Case Study: Carteret Community College

Let there be productivity

Marjorie Gross, instructor of Mathematics at Carteret Community College, had an organizational problem.  Like many other instructors, professors and business professionals, she was used to just jamming papers that she thought she might need into filing cabinets (or worse -- leaving them lying in piles around the office) and then scrambling around to find them later so she could run them down to the copy machine before class.

With the advent of Barbara Hemphill's Taming the Paper Tiger methodology, she was able to dramatically improve her productivity.  The Paper Tiger software gave her the ability to quickly locate and access copies of anything and everything she needed for her classes.  Until her computer crashed.  And she lost everything.

Out of the ashes

Fortunately, the advent of iPEP, a next generation hosted organization solution put an end to storing important files in one, vulnerable location.  By keeping everything "in the cloud," Marjorie was still able to access a searchable database that would point her, in less than five seconds, to any document she wished without fearing a virus or hardware failure.

But iPEP goes far beyond even that.  "Little by little I have been uploading whole files so I can access them from anywhere I am," said Marjorie.  "I don’t even have to be in the office to access whatever I need...I can just pull it up and send it to the printer."

There when you need it

While most jobs come with enough work and responsibility on their own, unfortunately it almost never stops there.  Generally, this takes the shape of meetings and committees that require endless back-and-forths, either in person, over the phone, or via email.

For Marjorie, a major extracurricular time-sink was the accreditation review committee of which she was the captain.  Because the college found itself under budgetary restrictions on supplies such as paper, she uploaded everything to a page in iPEP that anyone on the committee could access.  This meant that anyone could comment or raise questions on the topics-at-hand from wherever they had internet access.  As well, instead of running off handouts for each meeting, committee members had only to arrive with their laptops to have instant access to the most up-to-date versions of...well...everything.

"iPEP has already stirred quite a bit of interest among other people at the college.  Just the paper savings, I know, is making a dollars difference (not cents) just from this one committee," said Marjorie.  This may not seem like much, but when you think of what a difference this could make if it were adopted by every committee at the college, it becomes pretty significant.

Moving Forward

Marjorie is making plans to switch over from "seat classes" to primarily online courses.  With iPEP and PBworks, Marjorie is confident that moving from working in her office and seeing students face-to-face to working from home and electronically distributing and collecting assignments will be nothing short of "a smooth transition."