Search. Click. Enroll: How City Colleges of Chicago Transformed Continuing Education in 6 Months
An Amazon-Like Experience Built Entirely Within PeopleSoft Campus Solutions
“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.”
— Robert Clarke, Executive Director of Continuing Education and Customized Training
Results at a Glance
City Colleges of Chicago transformed their continuing education enrollment process from a manual, multi-step ordeal into a streamlined e-commerce experience—all within six months and entirely within PeopleSoft Campus Solutions.
Key Outcomes:
- $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 trajectory: From $450,000 (2020) to $1.9 million (2024), projecting $3 million with new system
The Challenge: A Broken Registration Experience
City Colleges of Chicago serves seven colleges across the Chicago metropolitan area, offering continuing education courses to thousands of students annually. Despite strong course offerings and growing demand, the institution faced a continuing education enrollment process that was silently bleeding revenue and frustrating everyone involved.
The numbers painted a clear picture of the problem. A quarter of staff time was consumed by manually enrolling students, at a cost of approximately ten dollars per student. The institution estimated that $250,000 in annual revenue was left on the table due to low enrollment and courses being cancelled before they could run. The process itself was convoluted and disconnected, requiring multiple steps spread across days or even weeks.
Students would typically begin by visiting the CCC website to apply for continuing education—a process entirely separate from actually registering for courses. Once they completed the application and their account was created in PeopleSoft, they could then search for courses. But finding a course they wanted was just the beginning of their journey, not the end. To actually register, students had to either visit a campus in person, call the continuing education office, or fill out a Microsoft form. Staff would then manually process these registrations, one at a time.
The delays inherent in this fragmented process created cascading problems. Between the time a student found a course they wanted and when they could actually complete registration, classes would fill up, last-day-to-enroll deadlines would pass, or holds would appear on student accounts. Each delay represented not just frustration for students and staff, but lost revenue for the institution.
Robert Clarke, Executive Director of Continuing Education and Customized Training, described the situation 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 challenge wasn’t just about improving an existing process—it required fundamentally reimagining how continuing education enrollment could work. CCC needed a solution that would eliminate manual processing, serve both new and existing students seamlessly, and complete the entire journey from course discovery to enrollment in a single session. But here’s where it got complex: unlike buying a product on Amazon, Campus Solutions enrollment requires sophisticated validation. The system needs to check for schedule conflicts, verify enrollment eligibility, prevent duplicate enrollments, manage holds on accounts, calculate tuition accurately, create program plan stacks, and execute admits, term activations, and enrollments—all while making this complexity invisible to the user.
The Solution: GT eForms and GT UX Working Together
Gideon Taylor deployed a comprehensive solution built entirely within the PeopleSoft framework, requiring no third-party applications and no additional integrations to manage. The solution combined two of GT’s core offerings: GT UX (formerly Web UX) for the course search experience and GT eForms for the application and enrollment automation.
The GT UX course search interface created a public-facing search accessible to anyone, whether authenticated or not. The system pulls real-time data from Campus Solutions to show current seat availability, class status, and enrollment limits. Students can view rich 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, so if a logged-in user shops from multiple browsers, the system tracks all courses they’ve added to their cart.
One particularly important feature 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 displayed in search results—so they know what’s coming—but the system prevents them from adding those courses to their cart. This protects data integrity while maintaining transparency about future offerings.
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 and demographic data, emergency contact information, 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. If no matches are found, the application proceeds with creating a new account.
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. All of this happens in real-time as students review their cart.
The technical architecture behind this seamless experience is sophisticated. The solution uses nine different component interfaces across eleven workflow steps. Cash Staley and the GT technical team worked extensively to make Campus Solutions components—which don’t always lend themselves well to component interface work—function properly through a combination of 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, though for this Campus Solutions implementation, the team estimates it was roughly fifty-fifty between configurable elements and custom code.
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.
Chuck Richey, GT’s solution architect on the project, explained the technical foundation: “The class search is built with GT UX framework which leverages the PeopleSoft search framework. Behind the scenes everything’s currently OpenSearch. The actual results come back and we’re using our SDK, so we can tap into some features that sometimes isn’t available on screen with normal searches. The checkout process uses Oracle Jet’s framework, which has the Redwood themes, and we have it rebranded to meet the CCC styles. We worked closely with their marketing team and they provided a lot of great design input.”
