For years, the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) watched students treat the portal like a utility: log in, click a link, leave. It wasn’t for exploring. It wasn’t for engaging. And for a college serving more than 55,000 learners — many fully online or on campus only in the evenings — this meant thousands of students were navigating CCBC without a central digital home.
The turning point came when CCBC realized the portal no longer matched the lives of its students. Information lived in separate systems. Communication depended on timing students often couldn’t match. And the experience lacked the personal cues students were accustomed to everywhere else — feeds, notifications, communities, and context. The portal needed to stop being a directory and start becoming a digital campus.
That shift began when CCBC selected Unifyed StudentX after a cross-campus RFP led by IT, Academic Affairs, Student Affairs, and the college’s grants office. The team wasn’t looking for new buttons; they were looking for a new logic. StudentX allowed them to rebuild the experience around student journeys instead of pages: applicants saw next steps, early access students saw tailored onboarding, continuing learners saw academic and financial snapshots, and every student stepped into a homepage that felt alive — dynamic posts, real conversations, and updates coming not just from administrators but from the communities they belonged to.
In less than two years, the results reshaped CCBC’s relationship with its students. Logins tripled. The portal became a daily check-in rather than a weekly task. More than 2,000 posts flowed through the Connect feed, attracting thousands of likes and comments. Students submitted feedback directly inside the portal, confirming not just satisfaction but genuine attention. And for the first time, non-technical staff across the college could update their sections without waiting on IT — allowing the portal to reflect what was happening on campus, as it was happening.
What CCBC built is more than a modern portal. It’s a digital campus that mirrors real campus life: role-based, conversational, personalized, and continually evolving. And the takeaway for any institution facing low portal engagement is simple: when a college stops treating the portal as a website and starts treating it as the student’s daily operating system, students don’t need to be pushed to use it — they come back on their own.
Boost Engagement Now: Schedule a demo for Unifyed StudentX
