News Story

The School of Continuing Studies at Rice Receives Gold Medal for Best in Class Website

The School of Continuing Studies at Rice received a Gold Medal (Category - Electronic, Marketing & Communications) from the University Continuing Education Association (www.ucea.edu) for the "overall best website" subcategory, in the 25,000 student registrants or less group. In addition, they received a Silver Medal for the "e-communications" subcategory.

"We are very proud of of the national recognition received by The School of Continuing Studies for its website and e-communications using our xCatalyst Platform," said Dan Rogas, vice president of sales & marketing for ESX, Inc.

Continuing Studies began using ESX, Inc.'s xCatalyst content management and marketing functions in December 2001. With more than 200 programs and 10,000 registrations each year, the School needed the flexibility to update website content quickly and easily. xCatalyst eliminates the previous workflow bottleneck that occurred when only web-skilled personnel were able to change or add content. Now staff members can maintain their respective web information. Continuing Studies has offered manually processed online registrations since 1998. The enhanced capability of xCatalyst's e-commerce module eliminates the manual process and provides real-time, online enrollment. Since implementing the xCatalyst online catalog module, online registrations have increased 49% and during peak registration periods phone staff is reduced from 2.5 to 1.5 FTE and registration staff from 1.5 to 1 FTE.

Some of the xCatalyst features used in the Continuing Studies site include:

Content Management System: Non-technical personnel can enter and edit content, eliminating the bottleneck caused when technical personnel are required. The system administrator sets security roles to ensure integrity and consistency of the site.

Community Tools: xCatalyst includes an interactive calendar that lets school staff create and automatically notify appropriate groups, such as press, registrants, or alumni, of event status. Recipients can automatically reply or request more information online.

E-Commerce: The xCatalyst course catalog e-commerce module enables full online registration of Executive Education and Continuing Studies courses, monitoring capacity and automatically closing classes when full.

Marketing: The School of Continuing Studies is using several of xCatalyst's marketing features, including newsletters, web polls, Dynamic forms, e-mail list management and for participant feedback. Online Course Catalog and Course Registration: The xCatalyst course catalog module provides a turnkey online continuing education catalog and registration system that seamlessly integrates into your xCatalyst website. This feature-rich catalog module gives you everything you need to provide a public registration interface for your site visitors and a back-office administration application to update course information and manage registrations.