CCC Systemwide Technology Platform

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA): Under this model, siloed applications are deconstructed into their component services and connected via secure Internet communications. This enables these component services to be reused by college or vendor applications and combined into composite applications.

Enterprise Portals: Most of the colleges are moving to some form of portal interface for their students. By providing our systemwide applications as portlets to the colleges, they can be plugged in to provide additional services and functionality for students. In addition, a systemwide portal would tie together our applications with a common front end.

Federated Identity: CSU, UC, and the California Community Colleges (CCC) have Federated Identity initiatives based on the InCommon Federation. Click for information about centrally paid InCommon membership for CCC. InCommon includes over 200 higher education Institutions, government agencies and vendors. The OpenCCC Federated Identity enables a common sign-in for students and staff across systemwide applications and institutions while increasing security and privacy.

Elastic Cloud Infrastructure: The emergence of elastic cloud platforms, where the computing power behind deployed applications is monitored to scale up or down to service demand loads, has made it possible to efficiently handle the annual cyclic student demand on student services applications without having to build a large data center to handle peak loads.

Business Intelligence: To facilitate analysis of student pathways, outcomes, transfer, and institutional performance for continuous improvement, there is a need to bring together various disparate data sourced from the existing applications within our system, and tie them together into usable structures that can be easily researched and presented to end users in a usable format for immediate and future decision making purposes.

Transforming The Platform

With the emergence of services from statewide initiatives such as CCC MyPath, new requirements have surfaced for the Systemwide Technology Platform.

Project Glue/SuperGlue: To not overwhelm college IT departments with connecting many new services to their Student Information Systems, there is a need to have a common connector and local control mechanism so that college IT only have to implement one interface and can control how data flows into and out of their SIS.

Data Lake: All of the new systemwide services are generating actionable data that can improve student outcomes and facilitate institutional improvement. There is a need to save data for long term research opportunities.

In-Memory Computing: Compute-intensive operations such as the recommender engine in the CCC MyPath portal must run in real time at a scale of tens of thousands of simultaneous sessions.