected with CEC at CITO, the Iowa Community College Chief Information Technology Officers’ annual event. The college was looking for ways to increase communications and wayfinding on campus through one solution that would improve navigation, offer marketing opportunities, provide interaction with anyone who came to campus, and support WITCC’s student engagement initiative. The college wasn’t looking for a digital signage solution to just display messages – staff members wanted to provide engaging, two-way interaction through digital communications.

Solution

CEC presented WITCC with a solution that could be custom-designed and built to the meet college’s requirements, specifications, and desires.

After partnering with CEC, WITCC now has:

  • An interactive solution to help students, faculty, and staff easily find buildings scattered throughout the campus. By pulling up their own personalized WITCC schedules on any screen, students, faculty, and staff can access detailed information and interactive maps that describe exactly where they need to be (and when they need to be there).
  • Technology that allows campus visitors to interact with the screens to request more information on the specific event or seminar that brings them to campus.
  • Digital signage that features messages, videos, event calendars, and campus updates, all of which can be controlled and updated by WITCC as needed.
  • A solution that syncs with the college’s student engagement initiative, encouraging classes to go beyond PowerPoint presentations and involve engaging, interactive presentations.
  • A video wall at the main entrance to capture the attention of everyone who comes to campus.

We don't want to talk at our students and visitors. We want to interact with them. Our video wall is about 'amazing.' I don’t want to inform our visitors … I want to amaze them. And CEC has been wonderful to work with to achieve this goal. They were willing to invent what we wanted instead of making us conform to their restrictions and limitations.

 

Mike Logan Dean of IT, Western Iowa Tech Community College
Back to Top