Powered Up Continued
In-Person Events
Arguably, the most energizing part of the past year for OCAS was having the opportunity to, once again, visit college campuses and participate in major in-person events, like the Ontario College Fair.
Of course, this also meant bringing back the OCAS Conference, a forum for closely collaborating with our partners to learn how we can strengthen our relationships through building innovative solutions for their unique challenges.
Campus Visits
Over the past year, members of the OCAS team have often been out of office – some of that time, we’ve been attending college system events like the Ontario College Fair or Premier’s Awards. But more often, we’ve been speaking with our partners at Ontario’s college campuses, including those of Northern, St. Clair, St. Lawrence, Niagara, Lambton, Algonquin, Fanshawe, and La Cité.
As we inch closer to our new normal following the pandemic, we’re excited to rebuild our face-to-face relationships and acquire the insights needed to keep our partner connections strong.
It’s also important to have these in-person meetings because every college is different. And while they share a common goal – educating learners of all ages – how they approach that goal is often unique. This individuality can result from a variety of factors, like the size of their student population to their location, local industries, and demographics.
Visiting Northern
The distinctness of each Ontario college was brought into perspective during our executive team’s visit to Northern College. That’s where we learned that, due to their relatively remote nature – paired with the abundance of high-paying mining jobs – getting applicants to choose a northern Ontario college can be challenging.
Now that we know about this issue, we can use it to help Northern and other remote colleges develop dynamic strategies for recruitment.
Looking ahead, we’re excited to continue this type of outreach and search for ways to better understand and support our college partners in the coming months, and years.
Ontario College Fair
The 2022 Ontario College Fair (OCF) took place on October 19 and 20 at the Enercare Centre in downtown Toronto. Hosted by the area’s colleges – including Centennial, George Brown, Humber, Michener, Seneca, and Sheridan – the OCF was the first major in-person event of its kind since the pandemic began. Unsurprisingly, OCAS was electrified about the opportunity to participate.
As a platinum sponsor of the OCF, OCAS was proud to hold four “How to Apply to College” information sessions and staffing a booth with some of our most knowledgeable employees – representing the Contact Centre, Learner Advisement, Strategic Initiatives, and Brand, Marketing, and Communications teams – to help learners understand the application process.
OCAS Booth
Centre Stage
With our booth strategically situated in the centre of the event venue, the OCAS team provided applicants and their families with a comfortable place to recharge and read through the materials they’d collected from the colleges.
We also introduced them to the ontariocolleges.ca website, where they could browse programs and sign up for our ON to College newsletter.
For the OCAS employees who participated in the OCF, it was rewarding to see so many visitors eager to learn about the college student experience from beginning to end. We learned a great deal about the needs of learners and how we can serve them now and in the future.
See you at OCF 2023!
OCAS Conference
Held on November 10, 2022, the OCAS Conference featured an inspiring keynote address, entertaining sessions about artificial intelligence and analyzing application data, and collaborative activities that brought college representatives and OCAS employees together to learn how we can help each other.
The theme of the conference, Perspectives, reflected our goal of gathering a diverse audience from across the colleges to listen, learn, and engage in conversations that will help us strengthen our relationships and service offerings.
Conversing with Partners
Under the shared vision of OCAS’ Strategic Initiatives and Brand, Marketing, and Communications departments, and with engagement and support from our leadership team, the agenda for the conference was designed to generate conversation about the prominent issues visible on college campuses today.
The morning included a keynote presentation from Tim Arnold, a leadership development and team-building expert and best-selling author. His talk focused on building resiliency, managing complex situations, and embracing different perspectives to support effective leadership in times of challenge.
The afternoon offered attendees the choice between five workshops led by members of the OCAS team, with topics ranging from using data to enhance enrolment to exploring how AI could impact the future of post-secondary education.
Looking back on the event, we learned a lot about the issues facing colleges and how we can prioritize meaningful work that supports them over the long term.
OCAS Verify
OCAS Verify is a new web-based service that helps government officials rapidly and accurately verify proof of acceptance for international students as they arrive in Canada.
Overview
Today, Ontario’s public colleges regularly get email inquiries from the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) asking the college to verify an applicant’s proof of acceptance. Often, this happens at inopportune times, such as when a learner is in an airport or trying to cross a land border into Canada.
OCAS Verify has three core goals:
- Help international students move through the study permit process more quickly and smoothly and get their post-secondary studies started sooner.
- Reduce the amount of effort and number of resources required of our higher education partners to verify each student’s proof of acceptance.
- Provide a secure, simple, and easy-to-use service that will help government officials verify the status of an applicant to an Ontario post-secondary institution, including the legitimacy of their proof of acceptance.
Web-Based Solutions
In Verify, OCAS has built a web-based solution that provides immediate self-serve results to government officials. With Verify accessible from virtually anywhere, the result is faster processing times and the ability to verify more applicants in less time.
Unlike the previous process for verifying offer letters and payment receipts – which often involved reaching out to colleges via phone or email to authenticate paper documentation – OCAS Verify is an easy-to-use website that provides officials with a real-time digital view of a student’s proof of acceptance and received payments.
