Course and Staff On-Line Professional Development Management System

VESC™ offers one of the most robust and well test Course and Staff Professional Development Management systems on the market today.  Offering on-line course registration; on-line course of catalogs; staff transcripts; separate administrator, principal, instructor, and participant management areas; principal/instructor approval systems; fee collection via credit cards, if necessary; printed transcripts of completed and enrolled courses; calendar of up-coming professional development course offerings; and many other features.

General Features:

• Provides a comprehensive professional development website presence for the management of professional development courses offered by your school or for professional development courses taken by your staff at other institutions. 
• Provides professional development administrators with a central database to manage all professional development activities.
• Provides a communication system allow professional development administrators to communicate with staff interested or assigned to take professional development coursework.
• Comprehensive course listing, publishing, and description system.
• Automated email approval system, automatically requests enrollment permission from administrators, principals, and/or instructors via email.
• Automated course payment system, if fees are required to be paid, the system can collect the fees using credit card or e-check. 
• Provides printed reports of participant transcripts and course completion statistics.
• Automatically creates a printed catalog for distribution in print or electronic format in PDF format.
• Comprehensive homepage announcement system allowing professional development administrators to post important and emergency notices quickly and easily on the website from any web browser, at any time – no coding necessary, just a simple form is used.  Perfect for school closings, course cancellations, course date-changes, new requirement announcements, and general announcements.
• Homepage gives instant access to complete list of course offerings including real-time updates of number of seats available and total enrollment.
• Homepage provides program announcement and news updates. 
• System can be easily expanded by VESC or by adding new web pages by using common web development tools. 
• Compatible with all major web servers including Apache and Microsoft IIS.
• Compatible with all major web browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape, and Opera.
• All data can be output to Microsoft Applications including Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Outlook, and Microsoft Access.
• System can be limited to use school email addresses only or any email address for registration.
• System supports up to 250,000 participants and over 1,999 courses per month, semester, quarter, or year. 
• System utilizes SSL 128 bit security to ensure the secure transmission and reception of all information to and from the web server and user.

Administrator Management System:

• Course Category Manager (i.e., Science, Math, etc.)
• Add an unlimited number of courses categories in each season.
• Course Seasons Manager (i.e., Fall 2006, Spring 2007, etc.)
• Season can be yearly, quarterly, or monthly.
• Comprehensive Course Manager
  • All course information including dates, times, descriptions, email/phone contacts, instructor information, fees (if applicable), etc. are all entered into one database, which may/may not be updated by the instructor.
  • Courses can be easily set to “published”, allowing participants to view the course information but not enroll.
  • Courses can be easily set to “enroll” allowing participants to view the course information and enroll in the course.
  • Courses automatically close when full, and re-open, if necessary, when participants drop a course.  The system self-monitors seat availability at all times ensuring all seats that are available, are open to participants for enrollment.
• Course Delete (For top level administrators only)
  • Automatically delete a course, and automatically un-enroll and email enrolled participants.
• Instructor Manager
  • Manage all instructors teaching professional development coursework.
• Participant Manager
  • Manage all aspects of teachers/participants using the system to enroll/manage their professional development coursework.
• Administrator Manager
  • Easily add/delete administrators authorized to manage the system.
• Course Rosters
  • Easily lookup and/or print complete course rosters for any course from a single screen.
• Administrator Participant Enrollment
  • Administrators can enroll a participant in any course.
• Administrator Drop Participant From Course
  • Administrators can drop a participant from any course.
• Broadcast Email to Administrators, Instructors, and/or Participants
  • Email all administrators, instructors, and/or participants for announcement purposes.
• Edit Program News (administrators can automatically update homepage with news from administrators – i.e., class announcements, snow-days, etc.)
• Edit Program Information (administrators can automatically update homepage concerning the general program information)
• Participant Records Report
  • Print simple or complex reports regarding participant enrollment and completion of courses.
  • Print custom transcripts for participants. 
• Course Instructor Assignment Reports
  • Prints report of instructor course assignments.
• Course Contact Reports
• Prints report of course contact information.
• Staff Lists and Contacts
  • Prints reports concerning staff contact information.
• System Access Logs Reports
  • Complete access to all login and access logs for administrators.  Every administrator action is tracked to backtrack any problems. 
• Administrator Access Login Reports
  • All administrators, instructors, participants, and principals are logged in and out of the system.  The users IP address is also recorded in case the computer being used needs to be tracked.
• Generate Course Catalog for Season (automatically generates a PDF course catalog for any given Season)
  • System automatically generates a catalog for print or electronic distribution in PDF format.  (You must have Adobe Acrobat Professional to use this feature, otherwise, the catalog can be saved in Microsoft-Word format.)
• Enrollment Statistics Report by Year and Season
• Administrator Communication System allows District 75 Administrators to easily communicate with each other concerning the System.
• Any administrator, instructor, principal, or participant may be denied access to the system by one-click by any master administrator. 
• Multiple levels of security can be created to give certain administrators master access and other administrator’s limited access to the administrative system controls.
• Administrators may add notes to most administrator, instructor, participant, and course records.  These notes are only visible to administrators.
• Reports.  A number of reports, including enrollment statistics, total number of enrollments, total number of courses, participant participation, and web-site usage are easily available from the administrator interface.
• Any enrollment errors are immediately emailed to school/district professional development administrator as well as VESC personnel for immediate response.

