North Carolina Justice Academy Implements Virtual Campus Using Acadis® Readiness Suite

As the premier criminal justice training academy in North Carolina, NCJA strives to constantly evolve and find ways to get better. It was with this perspective in 2014 that NCJA leaders sought to address several challenges in how the academy managed and provided training to personnel throughout the state.

One of these challenges involved using several different software applications to manage academy operations. Like many large law enforcement organizations, NCJA had personnel data spread out across individualized applications and desktop files. At the same time, NCJA’s training workflow was fragmented between paper processes and multiple, siloed digital processes. This situation, combined with the decentralized data, limited the academy’s capacity to meet the needs of students and to aggregate data in a timely manner for management reports.

Opportunity

In seeking training management software to best serve the state’s public safety officers in the years ahead, NCJA looked for a comprehensive system to integrate all of its primary functions, such as academy class management, a publicly accessible course catalog, registration system, scheduling, housing, and an online learning management system (LMS).

Goals

NCJA contacted Acadis® and provided a list of requirements to an Acadis® program manager, who responded line-by-line, consulting NCJA on which module of Acadis®’s Acadis Readiness Suite met each requirement. Of the many requirements listed, one of NCJA’s primary objectives was to fulfill its vision of a Virtual Campus. The vision called for a seamless system where students could access the course catalog, see basic course information like prerequisites and available seats, register for classes, update account information, take online events, and print course attendance certificates within a secure, personalized environment. In turn, NCJA staff would have 24/7 access to centralized, online training data with on-demand reporting to always know the progress of their students.

Solution Deployed

NCJA chose the Acadis® Software as a Service (SaaS) model with cloud hosting. With the SaaS model, there was no hardware to buy, no software to maintain, no network to monitor, nor staff to train – all yielding a quicker setup for NCJA.

The Academy also took advantage of the modular nature of Acadis, customizing its solution with Acadis Training, Acadis Learning Management System, Acadis Scheduling, Acadis Registration/Online Registration, Acadis Housing, Acadis Documents, and the Acadis Person Portal and Registration Portal.

Results

NCJA has grown significantly since it began its journey with Acadis. It is managing its training operations for both campuses through the effective use of Acadis modularization. It cites the realization of its Virtual Campus vision as a game-changer for North Carolina.

With more than 250 miles of travel between its Eastern and Western campuses, NCJA has found online training to be exceptionally popular and useful for officers across the state. Throughout North Carolina, use of the Acadis® Portal and Acadis® Online Registration enables students to review the publicly available NCJA course catalog and empowers them to request new account approval. It then allows approved students to securely log in, view online event registration information, review the prerequisites, determine the type of class (e.g. online, classroom, or blended), determine if the event is open, waitlisted, or full, register for the desired course, and enter course qualifications for approval. When an online LMS event is approved by administration, the link to the course appears on the student’s Acadis® Personal Portal page, and they can take their training as their schedule permits. After the student completes the class, they can see the event title and grade added to their training record in Acadis® Personal Portal, as well as print a certificate of their accomplishment.

In turn, from the centralized Acadis® Training Management, Acadis® Learning Management, and Acadis® Registration modules, NCJA staff can:

1) Review, approve, and update new student accounts,
2) Review, approve, and enroll students into online events
3) Monitor student accounts, student progress, and success rates

With a modularized, data-centric LMS software like Acadis, interruptive phone calling, emailing, and paper tracking are virtually eliminated. As a result of NCJA’s hard work and emphasis in providing convenient, high-quality online courses, NCJA’s annual number of online courses completed has skyrocketed from 1,883 in 2015 to 106,305 in 2018.