The Implementation Journey
The project moved from initial discovery to user acceptance testing in approximately six months, following a structured approach with clear milestones. Discovery and onboarding sessions began around April or May, with the teams going through initial design discussions, talking about what would work, what wouldn’t work, and how to build the solution to meet CCC’s specific needs.
By June, the team had completed the first pass of development on both the eForm and search sides. They laid out fields, got the component interfaces up and running, established the course indexing process, and built out the basic framework. The next development pass in July added more form logic, search logic, and the ability to dynamically pull data from Campus Solutions—things like common attributes, class notes, dates, and all the different elements that needed to appear in the search display.
August and September brought the third development pass, which focused on hooking up security, getting navigation working, implementing change requests that had come up along the way, and finalizing the solution. By October and November, the team entered user acceptance testing with hopes to go live very quickly.
Robert Clarke reflected on the timeline: “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. There’s a lot of customization that we’ve been able to do, so very happy to start using it.”
The Impact and Future Vision
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 the registration process, the institution couldn’t simply share course information widely and expect people to successfully enroll.
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 of what’s possible when barriers to enrollment are removed. In 2020, CCC’s continuing education revenue was $450,000. By last year, it had grown to $1.9 million—without the benefit of the new system. Clarke’s projection for the next year, with the new system in place: “Maybe 3 million. We’ll see.”
He emphasized another critical benefit: “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.”
Shawn Brett from Gideon Taylor highlighted the dramatic time savings: “You know there’s anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes to complete your registration. A little bit longer if you’re a brand new person, but compared to having to go in manually for a student to come into the office, talk to someone, find time in their day to register for a course, being able to get that down to 10 minutes or less is pretty cool.”
Robert Clarke emphasized the marketing potential: “I think that’s going to be a huge force multiplier for us is the just the ability to get links to specific courses and categories of courses out to the public.”
The transformation isn’t stopping with continuing education enrollment. CCC is already working on additional forms using the same framework. Laura Clark noted: “We’re doing one to update preferred name and we’re doing one to update something called pass through—it’s just additional course fees, pass through charges, course fees. So we plan on using the CI tools for both of those too.”
Leo Pappalas added: “We have our own career and then they’ll get activated with the program action of activate or if they already exist but are inactive, they get a readmit row on top of that or if they’re completed, they’ll get a new career number created. And then after, the term activation happens and it ties to the career number that was either activated or readmitted.”
Laura Clark concluded: “We have lots of other ideas, but we want to make sure these are solid first, but very excited to keep using creating these forms.”
The solution demonstrates what’s possible when innovative technology meets deep expertise in Campus Solutions. As one webinar attendee commented: “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. This is a lot of work testing.”
Conclusion
City Colleges of Chicago’s transformation from a manual, fragmented enrollment process to a seamless e-commerce experience represents more than just a technology implementation. It demonstrates how institutions can fundamentally improve student experience, operational efficiency, and revenue growth without replacing their core systems.
The six-month timeline from discovery to user acceptance testing proves that significant transformation doesn’t require years of effort. The elimination of $10-per-student manual processing costs and recovery of $250,000 in lost revenue provides clear financial justification. The freeing of 25% of staff time from manual enrollment creates capacity for strategic work and improved service. Most importantly, the compression of a days-long enrollment journey into 5-10 minutes removes friction that was preventing students from accessing education.
For institutions struggling with similar challenges in continuing education or other areas requiring complex enrollment processes, the CCC case study offers both inspiration and a roadmap. Modern user experiences can exist within PeopleSoft Campus Solutions. Complex business rules and validations can be automated while maintaining data integrity. Revenue growth does follow when barriers to enrollment are removed. And with the right partner and methodology, transformation can happen in months, not years.
About the Solution
This case study is based on the GT Lunch and Learn presentation “Click. Enroll: Transforming Continuing Education with GT UX and eForms” presented in October 2024.
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Ready to transform your continuing education program or other complex enrollment processes? Contact Gideon Taylor to discuss your specific challenges and how solutions like those implemented at City Colleges of Chicago could be adapted for your institution.
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