Charter Oak State College is Connecticut’s public online college.

“Being able to remotely deploy our administrative staff to fully continue operations in any crises is a major undertaking and we have successfully completed our drill,” said College President Ed Klonoski.

NEW BRITAIN, Conn. (PRWEB)
March 12, 2020

Charter Oak State College Completes Two Day Drill of Administrative Staff Remote Deployment

Ensures fully operability of online college during COVID-19 Crises

Charter Oak State College, (http://www.CharterOak.edu), Connecticut’s public online college, and a member of the Connecticut State Colleges & Universities system, has completed a two day test of its remote administrative opereations.

Since 1973 the College has been a distance learning provider and now offers Bachelors, Masters, Associates and Certificate programs online in a variety of fields including Health Care, Early Childhood Education, Public Safety, Cyber Security, Business and more. While students and faculty already take and teach courses online, the College’s staff operations are based in New Britain and Newington, CT.

“Being able to remotely deploy our administrative staff to fully continue operations in any crises is a major undertaking and we have successfully completed our drill,” said College President Ed Klonoski. “Our historically remote students and faculty are already two strong legs of our tripod. The remote deployment of our administrative staff was the third leg we needed to test.”

In response to the COVID-19 health crises the College had taken the following steps last week and early this week to ensure operations:

• 
  The College President activated the College’s Pandemic Continuity Plan
• Contact information including phone numbers, email and a dedicated web page (http://www.charteroak.edu/updates) were provided to online students and faculty.
• Should students or faculty or family members become ill the College prepared to extend deadlines for both course completion for students or extending course dates for faculty.
• The College is planning for faculty backup in the event a faculty member is unable to continue teaching their course.
• Following System Office guidance, the College has frozen all institutional out-of-state travel and events of persons over 100.

The College’s Administrative Staff participated in a two day remote deployment test of its operations on March 10 & 11. As part of that drill the College:

• Deployed technology (both hardware and software) to its administrative staff prior to the deployment.
• It conducted technology trainings to support staff in making the move to an online work environment.
• Instituted daily online check-ins of its remote staff which provided the management team with a real time view of its administrative capacity and operations.
• Instituted remote Incident Command Team meetings to oversee its operations and ensure rapid decision making capabilities.
• As part of its online structure the College continued to recruit, enroll, register, advise and teach students. It continued all business office functions including accounts payable and receivable. The Financial Aid office continued all operations including the distribution of financial aid to students.

Klonoski said, “This is a rapidly evolving situation but this drill provides us with the confidence we needed to be able to deploy our entire staff remotely should we need to make that decision.”

Founded in 1973, Charter Oak State College (http://www.CharterOak.edu) is Connecticut’s public online college, offering associate and bachelor’s degrees in high-demand fields including Health Information Management, Nursing, Criminal Justice, Early Childhood Education and Business Administration. The College offers master’s degrees in Health Care Administration and Organizational Effectiveness and Leadership. Charter Oak is accredited by the New England Commission of Higher Education and governed by Connecticut’s Board of Regents for Higher Education.

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