A few years ago, Florida Christian College found itself in territory that is familiar to many, if not most, small Bible colleges.  To reach its full mission, it had to find a way to serve those students who needed to pursue an education but for whom job or family pressures meant attending college could not be a full-time endeavor.

FCC opted to make its adult education courses available online.  Jim Byrd was brought in as Assistant Director of Online Initiatives to help the college make the transition.  His first task was to choose a platform.

FCC already had a relationship with Knowledge Elements, which had provided an occasional online course for students who needed it at a time when it wasn’t feasible for the college to offer the class.  The onsite adult degree completion program setup was guided by the Knowledge Elements team several years previously.

Florida Christian College needed a platform that would allow it to develop its own robust course offerings and a partner that would provide the support it needed.  After much research, Byrd ended up where he began—with Knowledge Elements.

“If a professor or student is having a problem, I’ve got to come up with an answer, and do so fairly quickly,” Byrd said.  “I’m confident that if I have an issue or need help, I can get it and get it quickly.  That means a lot.”

Florida Christian has opted to develop most of its own courses using its own faculty.  That meant training and support was an important deciding factor.
 
“I knew very little when I took the job and I did a lot of self-educating,” he said.  “Support is a very important thing.”

Florida Christian College also uses Knowledge Elements to host all of its online offerings and has found its reliability unmatched.  Because Knowledge Elements technical infrastructure is both highly scalable and includes numerous built-in redundancies, the system is available when a student needs it.

“Because of the nature of an adult-completion program, students are often sitting down to take the class at 11 p.m., after a work day and after they’ve put the kids to bed,” Byrd said.  “We need to make sure that the system is always up and available.  We’ve had no significant outages with Knowledge Elements in the four years we’ve been doing it.  They’ve built a strong infrastructure that we can rely on.”