How Palm Beach State is Using iPaaS to Aggregate Student Data for Improved Student Experience

Providing Better Service for Continuing Education Students by Connecting Eventbrite with the LMS and RAVE

“We’ve been struggling as an institution on how to service our continuing education students,” Libutti said. “It’s an interesting program, with a menu type system – it’s like an Amazon shopping cart kind of experience. We offer photography workshops and law enforcement classes, and they all have different sections and time frames. Some classes are single sessions. There’s a lot of options”

To handle registration for these classes, Palm Beach State uses Eventbrite. The one problem, according to Libutti, is that people who enroll in these continuing education classes don’t need to be provisioned in the same way a student at the college needs to be, so they had to come up with a way to make Eventbrite work with their other systems.

“We needed to have the courses loaded into our learning management system, as well as make sure the people registered for these classes populated into RAVE,” he said. “RAVE is our mobile safety application, and we use it for a couple of things like emergency announcements, as well as communication to students in targets groups.”

Using iPaaS, Libutti and his team built a workflow that uses APIs from Eventbrite to pull the registration data for each person and place it into an SQL table. That data in the SQL is then used to provision the continuing education students and add them to RAVE, they are also added to Canvas. The result is a fantastic user experience for the students registering for these non-credit classes through Eventbrite, and a workflow that automates the access and information needed by the institution on the backend to properly create logins and access needed from Active Directory, as well as getting the information into RAVE for any communication needs.  

Getting a Holistic View of the Student Experience with iPaaS

Since purchasing iPaaS from TeamDynamix, the main focus for Libutti and his team has been data integration and transparency, “We’ve made sure that we can populate the data warehouse using iPaaS to get the data out of our different applications and systems, and use all of that data to populate the dashboards we’ve created for our administrative and executive staff,” he said.

But there’s also been a focus on what the user interface looks like for students and faculty as well.

“We want to present a single pane of glass to the students so they can really see what their education plan is, what their progress looks like, who their advisor is and what events are relevant to them if they’re in clubs or things like that,” Libutti said. “So we have several interfaces that we’re working on and trying to understand how we can pull those all together using iPaaS and our data warehouse.”

For Libutti and his team, they’re just scratching the surface of what they feel they can do with iPaaS.

“We want all the data to come into the data warehouse because we know TeamDynamix iPaaS can keep all those APIs in sync, which keeps the data in sync and it ensures we are doing the transforms that need to be done to the data,” Libutti said. “Having that single source of truth – knowing the data is in sync and valid – is our main focus and why we were so interested in investing in iPaaS.”