SLC’s School of Contemporary Teaching and Learning (SCTL) and the department of Innovation and Business Engagement have started a pilot project using Salesforce to track a four-week period during the fall 2020 semester start-up. The goal of the project is to design and implement a process to allow for the quick upload of SCTL data and create customized reports and dashboards with data on staff and faculty participation.
The SCTL team seeks feedback from the learning community when delivering workshops and engaging in one-on-one consultations, according to Andre Leger, Associate Dean, SCTL. "This information helps us reflect on our practice and enables us to grow as practitioners. While this feedback continues to guide our practice, we weren’t getting the big picture, as we lacked a business analytics strategy that would help us identify specific training requirements for the community."
"We approached Jacob Phillips and Claudio Righetto from Innovation and Business Engagement to learn more about how they’re using Salesforce data to enhance decision-making processes for the College. During our discussion, it became evident that using Salesforce would enable us to leverage an existing infrastructure to analyze our data and combine our efforts with other college initiatives."
Through the exercise, the SCTL was able to identify trends across professional learning (assessments, learner engagement, rubric, etc.) and digital learning (Blackboard, Panopto, MS teams, etc.) as well as pairing this information with needs analysis surveys to offer a more responsive training plan for faculty and staff.
"It has been amazing working with Jacob and Claudio on this project as their expertise in data analytics enabled us to develop new ways to engage in professional growth and enhance our services," Andre said.
Salesforce is a cloud computing service and a software (SaaS) company that specializes in customer relationship management (CRM). Salesforce's services allow organizations to use cloud technology to better connect with customers, gather data, and provide real-time reporting. The software has become the number one platform for customer success and helps businesses track activity, market to customers, and many more services.
Originally brought to the College in 2010, the platform has undergone significant evolution, according to Jacob, Manager of Business Intelligence and Salesforce administrator.
"Together with the help of managers and staff across the departments of Career Services, Corporate Learning & Performance Improvement, Employment Service, SPARK, Applied Research, Innovation Hub, and others, we’ve built robust processes that allow us real-time understanding of department activity. More importantly, we’ve been able to develop deep insight into our interaction with employers in our community and identify opportunities to build and strengthen these relationships."
For more information on how Salesforce can help your department, contact Jacob at jphillips@sl.on.ca.