College is complicated.

After extensive consultation with campus constituents and a thorough software review process, the University of Vermont has partnered with the Education Advisory Board’s Student Success Collaborative (SSC). In this partnership, we hope to help students and advisors navigate the many available resources that promote student success, during their UVM years and beyond.

We joined the Student Success Collaborative because we want to:

  • Enhance the student experience
  • Create effective and efficient practices in advising
  • Improve retention and graduation rates

Led by faculty, staff and academic leadership, the implementation of the SSC will impact our ability to support undergraduate students from enrollment to graduation. The SSC is a comprehensive solution that brings together historical data analytics with advisor workflow and student communication tools to deliver smarter, personalized support to each student. This functionality will allow the University of Vermont to improve undergraduate student retention and the percentage of undergraduate students graduating in four years, two of our most important Academic Excellence Goals.

An advisor-facing web application and a mobile application for student use make up the EAB SSC management system, called Navigate.

Consultants from the Education Advisory Board (EAB) met in January 2018 with the UVM Leadership and Engagement Teams who are working to configure the applications. The teams, which include representation from faculty, staff, administration and technical staff, are meeting regularly to establish content, customize application functionality, and discuss long and short term goals for the project.

The incoming class of 2022 will utilize Guide to view course schedules and campus resources at Orientation in June 2018. A robust training schedule for faculty and staff is being established as a phased roll out of Campus will begin in Fall 2018.

About

In late January 2018, Student Services staff from each of the UVM colleges and schools completed a thorough assessment of their advising approaches. This information was shared with the Education Advisory Board (EAB) consulting team, who then, in consultation with the project leadership team, recommended that UVM utilize professional advisors within the Student Services offices for first-year advising as our phase I user group. This group, who will begin use of Campus (web application) in their advising starting in fall 2018, includes:

  • College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences – Engineering students
  • College of Nursing and Health Sciences
  • Grossman School of Business
  • Honors College – All students

Allowing this comparable, smaller group of skilled advisors to initially explore and test the system will make it easier to then train and add faculty and other student support users at the appropriate time. (Incoming first-time, first-year students will download and begin to use the Guide, mobile application, at June Orientation.)

In addition to improving undergraduate student retention and the percentage of undergraduate students graduating in four years, Campus, the advisor-facing web application, will improve upon existing advising practices.

Campus will allow advisors to:

  • Quickly access student information designed to guide advising conversations
  • Identify discrete problems & initiate early interventions
  • Proactively refer students to support services
  • Utilize timely, multi-modal means of communication for reaching subsets of students
  • Access data mining capabilities and predictive analytics to guide initiatives

Project Timeline

Phase 1: Pre-Purchase/Exploration

In this phase, the team discussed desired functionality; software options, capabilities and costs; and next steps.

Fall 2016

  • October - Council of Deans (Kostell and Warrington)
  • November - Associate Deans (Kostell and Warrington)

Spring 2017

  • January - Student Services Collaborative (Kostell and Warrington)
  • May - Faculty Senate (Undergraduate Student Retention session) (Kostell)

Phase 2: RFP Process

March 2017

Nine offices were represented in committee involvement:

  • Center for Academic Success (Dani Comey)
  • College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences Dean’s Office: Student Services (Marnie Owen)
  • College of Nursing and Health Sciences Dean’s Office (Patricia Prelock)
  • Enrollment Management: Retention/Re-entry Coordinator (Sarah Warrington)
  • Enrollment Management: Vice President’s Office (Stacey Kostell)
  • Enterprise Technology Services (Nancy Beck)
  • Faculty Senate: Student Affairs Committee (Jennifer Prue)
  • Institutional Research (Larry Granillo)          
  • Registrar’s Office (Veronika Carter)
  • Provost’s Office (Kerry Castano)

June 2017

EAB conducted a second on-campus demo with the following audiences:

  • RFP Committee                                 
  • Deans
  • Associate Deans       
  • Student Services Staff                       
  • Vice Provost for Student Affairs
  • Center for Academic Success
  • Dean of Students Office        
  • Career Center                                                  
  • Enterprise Technology Services                                                       
  • Student Government Association Academic Affairs Committee Reps

Phase 3: 

In this phase, the team discussed impetus of exploration; timeline of events; EAB-SSC functionality/benefits; demo slides; return on investment; and next steps.

