Category: Blog

Given increasing competition, shifts in student enrollment, and reduced resource levels, it’s critical that colleges and universities recruit and retain the students who are most likely to succeed at their institutions. By transitioning from a risk-based model for predicting student enrollment and retention to a success-based model, you can look across the student life cycle to identify not only the factors that impede desired outcomes such as yield and student retention, but also the positive factors that contribute to those outcomes. What are the shared characteristics of students who enroll and persist? What were the shared characteristics and behaviors of your most engaged alumni when they were students? Success leaves clues. Identifying these indicators of success can help inform smarter investments in recruitment and intervention, and can inform cross-campus efforts to maximize yield, student success, and alumni engagement. Exploring this approach further, Rob Durkle, the University of Dayton’s assistant vice president of enrollment management, and Bernadette Jungblut, West Virginia University’s director of assessment and retention, recently joined Academic Impressions for a complimentary webcast offering examples of how specific indicators of success might drive specific decisions on campus. Here is One Example: “Grit” During the webcast, Bernadette Jungblut directed attention to […]

As more institutions consider offering Massive Open Online Courses (or MOOCs), we wanted to investigate what impact these open-enrollment online courses might have on copyright compliance issues for faculty in higher education. To learn more, we turned to copyright and fair use policy experts Steven McDonald, general counsel for the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and Kevin Smith, director of scholarly communications for Duke University’s Perkins Library. Here are the insights that McDonald and Smith shared with us, related to issues of both copyright compliance and ownership. A Closer Look at Compliance and Fair Use Kevin Smith. We are seeing two things: People are more cautious about relying on fair use when anticipating sharing content with 170,000 people in the (online) classroom than we are when anticipating sharing content with 170 students on campus. We also have a huge opportunity to establish new partnerships with copyright holders (publishers and various clearinghouses), developing agreements to use their materials in the MOOCs, because of the significant opportunity for the MOOC to raise the visibility of their materials. I’ll tell you a story. We had a situation where a faculty member wanted to use materials from a textbook. In her regular class, […]

Early alert programs have been emerging on college campuses for the last 10 years to varying degrees of success. Too often after the initial startup, many early alert programs fail to fully meet their designed purpose of identifying and reaching out to academically at-risk students — in part because these programs are often focused on reactive rather than proactive identification and outreach, relying heavily on faculty to provide a “single stream” approach to flagging at-risk students. This week, we reached out to two of the architects of Arkansas State University’s forward-thinking approach to early alert: Jill Simons, executive director of Arkansas State’s University College, and Darla Fletcher, director of technology services and support. Fletcher and Simons provide three key pieces of advice for making an early alert program truly effective: Use predictive modeling to proactively identify and reach out to your most at-risk students. Empower students to self-identify and self-report when they may be at risk. Reach out to your most successful, not just your least successful students, celebrating milestones in their progress toward their degree. Let’s take a closer look. Use Predictive Modeling Mining your data is key. Simons speaks to the importance of moving to a “pre-emptive” approach […]

Social media and mobile technologies offer low-cost opportunities to increase the impact of your alumni events, because you can extend the reach of your current efforts to online alumni communities such as a Facebook alumni group or Twitter feed. Andrew Gossen, senior director for social media strategy for alumni affairs and development at Cornell University, advises: “Our engagement efforts and our annual cycle is built around offline, physical events … reunion, homecoming, etc. … and our staffing is often allocated to serve those events. We support the growth of alumni communities and clubs because they connect alumni to each other and to the university in beneficial ways. We need to think about online communities in the same way, and find opportunities to extend what we are already doing.” Expanding the Footprint of Your Annual Events Asked for examples, Gossen illustrates how an alumni relations office might employ social media tools to enhance and extend the reach of a reunion event: Beyond just tweeting and posting reminders about the upcoming event, use a Twitter hashtag to encourage conversation among alumni before they arrive on campus Tweet actively to a backchannel during the event Have staff – or trusted volunteers – active […]