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FIVESTAR* CASE STUDY

Massachusetts Community College System - Massachusetts Online Course Registration System (MCO)

THE CHALLENGE

Online courses, distance learning and virtual classrooms — the way today's tech savvy and time crunched students choose to learn is rapidly changing. Massachusetts colleges and universities banded together to meet evolving approaches to learning as Massachusetts Colleges Online (MCO) — offering thousands of online courses across 24 institutions statewide. However, college staff needed a better way to effectively manage the resulting massive amounts of data across the collaborative. In addition, the legacy web platform had become outdate, which created internal inefficiencies and threatened registration rates as a result.

THE SOLUTION

MCO turned to fivestar* to develop a fresh, responsive, and content-rich website powered by a robust back-end toolset that centralizes data and content management processes for administrators and streamlines course information access for students. The innovative website and feature rich application that fivestar* created optimizes search capabilities to allow students to find and explore up-to-date and comprehensive information on courses and programs; empowers and engages prospective students to tour MCO offerings, and dive deeper into course and program details: opens the line of communication between student and the relevant institution, allowing for meaningful dialogue around next steps; enables better control and easier import of key data, reducing errors and saving time; places content management into the hands of site administrators — giving nontechnical users the ability to easily and instantaneously update their website; provides the tools needed to track success and make data-driven decisions on the student acquisition process.

THE IMPACT

The redesigned website resulted in increased enrollment for Massachusetts Community College System’s online courses.

The redesigned MCO Online site enabled the client to rapidly respond to the increased demand to online courses due to COVID-19.

THE TECHNOLOGY

The site was built in WordPress which enabled full W3C standards compliance, user registration, multiple content authors, and built-In features including blogging, forms, and event management. The site is hosted n in Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.

mcc mockup

Why a custom solution?

WordPress provided a reliable and economical solution to our client’s needs.

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