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Adobe Case Study

Monfort College of Business at the University of Northern Colorado

Monfort College of Business at the University of Northern Colorado

Monfort College of Business at the University of Northern Colorado

"For developers like me with a limited design background, working in Adobe Flex, Flash, and ColdFusion, empowers me to produce sophisticated web applications and keep them easily updated to meet the constantly changing needs of the university."

Justin Imhoff
web designer
Monfort College of Business, University of Northern Colorado

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ColdFusion
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Making money work
With its rich 118-year history, dedicated faculty, active students, and noted athletic teams, the University of Northern Colorado (UNC) is large enough to provide students with a broad university opportunity, yet small enough to treat each student as an individual. At UNC, students in more than 200 graduate and undergraduate programs are encouraged to stand out, not just fit in.

The Monfort College of Business at UNC focuses exclusively on excellence in under-graduate business education. The first and only business program to receive the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award from the Office of the President of the United States, and the only undergraduate-only program worldwide to be accredited by the nation's leading agency in both business and accounting, Monfort offers degrees in business administration with emphases in accounting, computer information systems, finance, general business, management, and marketing.

Benefits

  • Provided first-year students with convenient eLearning option
  • Saved administrative and physical costs of running large-scale bricks and mortar class
  • Enabled students to gain greater understanding of personal financial management
  • Cost effectively established an eLearning program designed to help decrease freshman attrition rate
  • Deployed project rapidly within existing IT framework

Project Details

Intro to fiscal responsibility
More than 1,600 freshmen enrolled in the new, for-credit course titled Student Personal Finance the first semester it was offered. "The online class is like an electronic textbook," says Imhoff. "It has everything a student needs to successfully complete the class, including savable worksheets and assessment tools." An on-campus version of the class complements the eLearning experience, but the eventual possibility is to offer the class online only.

The course consists of four eLearning modules that include interactive content, quizzing, and animation. Approximately three quarters of the introductory module is video snippets of lectures, highlighted by an animated diagram of how different parts of the brain control decision-making. "It was really easy to animate the brain graphic using Flash CS3 Professional and then tie it into the Flex framework," says Imhoff, who explains that when a user clicks on the brain inside the Flex interface, the action registers to the SWF content created in Flash.

The other three modules address more complex topics including income and expense basics, monthly and annual budgeting practices, and how to effectively navigate the world of credit. "The students love that they can alter the color schemes and move things around on the fly," says Imhoff. With the application deployed using Adobe Flash Media Server, there are no page refreshes for data, visual, or content revisions. Many of the fields are also automatically populated with current information including tuition expenses and student loan information, as the application ties to various back-end databases and web services.

Maximizing resources
The online offering helps students work more efficiently by referring to course content on the web at their convenience. As web developers, the team relies heavily on student survey information to keep courses standardized, relevant, and engaging. From a development standpoint, Imhoff explains that he opted to use Adobe Flex Builder 2 for its ease of use in building interactive components, its rapid production capabilities, and for the ability to integrate Flex components seamlessly into a ColdFusion framework. According to Imhoff, The Monfort College of Business website runs on ColdFusion application server software, so the new course was extremely easy to deploy within the existing IT infrastructure.



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