An Amazon-Like Experience for Continuing Education Built Entirely Within PeopleSoft
Continuing Education on PeopleSoft
City Colleges of Chicago serves seven colleges across the Chicago metropolitan area with thousands of continuing education students annually. Despite strong offerings and growing demand, they faced a critical challenge: PeopleSoft Campus Solutions wasn’t designed to handle the unique requirements of continuing education enrollment, creating a fragmented process that bled revenue and frustrated students.
The Continuing Education Gap in Campus Solutions
Campus Solutions excels at managing traditional academic programs with their structured admission processes, prerequisite chains, and multi-term degree plans. But continuing education operates differently. Students need immediate enrollment for professional development courses, workforce training, and personal enrichment. They don’t want to navigate admission requirements or wait days for registration approvals. They expect the Amazon experience—browse, select, purchase, done.
Robert Clarke, Executive Director of Continuing Education and Customized Training, described the disconnect clearly. “Our system was not set up to be widely distributable and usable. We had just volumes of instructions on how to operate our systems and you know, people are not looking for instructions on how to buy things. They want the Amazon e-commerce experience.”
The numbers painted a stark picture. CCC estimated $250,000 in annual revenue left on the table from low enrollment and cancelled courses. A quarter of staff time was consumed by manually enrolling students, at approximately ten dollars per student. The registration process itself required multiple disconnected steps spread across days or weeks. Students would apply for continuing education on the website, wait for account creation in PeopleSoft, then search for courses. But finding a course was just the beginning. To actually register, students had to visit campus, call the office, or complete a Microsoft form. Staff then manually processed each registration one at a time.
Between the time students found a course and when they could complete registration, classes filled up, deadlines passed, or holds appeared on accounts. Each delay represented lost revenue and frustrated students who simply wanted to register for a course.
A Fully Integrated Solution Within PeopleSoft
Gideon Taylor deployed a comprehensive continuing education solution built entirely within the PeopleSoft framework, requiring no third-party applications. The solution combined GT UX for course search with GT eForms for application and enrollment automation, specifically addressing the gaps in Campus Solutions for continuing education.
The GT UX course search interface created a public-facing experience accessible to anyone, whether authenticated or not. The system pulls real-time data from Campus Solutions showing current seat availability, class status, and enrollment limits. Students can view comprehensive course details including descriptions, schedules, locations, fees, instructors, and class notes. Advanced filtering allows searches by term, subject, college, date, mode of instruction, and location. Each college’s unique branding appears in the interface with custom colors and identity elements.
The shopping cart functionality persists across sessions. If a logged-in user shops from multiple browsers, the system tracks all courses added to their cart. An important protection prevents enrollment problems before they occur. If tuition calculation controls haven’t been set up yet for a term, students can still see those courses in search results—so they know what’s coming—but the system prevents them from adding those courses to their cart.
The GT eForms component handles the complex orchestration of Campus Solutions processes. For new students checking out as guests, the form requires email verification with time-limited codes, then collects biographical data, demographic information, emergency contacts, and compliance data. An automatic search match runs in the background to prevent duplicate accounts. If the system finds an exact match to an existing active student, it forces the user to log in instead. If it finds multiple potential matches, it routes the application to staff for manual verification, then notifies the student via email when the match is complete.
For existing students who are authenticated, the system automatically creates a continuing education program plan stack if needed, readmits discontinued students, or creates a new career number for completed students. The form then activates the term and displays the shopping cart for review.
Regardless of whether a student is new or existing, the system performs extensive validation before enrollment. It checks for time conflicts with existing schedules, prevents duplicate course enrollments, verifies class capacity and waitlist status, checks last-day-to-enroll deadlines, detects holds on accounts and provides messaging about resolution, and verifies prerequisites. The system applies waiver and discount codes using permission lists, implements core offering logic where the first eligible course may be covered, recognizes employer-paid courses, and handles grant applications.
The technical architecture uses nine different component interfaces across eleven workflow steps. The solution required making Campus Solutions components—which don’t always lend themselves well to component interface work—function properly through configuration and custom code. The latest version of GT eForms includes a Configurable CI tool that lets functional users configure component interfaces with minimal developer intervention.
Once enrollment is complete, students can immediately access the payment gateway. If they chose to pay online, a button appears that opens their payment portal. If they don’t yet have an account in the payment system, they can create one. If they already have an account, the system logs them in automatically and they can make their payment right then and there.
From Discovery to Deployment in Six Months
The project moved from initial discovery to user acceptance testing in approximately six months. Discovery and onboarding sessions began around April or May, with teams going through initial design discussions about what would work for CCC’s specific needs. By June, the first development pass on both the eForm and search sides was complete. They laid out fields, got component interfaces running, established course indexing, and built out the basic framework.
