Fanshawe College, Ontario, CA

Customer Spotlight

Fanshawe College of Applied Arts and Technology, often shortened to Fanshawe College, is a public college in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. As one of the largest colleges in Canada, Fanshawe has approximately 43,000 students and campuses scattered across Southwestern Ontario. As well as offering more than 200 programs to their student body, Fanshawe also plays an important role in providing re-skilling and skill upgrading opportunities for mature learners.  

“Focus on students, involve our communities, utilize resources wisely, embrace change, engage each other.” – Fanshawe’s Values 

Fanshawe's AppsAnywhere Journey

Stepping back from a VDI environment

The OCCCIO is a collaborative member-run organization created to help enhance its members’ ability to strategically and effectively lead information technology support across Higher Education. Among many other aspects, it provides a forum for the exchange of ideas, best practices, and technologies.  

As Fanshawe is a member of the organization, members of the IT department attended an OCCCIO conference held at Seneca College. Whilst there Seneca demonstrated how it had overcome the issues surrounding software delivery by using AppsAnywhere. Having seen this software in person, being actively used by students in a Higher Ed environment had a huge impact on Fanshawe, and they decided that this was the software they needed.  

The Power of Analytics

Once the software was in place, they need to ensure that it was working for their students in the way they wanted. Fortunately, AppsAnywhere provides a fitting solution in the form of built-in analytics. Fanshawe used this feature not only to track the progress of their investment but also to build upon their open relationship by delivering the information directly to students. 

“We want to deliver the results to them and it's not enough just to say we think it worked well. We want to be able to say this many packages were used by this many unique students and so on. It simply gives us great information to affirm that we're heading in the right direction.” 

Embracing Change: 60-day Implementation

It’s 2021, we cannot talk about Higher Ed without mentioning COVID-19, and with a value all about embracing change, Fanshawe certainly stepped up to the plate. 

Thanks to the simple procurement process, once COVID-19 hit Fanshawe was able to be up and running in two months with around 100 packages ready for fall 2020. Having this software meant that they had a very impressive zero transmissions of COVID on their campus last year, largely due to the fact they could get their onsite activity levels down due to being able to work from home.  

“AppsAnywhere enabled us to thrive as a College despite the challenges of COVID-19.  As a College of Applied Arts and Technology, software plays a critical role in the academic success of our students.  AppsAnywhere allowed us to deliver software anywhere in the world, enabling our students to continue their education while remaining distanced from our campuses for their safety.  In addition to our students’ success, the College remained in a fiscally healthy state which positions us well as we begin to emerge from COVID-19 restrictions.”   

Embracing Change

Fanshawe have shown that being part of a consortium means so much more than just being part of an organization, instead, it is more like a family where they are able to come together to share best practices, learning experiences, and most importantly their resources, and in doing this, they have moved mountains by progressing through the procurement process in a record time and implemented AppsAnywhere within 2 months resulting in an enhanced student experience throughout the campus and internationally.

Fanshawe now see AppsAnywhere as a partner rather than a vendor, and we cannot wait to see how their journey progresses.  

AppsAnywhere x Fanshawe College