Instructor Management System:

• Quick View Class Rosters
  • Display/print participants in course, including name, email, enrollment, and if necessary, payment status.
• Complete Detailed View Class Rosters
  • Display/print participants in course, including name, address, phone, assigned school, grades taught, email, enrollment status, and if necessary, payment status.
• Edit All Participants in Course (i.e., enter attendance, grades, for all participants in a course at once.)
• Edit Participant Information (i.e., update a single participant records)
• Email All Participants in a Course
  • Instructors can email all participants in a course at once for announcement purposes.  Instructors will be able to attach files to the emails in the new release. 
• Register Participant in My Course
  • If the system administrator approves, Instructors can enroll participants directly in their course(s).
• Update My Personal Information
  • Allows instructors to keep their contact information up to date with the district/school professional development office.
• Multiple Instructors can be assigned to a single course, and all Instructors can manage all participants.
• Instructor’s must enter their initials and date upon course completion to pass a participant in an enrolled course.  Once entered, the course is automatically included on the participants permanent record. 
• Instructor’s can record student withdrawals from class and the reason.

Principal Management System

• Quick View Current Staff Class Enrollments
• Complete View Of All Staff Professional Development Coursework
• Approve Staff Member for Course Enrollment
• Edit School and Personal Information
• Email All Staff Members
• A single Principal can be assigned to multiple schools for Participant approval/record keeping. 
• Print Staff Member Transcript
  • Allows a principal to print a official transcript of all professional development courses completed for a staff member.
• Principals receive email approval requests when staff members request enrollment, if necessary.  Principals simply click a link in their email to either approve or disapprove the staff members enrollment request. 
• Principals are automatically notified if a staff member drops a professional development course. (The system can also be set to require Principal Approval to drop a course as well.)

Participant Course Registration System

• On-line registration using e-mail verification
• Catalogue of available courses with
  • instructor contact information
  • number of available seats
  • location of course
  • dates and days of course
  • last available registration date
• Enroll in Course
• Drop Course
• Change Password
• Request Principal Approval (automatically occurs via email, if course requires approval)
• Request Instructor Approval (automatically occurs via email, if course requires approval)
• Request Professional Development Administrator Approval (automatically occurs via email, if course requires approval)
• Update Personal Information
• Contact Administrators
• List All Courses Taken and Currently Enrolled
• Print Invoices and Other Documentation
• Participants can select an school/principal from a list where requests for approvals will automatically be sent via email, if necessary for enrollment.
• Participants can request to be “wait-listed” for a course that is full.  If the course re-opens, the participant will automatically be enrolled in the course.

Professional Development  Calendar System

• Comprehensive Calendar system allowing professional development administrators to easily maintain an up-to-date calendar of course offerings..
• Calendar is extremely attractive, easy-to-use, and interactive.
• Calendar can be displayed in multiple views including full month, full day, list of upcoming activities, etc.
• Calendars can be easily integrated on any web page the school/district creates by adding a few simple lines of code.  School personnel designing new web pages can easily control the look and display of the Calendar.
• Calendar system is RSS compatible allowing staff to receive automatic updates and news delivered directly to their email, computer desktop, or even their own website.  Any changes made to the calendar will be immediately updated to users using the RSS feed.
• Calendar system can be implemented and synchronized with all major Calendar systems including:
• Microsoft Outlook
• Trumba Calendar
• MSN/Hotmail Calendar
• Applle iCal
• Google Calendar
• Calendar events can be emailed to any email address from the website by any user to themselves or another user as a reminder.
• All Calendar events can be downloaded into Microsoft Excel and other popular Microsoft products.
• Calendar events can be text-messaged to most cell-phones.
• Calendar system automatically creates a list on the homepage of all upcoming events.
• Calendars can be updated by administrators from any web-browser, at any time.

Web Hosting and Management

• Software can be licensed and installed on school/district server or VESC can host the system on our enterprise class servers managed by RackSpace.com – a leading ISP ensuring 99.9% uptime and data backup/recovery. 
• Software can be customized to meet any district/school professional development need.
• Software can be integrated with most database systems.
• Yearly license fee includes phone, email, and on-line support; all software updates released during your contracted year; and daily off-site backups of all software and data.

• VESC offers on-site and/or on-line training for the system. 
• Complete instruction manuals will be provided for each section of the website in PDF format and on-line.
• Administrators have access to phone, email, and on-line support from 9am – 5pm Monday – Friday, and cell phone access 24 hours a day to a VESC technician.
• Instructors and Principals are encouraged to send all support requests via email, however, phone support is available 9am – 5pm, Monday – Friday EST.

• VESC will assist all participants in their use of the system via email.  Email requests for assistance are normally answered within 60 minutes Monday – Friday, 9am – 6pm EST.

• Chat and Forum System for Administrator, Instructor, and/or Participant use are available at an additional fee depending upon use and number of simultaneous users.
• For a description of the available chat and forum systems, please view or 3-in-1 Communication Solution for Schools and Districts, http://vesc-education.com/3in1/

• The system may be used as the central homepage for a professional development department for a school/district.
• Administrators can add pages to the system to build a robust web-site presence without the need of another web server. 

Click here to View the Demo Site!

For more information about the
Staff and Course On-Line Professional Development Management System
please contact Ventures Education Systems™ Corporation at
212-566-2522 or toll-free 800-947-6278 ext. 110
Email: info@vesc-education.com