The July development pass added form logic, search logic, and the ability to dynamically pull data from Campus Solutions—things like common attributes, class notes, dates, and all the elements needed in search display. August and September brought the third development pass focused on security, navigation, implementing change requests, and finalizing the solution. By October and November, the team entered user acceptance testing.
Robert Clarke reflected on the timeline with some surprise. “I have to admit, when I saw the six month implementation timeline, I wasn’t entirely sure that it was going to work out, but it really has. Been a great team to work with, very responsive.”
Revenue Growth and Operational Efficiency
The transformation extends beyond operational efficiency to fundamental changes in how CCC can grow their continuing education program. The previous system’s complexity limited CCC’s ability to market courses effectively. With instructions and manuals required to navigate registration, the institution couldn’t simply share course information widely and expect successful enrollment.
The new system changes that entirely. Robert Clarke outlined his vision for expansion. “One of my plans moving forward is to really activate all of the organizations that are present in Chicago, like the libraries, the CDCs, the chambers of commerce, the community organizations, and push out the fact that we have all of the courses that we do. Because once this is implemented, they’ll be able to categorize them, search them, register for them without having it flooding, to be honest, our continuing Ed teams.”
The ability to create deep links to specific courses or categories of courses becomes a force multiplier for marketing efforts. Organizations throughout Chicago can direct their constituents to exactly the right courses for their needs, and those students can complete registration immediately without manual intervention from CCC staff.
The revenue trajectory tells a compelling story. In 2020, CCC’s continuing education revenue was $450,000. By 2024, it had grown to $1.9 million—without the benefit of the new system. Clarke’s projection with the new system in place: “Maybe 3 million.”
He emphasized the payment simplification as equally critical. “Payment is also a huge thing that’s being simplified by this. We had just volumes of instructions on how to operate our systems and you know, people are not looking for instructions on how to buy things. They want the Amazon e-commerce experience, and that’s what this is going to give us.” The time savings are dramatic. Students can complete registration in five to ten minutes, a little longer if they’re brand new to the system, compared to the previous requirement to come into the office, talk to someone, and find time in their day to register for a course.
Results at a Glance
- $250,000 in previously lost revenue now recoverable from low enrollment and cancelled courses
- $10 per student manual enrollment cost eliminated
- 25% of staff time freed from manual enrollment processing
- 5-10 minutes for complete registration versus days previously
- Revenue growth from $450,000 (2020) to $1.9 million (2024), projecting $3 million with new system
Expanding the Solution
The transformation isn’t stopping with continuing education enrollment. CCC is already working on additional forms using the same framework, including forms to update preferred names and pass-through course fees. Laura Clark, Associate Vice Chancellor of Academic Systems Records and Policy, noted their enthusiasm. “We have lots of other ideas, but we want to make sure these are solid first, but very excited to keep using and creating these forms.”
The solution demonstrates what’s possible when innovative technology meets deep expertise in Campus Solutions. As one webinar attendee commented during the presentation, “That is as slick as any SaaS demo I’ve seen. Kudos to the team showing a lot can still be done with Campus Solutions.”
Building Your Continuing Education Solution
For institutions struggling with similar challenges in continuing education, the CCC case study offers both inspiration and a roadmap. PeopleSoft Campus Solutions can support robust continuing education programs when extended with the right tools and expertise. Complex business rules and validations can be automated while maintaining data integrity. Revenue growth does follow when barriers to enrollment are removed.
Modern user experiences can exist within Campus Solutions, and with the right PeopleSoft consulting partner and methodology, transformation can happen in months, not years. The key is recognizing where Campus Solutions needs augmentation for continuing education requirements and deploying purpose-built solutions that integrate seamlessly with the core system.
Product Showcase
Technical Implementation Details
- Course Search
- The course search front-end is populated using PeopleSoft-delivered Search Framework and associated components with indexes run daily to return updated search results. GT UX delivered connected query and associated queries and views were cloned and modified to meet the unique needs of CCC and integrate Common Attribute Framework, Dynamic Dating, Course Attributes, Class Notes, and more.
- Course Search results contain real-time data, such as open seat count and course status to provide up-to-the second feedback for users.
- Branding is fully customized to CCC’s needs.
- GT eForms
- Leverages class permission lists and custom logic to provide discounts depending on course(s) selected and previous enrollment
- Implements conflict checking to prevent enrollment in the event a course is no longer open, conflicts with existing enrollment, has a time conflict with existing enrollment, and other checks typically done through Quick Admit.
- Implements existing CCC Campus Solutions Search Match Rules to perform an auto-match and allow for manual matching when needed.
- Integrates with NelNet payment gateway for account creation (or access) and immediate payment.
- Provides unique messaging to give feedback on component interface status (error messages to admins, informational messages to students) and admin notifications for error resolution.
- Implements Configurable CI – a functional eForms tool to create component interfaces and update records. CCC’s Configurable CI contains a mix of functional setup and PeopleCode to accomplish system updates.
- Workflow to accommodate manual search match and pay in person scenarios.