The eight-block downtown campus of Grand Rapids Community College (GRCC) includes several classroom buildings, while an off-campus “Learning Corner” serves the greater Grand Rapids community. More than 15,000 students are enrolled in more than 1,600 liberal arts and occupational courses. With over 5,000 students commuting every day to its campus in Western Michigan, regulating access and accepting payment for parking facilities had become an enormous chore for school employees.

Without an existing campus card in place, managing cash acceptance for any purchase on campus consumed staff members’ time and constricted the campus’s ability to provide a positive experience for students. While accepting payment for parking created challenges specific to the college, overall cash handling was beginning to weigh heavy on the campus, especially in areas such as food service operations, the library, copy machines and bookstore. Grand Rapids needed a more sophisticated photo ID to help eliminate its existing student authentication process.

College officials conducted a feasibility study to find an ID card system that would meet their needs. In 2004, Grand Rapids implemented the Blackboard Transaction System™ for campus commerce and access control. At the same time, the school activated the cardholder account management module in the Blackboard Community System™ so that students could manage their RaiderCard online.

A Phased Approach

Grand Rapids formed a cross-college team to work on the phased implementation of its Blackboard Commerce Suite™ and prioritize the various pieces. In the first phase of its implementation, Grand Rapids deployed the Blackboard Transaction System to manage its parking problem on campus. Due to the size of the growing student population and the relative lack of parking at the urban campus, Grand Rapids cannot charge students an annual parking fee, because they cannot guarantee availability. So the system requires payment upon exit from the lot.

Using readers designed to work in a vending environment, students simply swipe their card to enter any of the three campus garages and then swipe once again to exit the garage. Upon exit, their RaiderCard account is charged the daily $2.50 rate. Possessing an anti-passback feature, each card can be used to enter the garage a single time, and to avoid fraud the card must be used to exit the garage before it can be used again to enter. Grand Rapids has also been able to automate the assignment of parking privileges. By linking the Blackboard Transaction System with its registration system, the college is able to automatically assign parking privileges for any student enrolled for the current term.

Phase two of the college’s implementation included deploying point-of-sale devices for dining services and a couple quick-serve restaurants on campus. “The positive impact was faster lines and increased sales,” says Paulo Teles, GRCC’s RaiderCard Manager. “We went from accepting only cash to a cashless environment.” A Subway sandwich shop on campus saw a 15–20% increase in sales once it began accepting the RaiderCard. The third phase of Grand Rapids’ initial deployment plan included Blackboard door access and vending. With campus safety as a driving factor, the college installed approximately 55 door access readers, including two exterior doors per building to help regulate traffic. Vending was the final phase of deployment, and Grand Rapids targeted 80% of the approximately 120 vending machines on campus to accept the RaiderCard. Machines were prioritized based on sales volume.

Measuring Success

“Each year we were selling $1.2 million worth of 75-cent parking tokens, which was arcane,” says Eric Mullen, the college’s director of student life. “From an administrative point of view, the Blackboard Transaction System has allowed us to walk away from archaic systems and processes that were time consuming.” Grand Rapids estimates that it has saved $78,000 per year on the parking management solution alone, simply by eliminating the need to collect and process cash payments, while also reducing the staffing at the garage exits.

The RaiderCard program has helped increase parking availability on Grand Rapids’ campus by automatically allowing access only to current students and also increased speed of service. The average time to exit the parking ramp using tokens was 15 seconds, whereas now, using the RaiderCard, it takes only 5 seconds. In its first year, the RaiderCard program processed $2.2 million in parking fees and now regularly takes in more than $3 million in student deposits to the campus discretionary spending account.

Campus safety at the college also has improved. Gym locker room access is now managed automatically based on student enrollment status. For example, student athletes, health club members, employees and students are all assigned access automatically to their respective locker rooms. In addition, replacing lost keys has become far less cumbersome. The campus now has the ability to simply turn off access privileges in its Blackboard system if someone is no longer employed by the college.

Grand Rapids also uses the Blackboard Transaction System to help track student attendance and use of campus services. The system enabled them to eliminate the need for semester stickers, which they previously issued each term to over 10,000 students, each of whom was required to visit the Student Life office to be verified as a current student. In yet another use, Grand Rapids also instituted a financial aid refund program that enables students to put up to $200 in financial aid dollars on their RaiderCard.

Unsurprisingly, students have embraced the implementation of the Blackboard Transaction via GRCC’s new program. In a recent survey, 91% of all students said they were either “satisfied” or “extremely satisfied” with the RaiderCard program.