August

  • Senior Leaders Retreat (Kostell)

September

  • Provost’s Academic Leadership Council (Kostell and Warrington)
  • College of Education & Social Services, Student Services (Warrington)

October

  • Faculty Senate FPPC Committee (Rosowsky and Prue)
  • Staff Council (Warrington)
  • Faculty Senate Student Affairs Committee (Prue)
  • Faculty Senate Executive Council (w/ President Sullivan) (Prue)
  • Academic Affairs Committee, Student Government Association (Warrington)
  • Board of Trustees, EPIR (Rosowsky and Kostell)

Phase 4:

February

  • College of Nursing and Health Sciences – Dean, Chairs, Program Directors Meeting (Warrington)

March

  • Begin monthly updates with Provost’s Academic Leadership Council (Kostell and Warrington)
  • Reappointment, Promotion, Tenure (RPT) Week, Advising – Successful Strategies Session (Prue)

April/May

  • College/School Faculty Meetings (College/School Reps and Kostell/Warrington)
  • Faculty Senate – Meeting of the Whole (Kostell and Warrington)
  • Faculty Senate Ed Research & Technologies Committee (Prue and Warrington)
  • Faculty Senate Student Affairs Committee (Prue and Warrington)
  • President’s Senior Leadership (Kostell and Warrington)
  • May 23: EAB Training and Strategy Onsite Visit

June

  • Big Tent Meeting (Kostell and Warrington)

August

  • Annual Faculty Conference
  • New Faculty Orientation

SSC Leadership and Governance

Two small groups of faculty, staff and administrators will make up the content governance for Guide (mobile) and Campus (web). Representation within the groups will come from Academic Affairs, Student Affairs and Enrollment Management.

  • Program Sponsor: David Rosowsky, Office of the Provost and Senior Vice President
  • Program Owners: Stacey Kostell and Sarah Warrington, Enrollment Management
  • Technical Leader: Rachel Seremeth, Enterprise Technology Services
  • Application Administrator: Veronika Carter, Registrar's Office
  • Content Administrator: Kate Strotmeyer, Vice Provost and Dean of Students Office
  • Engagement Team Leads:
    • Workflow and Training: Sarah Helmer, College of Arts and Sciences, Dean's Office; Sarah Warrington, Enrollment Management
    • Analytics: Alex Yin, Office of Institutional Research
    • Content Development: Stacey Kostell, Enrollment Management; Dani Comey, Center for Academic Success
    • Promotions and Communication: Kate Strotmeyer, Vice Provost and Dean of Students Office

If you have questions or ideas that should be shared with the governance groups for the Student Success Collaborative, please contact Sarah Warrington, Coordinator of Strategic Retention, at 802-656-9652 or email swarring@uvm.edu.

Education Advisory Board

The Education Advisory Board (EAB) serves more than 1,200 colleges and university members by helping to address their most critical challenges. They do this by forging and finding proven best practices that can then be hardwired on campus through technologies and services. Among EAB’s partners are high-performing research institutions, such as University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Stony Brook University (SUNY).

A primary goal of EAB is to make education smarter. In this vein, they focus their research around three central areas: enrollment management, student success and growth and academic operations.

As a member of the Student Success Collaborative, UVM benefits from:

  • Support-dedicated consulting
  • Access to a progressive student success conference (CONNECTED)
  • A customized best practice library & monthly webconferences
  • Much more

Visit the EAB website to create an EAB account, view their best practices research library or learn more about their products, including the Student Success Collaborative.