Results
In last year’s annual report we previewed OCAS Verify, anticipating that it would begin helping the CBSA, colleges, and international learners in 2022.
We’re happy to report that, for some time now, the CBSA has been using OCAS Verify at major ports of entry in the Greater Toronto Area, including Toronto Pearson International Airport. In November 2022, the agency completed training of officials within their primary passenger assessment team at National Headquarters, which they expect will result in greatly expanded use of Verify.
Sample Verify Form:
Provide the following applicant information
Designated Learning Institute (DLI) that issued the Letter of Acceptance
(Input for Search an Institute)
Date of Birth
(Input for month, day, and year)
Student ID
(Input to enter ID)
Passport ID (Last 4 Characters)
(Input for Passport ID)
Program Start
(Input for Month) (Input for Year)
(Input checkbox) I am authorized to disclose this information to OCAS to verify a letter of acceptance.
(Secondary Button: Clear All Fields) (Primary Button: Verify)
Overall, the CBSA have found OCAS Verify to be a highly effective tool for verifying international student credentials and are working on expanding its implementation to new regions in the coming year.
Domestic on Demand
For the past two years we’ve excitedly discussed Domestic on Demand in the ‘what’s coming’ section of our annual report. For the first time, we’re updating our partners about it in this, our ‘what’s ready’ section.
That’s because we’re thrilled that Domestic on Demand has now launched with two colleges – Seneca and Georgian – and is planning to launch with two more – St. Clair and La Cité – in the coming year.
In case this is your first OCAS annual report, Domestic on Demand (DoD) provides an alternative means of exchanging applicant data with OCAS.
For some time, OCAS has used a file-based batch process to send application data (including offer confirmations from applicants) to the colleges each night.
DoD, in contrast, enables a college to access that data at any time of the day and as often as they want, helping colleges respond to applicants much faster than before.
Process
Hello, I'm Rebecca Patten
| Years at OCAS: | 3 |
| Key responsibilities: | Supporting those college partners who use OCAS’ International Application Service (IAS); this includes regular touchpoint calls and emails to answer their questions about the service. I also work closely with our Product Management and IT teams to discuss partner requests and develop future product releases for the IAS. |
| Essential skills: | Emotional intelligence and empathy are essential to my role. These skills help me understand our partners’ needs and translate them into technical requirements for our internal teams. I would also add that this role really requires the ability to adapt and embrace change, whether it be related to a project or new technology. |
| Biggest challenge: | The most significant challenge in my tenure thus far at OCAS involved adapting to the pandemic and learning new ways to onboard colleges to the IAS in a virtual environment. |
| Favourite project: | When a college onboards to the International Application Service, it is a monumental undertaking that requires coordinating logistics and helping the college work to migrate old business processes to the new system. I have onboarded four institutions to the IAS thus far and remain proud of all these projects. |
| Favourite part of the job: | I enjoy solving complex questions and devising solutions that help make life easier for our college partners. |
| Favourite hobbies: | One of my favourite hobbies is creating indoor and outdoor balloon displays for special occasions, like birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, or community events. I enjoy learning new techniques, and it’s been a fun creative outlet. |
Hello, I'm Rebecca Patten
Years at OCAS: 3
Key responsibilities: Supporting those college partners who use OCAS’ International Application Service (IAS); this includes regular touchpoint calls and emails to answer their questions about the service. I also work closely with our Product Management and IT teams to discuss partner requests and develop future product releases for the IAS.
Essential skills: Emotional intelligence and empathy are essential to my role. These skills help me understand our partners’ needs and translate them into technical requirements for our internal teams. I would also add that this role really requires the ability to adapt and embrace change, whether it be related to a project or new technology.
Biggest challenge: The most significant challenge in my tenure thus far at OCAS involved adapting to the pandemic and learning new ways to onboard colleges to the IAS in a virtual environment.
Favourite project: When a college onboards to the International Application Service, it is a monumental undertaking that requires coordinating logistics and helping the college work to migrate old business processes to the new system. I have onboarded four institutions to the IAS thus far and remain proud of all these projects.
Favourite part of the job: I enjoy solving complex questions and devising solutions that help make life easier for our college partners.
Favourite hobbies: One of my favourite hobbies is creating indoor and outdoor balloon displays for special occasions, like birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, or community events. I enjoy learning new techniques, and it’s been a fun creative outlet.
Any time an applicant performs an action that a college should be aware of, an event will be triggered that takes that data and saves it in a queue.
A college can then read this queue at any time – daily, hourly, or even every few minutes – taking the data and inserting it into a college’s Student Information System (SIS).
Domestic on Demand
Column One:
Applicants – Apply: Domestic Application Service
On-Demand: Application updates are made available to colleges in near real-time.
Column Two:
IT Teams – Application Event & Offer Event (apis.ocas.ca)
On-Demand: The college has control to retrieve data using any desired time interval.
Column Three:
Admissions Staff – College System: College SIS
Onboarding
For colleges interested in implementing DoD, an OCAS Partner Success Office member can provide a walkthrough of each stage of the onboarding process with support from our Project Management Office, as well as Technical Solutions and Quality teams. Together, we investigate a college’s current business processes and help them understand how DoD can be integrated.
Interested? Reach out to us today.
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