Case Study: Durham TAFE, Toronto

Overview
Located one hour east of Toronto Canada, Durham TAFE is a success story of how a small regional TAFE grew into a national powerhouse educational institution.

Their recent renovations and expansions have produced a world class Student Services Building, a beautiful IT Services Lab and a new Whitby Campus in a refurbished Chocolate factory.

The Challenge
Durham TAFE wanted to provide enhanced and robust services to their 8,400 full time and 3,600+ part time/apprenticed students.

Durham had tried to build their own Student Flow solution, but the project was met with many challenges. Building an application in-house requires substantial development time and the skilled resources to design, build, test and deploy the application. Durham found that the initiative consumed too many valuable in-house resources that could not be fully dedicated to the effort as required to make it successful.

Durham therefore approached NEXA’s partner Q-nomy to better understand how the Q-Flow solution could meet their growing needs.

The Solution
After initial investigation by the TAFE, Q-Flow was rolled out to meet the TAFE requirements, deployed in a series of three phases.

Phase One – Self Check-In at the Kiosks for students using their student ID cards with Magnetic Card Readers. Also deployed was functionality such as: Receptionist functions, Calendar booking with tier two resources, and dynamic queuing for seasonal events, digital signage and audio announcements. Part of this deployment was a full integration into the TAFE’s student management CRM system.

Phase Two – involved implementing SMS features for dynamic queue management, on-line booking and web-check-in via the TAFE’s web site as well as a full deployment in the IT Services and Lab areas. The space in the IT Services area was challenging as the vaulted ceilings and angled positions for the digital signage were not easy to access, or cable to.

Phase Three – was the Whitby Campus deployment. Whitby is about 30 minutes southwest of Oshawa. This location focuses on Skilled Trades, IT, Hospitality, Travel and Leisure Industry studies and services approximately 2,000 students. The unique layout of this building allowed for a large Common Area in the centre point of it that was repurposed as a lounge/lunch/study area.

Within the common area in Whitby, they deployed four counter service areas, four self-serve kiosks and seven digital information displays as well as another Kiosk in the Computer Lab with a digital information display.

Products:

Student Experience

“After working with Q-nomy for over a year now, I can say that we were all very pleased with both their product and the team. We have been extremely pleased with Q-Flow and are always impressed with its functionality and ease of use. Adding new Agents / Workstations and departments has been a very smooth process. Based on how fast our institution is growing, it is definitely an asset being able to scale up and leverage all of Q-Flow’s features.”

Angie Paisley, Associate Registrar, Student Service Operations Durham TAFE