Spring is Here; Change is in the air!

Banner Modernization Project

In November last year, a Strategic Alignment Planning exercise was conducted to help plan the digital future for Harding. This exercise was focused on our main systems from Ellucian, which is primarily Banner. We want to ensure that we are maximizing the value of our investments in the Ellucian solutions and that we have a clear roadmap to keep our Ellucian products and services aligned with modern technology and operation efficiencies.


The major deliverable from this exercise is the Banner Modernization Project. There are many items in this project, but the overall objective is to ensure that our deployment of Banner is always aligned with the latest updates and features. As is common with most vendors in the higher education space, there is a concerted move to have products like Banner be implemented in the cloud as Software as a Service (SaaS). While this is some time away from being fully implemented, we want you to be aware that a SaaS implementation will bring changes to what we can and cannot do ourselves and will lead to business process changes.

The first steps in the project will be to implement Ellucian Experience and the Intelligent Learning Platform.

Ellucian Experience is a platform that ties all the operation elements of Banner (and other services) into one place. Experience is a centralized and secure information hub. It can be tailored to fit the roles that we fulfill. One major outcome we see is that Experience would replace Pipeline! The intention is to make this a ‘soft’ rollout where we will have a pilot group use and stress test Experience and from there enter an opt-in period where we can choose to opt-in to using Experience. During this opt-in time we should be able to switch back and forth between Pipeline and Experience. Following the opt-in period, there would be a hard cutover time.

We are planning for the opt-in period to begin in the first quarter of 2024.

The Intelligent Learning Platform (ILP) provides a tight integration between Banner and Canvas. Currently we are using homegrown software to provide this integration. As we move forward, it is better to use the platform that comes with Banner. ILP works seamlessly with Experience to the point where it can send reminders to students of upcoming assignments (if of course all this information is in Canvas). ILP implementation is planned to be in place by the Summer of 2024.

Cyber Security Update

One of the key requirements of our Cyber Insurance policy is to have fake phishing exercises and any follow-up training that may be needed! I can only guess what we are all thinking about this! Please don’t look down on the folks in IS&T because of this.

However, because those bad actors that send out the phishing emails and so forth keep getting ‘better’ and looking more and more legitimate, we are about to start sending out fake phishing emails and invite some who may be hooked by the fake phishing bait to undertake some online training. The training will be in the form of 3-5 minute videos, most of which are animated. The video is followed by a simple quiz. Here is a sample video (our videos will be more suited to a higher education institution) - https://player.vimeo.com/video/344657894
The fake phishing emails will be sent out randomly. Some will focus on particular groups and others will be to the general community.

Changes in Google's Agreement

Google is changing the way they handle storage. Because of this, it was necessary for us to purchase Google licenses instead of using the “free” version of Google. The licenses we purchased are called Google Plus Licenses and are available for current employees and current students.

Our new licenses come with some nice features. Most of them are administrative, but there are some enhancements to Google Meet that we think will be helpful to you.  

• Q&A – allows anyone in the Meeting to ask questions. The moderator can filter the questions, mark them as answered or hide them.

• Breakout Rooms – moderators can divide participants into smaller groups during the Meet.

• Record a Meeting – recordings are saved in your Google Drive.

• Transcripts – Captures a transcription of the Meet that is saved in your Google Drive.

• Noise Cancellation – helps to limit distractions in the Meet and filter out background noise.

• Attendance Reports – track Meeting attendance automatically.

You don’t need to do anything to use your new Google license. It has already been applied to your account. Licenses for students with similar features will be added soon.

New Telephone system coming...

If you haven’t already, please complete the survey that will help us determine the features of the future telephone system that will be installed.


We have had 354 people respond so far. That is a great response to the survey. Here are some of the early results:

In the charts below, 5 - strongly agree and 1 - strongly disagree.

The survey closes this Friday, March 24, 2023.
Here is a link to the survey: https://forms.gle/1tsRJ4graSDScp4n6.