Modern Campus Lifelong Learning

Overall: We have a centralized system and database that is utilized by multiple campuses at various locations. A single repository for information that allows for online registration and integration of program information across multiple platforms is a something we did not have before.

Pros: The flexibility of the product to accommodate various use cases is important for a continuing education unit. Also, Destiny One has come a long way to provide vendor hosted users access to customization and configurations. This allows us to be agile and responsive to the customers needs.

Cons: Eastern time zone of the company headquarters can delay progress and response time. However, urgent issues are handled in a timely manner.

Overall: The previous iteration of our company had no overall plan to bring a cohesive, unified working experience to both the staff user and client experience. Destiny One has helped us bring all aspects of this in line with modern business practices and develop more realistic expectations plans to create a better experience for staff/customers. Although we experience pain integrating the software with our needs, we are hopeful that better communication and upgrades will result in an even better relationship between Destiny One and our department.

Pros: Once the software is properly configured, the DestinyOne software is very powerful. It handles the needs for daily use very well. The procedural flow of tasks are a joy to complete. Strong links from all aspects of a clients' info in the staff view is really useful and the ability to keep annotated comments related to the client linked to the staff author is also useful. The Destiny One software has a healthy update cycle that attempts to integrate repairs to user problems and requests with each update. Help desk/support staff are quick to respond and attempt to help with unusual situations that arise. There is an active users forum that can help with real-world examples or shared expertise. Integration of the staff view with the online customer view is fantastic. It presents a very professional and accurate web presence that can be modified to best represent the face of our company to the world.

Cons: There are many situations wherein the software feels like a work in progress. Upgrades can break procedures that were previously working. The UI can be terribly counter-intuitive. Help files are a rabbit-hole that rarely gives satisfaction. Initial progress through the setup for your institution (extremely crucial) could be so improved by a follow-along example of an end-result setup for a fictional or real organization. In our experience, no real follow up was successfully communicated by the Destiny One team to bring us from a neophyte user into the big league team of advanced users.

Reasons for Choosing Modern Campus Lifelong Learning: Destiny One did a much better job at a competitive demo to present their product.

Reasons for Switching to Modern Campus Lifelong Learning: The software was unwieldy, could not export usable data easily, and became unsupportable due to aging support staff.

Overall: The biggest resolution we find with using Destiny One is generally to provide consistent reporting formats for multiple faculties providing Professional Development training. Previously many used spreadsheets and shoeboxes to collect and record revenue. Now every faculty is reporting the same way to the central finance team. Note: with Daily revenue reconciliations it would be nice to have the report display the fee and tax separately with a grand total for the transaction. Accounting clerks currently have to find this information manually.

Pros: The most impactful thing about Destiny One is that when a Course, Section or Certificate is created or modified in Staff View, the changes appear on the Public View instantaneously. New information regarding a course or certificate can be quickly presented to our potential students in order to help them to make a buying decision. Good Business Analysis by the implementers of the software determines how easy it is to mesh with existing business processes and in my experience Destiny does provide quite a lot of functionality to fit the many different scenarios different departments in an organization have come up with. Another feature I like a lot is the ability to make configuration and label changes on our own rather than waiting for a change ticket to be processed by the vendor. Love having the Dashboards, however, the canned workbooks could use some updating to reflect the filtering needs of Multi-Program Offices. Not all colleges may have Tableau experts who can modify the existing dashboards.

Cons: Missing Features - An implementation toggle to change from American English - to Canadian English or UK English, etc, rather than having to ferret through every aspect of configuration points and labels to change as you find them. I have worked with a S/W in the 1990s that did have that option in both DOS & Windows. Bundles - was not well thought out at implementation - after 3 years Destiny is now working on ensuring the revenue is reflected in the course sections and Tax Credit receipts are generated. Advanced Standing Courses / Certificates - When a course Advanced Standing is entered in Other Academic History - it would be really helpful if that Adv Stdg course were to appear in applicable certificates. Grateful to have it - but it could be improved. Dashboards Datapoints - I find the datapoints available in the Destiny Tableau BI server to be very limited. It would be nice if we could request additional extractions - IE: we need monthly reporting to compare enrolments to drops - transfers - the only datapoints are enrolments so gathering this data will be a manual process. Another example: Certificates - but no datapoint to pull in the courses applied to the certificate. Gift Certificates - more than one faculty on campus would like to be able to provide Gift Certificates to our students - can't find that functionality in Destiny One.

Reasons for Choosing Modern Campus Lifelong Learning: I was not involved in the Vetting process, however, when seeking new employment have looked for institutions using Destiny One.