case studies colorado

Founded in 1889 and tucked between the Rocky Mountains and Colorado’s stunning high plains, the University of Northern Colorado is a public doctoral research university committed to the success of its students. UNC’s diverse, welcoming campus hosts international students coming from around the world. The university’s just-right size, expert faculty, and tradition of research and hands-on learning gives students exceptional opportunities and a personalized education.

100

UNDERGRAD
PROGRAMS

120

GRADUATE
PROGRAMS

181

INTERNATIONAL
STUDENTS

11,460

STUDENTS

250

INTERNATIONAL
AGREEMENTS

DIFFERENT
COUNTRIES

Fall 2020 enrollment numbers

UNC Center for International Education (CIE) advances the university's teaching, research and service mission by working collaboratively throughout the institution to promote global engagement by increasing international mobility among students and faculty, promoting faculty engagement in international activities, and developing strategic partnerships abroad. CIE oversees both incoming international students and outgoing study abroad students. As for study abroad opportunities, the office offers a variety of programs such as faculty-led, work/internship, student exchange, and research opportunities.

BEFORE TERRA DOTTA

Manual & Disjointed

Before Terra Dotta, and without an effective system in place to manage the many details and steps involved in UNC’s international agreements, UNC relied heavily on the Provost oﬃce and the Center for International Education (CIE) to keep track of these international agreement documents. With the Provost office utilizing SharePoint, OnBase, and CIE scanning documents into a shared drive and listing them in Excel, this decentralized holding area caused their process to be very disjointed and hard to record.

Pain Points Exposed

Email communication made it hard—nearly impossible—to keep track of which stakeholders approved international agreements.
Disjointed international agreement approval process allowed approval records to be lost.
Manual processes made it easy for international agreement approvals to fall through the cracks.
CIE’s decentralized database made it hard to figure out where you needed to go for a specific international agreement.

In the past, the drafts were reviewed by different units on campus, just by emails. And sometimes you can easily lose track of that, or they approved [drafts] and then, later, no one could find the record. That would cause issues.

—Meiren Chen

Assistant Director for International Partnerships and Business Development

FINDING A SOLUTION

In fall 2017, new leadership arrived in the CIE oﬃce. It was soon decided that the CIE office needed a different approach to track the international agreement approval process and maintain a centralized database within CIE to store the university’s international agreements and meet the specific needs of CIE.

When we got the new university administration and the new CIE team, we decided to find a system that could centralize things in our office. That's why we decided to purchase the Terra Dotta Agreement module.

WITH TERRA DOTTA

Easy Implementation

After purchasing the Agreements module in Fall of 2019, CIE looked forward to the implementation process. During that time, Meiren Chen, Assistant Director for International Partnerships and Business Development, worked with the IT and Purchasing & Contracts departments at UNC to make sure all of the proper information was integrated over for a smooth transition. Now all UNC's international agreements are housed not only within UNC’s centralized contract management system, but also within Terra Dotta as a central information repository that meets CIE’s detailed specific needs.

The implementation team at Terra Dotta were very supportive and helpful. I remember we had multiple Zoom meetings to talk about implementation of each step. They helped me through all of the building process and that has been very helpful.

Streamlined & Centralized

With Terra Dotta, University of Northern Colorado’s Center for International Education, can now, with respect to international agreements:

Track & Record International Agreement Approvals

The ability to set up different approvers for different levels of agreements has allowed UNC to easily keep track and record approvals.

Easily Monitor International Agreement Lifecycles

Automatic notifications in the Terra Dotta system let UNC know when agreements are about to expire or are renewing. No longer do staff have to mentally remember multiple agreement dates.

Quickly Locate All International Agreements

With an online, centralized database, gone are the days of searching multiple places for a specific agreement.

Increase International Agreement Visibility

Utilizing the integration with Google Maps, UNC created a map on the front page of their international agreements website; easily allowing faculty and students to see where they have partner agreements around the globe.

Digitize their Process

With all international agreements digital, it’s much easier to read agreements and summaries. No more double checking paper files in multiple areas, it’s all there in the system.