É«ÀÇÉçÇø

The broad goal of Project Insight is to improve student experiences across our campus. É«ÀÇÉçÇø prides itself on supporting students throughout their educational and developmental journey and this initiative will help us not only measure our current efforts, but provide us with strategic, pro-active steps to increase our student outreach and engagement. Project Insight spans divisions, programs and audiences, and our work must be thoughtfully integrated to collect and analyze data that will help us achieve these goals. The É«ÀÇÉçÇø Success Network powered by Starfish (RSN), one of the components of this project, is already widely utilized throughout campus to enhance student success and has recently been upgraded to enhance our efforts as we move forward. Hobsons, the company who hosts Starfish and is a partner in the Insight initiative, visited the campus recently to garner a more holistic vision of our current university community and provide guidance on the next steps of our project.

To ensure a collaborative vision is incorporated from the outset of the process, Hobson’s brought together more than 100 student and staff representatives from across the campus to participate in focus groups and community discussions. Colleague representation included all staff levels - senior leadership, front-line staff and managerial staff - from all university divisions. Students and staff were encouraged to share and speak openly about a variety of topics to help us visualize our current landscape and gauge our capacity to strategically improve student success. By the end of the three-day visit, we discovered that while É«ÀÇÉçÇø has some work to do, we are on par with – or in some cases, surpassing – comparable institutions of our size.

“We all come to work every day because we want better experiences and more equitable outcomes for our students,” says Dr. Rory McElwee, vice president of the Division of Student Affairs. “É«ÀÇÉçÇø’s extensive use of Starfish already far exceeds that of most other schools. This campus visit helped us to celebrate those strengths, but also energized us for the steps ahead. It unites the campus as we revitalize our approach and helps demonstrate how much impact these tools have not just on our own practice, but on student success.”

Our strengths include:

• Engagement through collaborations
  • É«ÀÇÉçÇø encourages partnerships across departments and the teams in Student Affairs are particularly adept at developing these relationships.
  • As a testament to the effectiveness of these collaborations, É«ÀÇÉçÇø recently won the 1st Place Collaborator Award from Campus Labs.
• Utilization of student success tools
  • Our community recognizes and uses student success tools, such as RSN, to track and review student retention.
  • During the 2018-219 academic year, 89% of our faculty participated in a progress survey using Starfish. This far surpasses the national average of 46% for the same time period.
• Opportunities to explore professional development outside of a person’s traditional/contracted area.
  • Staff and students both have access to a variety of workshops, lectures, and trainings to enhance their work skillsets.

Our targets for improvement include:

• Communicating the “why”
  • While many know that specific tools, programs, or systems are available, they may not know “why” using it is integral to student success.
  • Having this knowledge could increase engagement and participation.
• Analyzing areas where we can collaborate to eliminate overlap and duplicitous efforts.
  • Help departments develop assessment tools to identify these areas.
  • This will build relationships and result in more efficient work environments, more sustainable workloads, and capacity for professional development.
• Continuing to build and promote mentorship and trainings for staff, as well as experiential learning opportunities for students.
  • Identify new and more efficient avenues of communication, so that information can be widely distributed and consumed.

Through the information gathered through the three-day visit, combined with our on-campus utilization of RSN and other assessment tools, we will be able to engage our community in intentional, systematic and proactive efforts to improve student success and make data-informed decisions.

As Project Insight becomes a “household name,” we anticipate new goals and strategies will be developed to address our ever-evolving college community. We will encourage our departments to access and implement the use of student and institutional data to better support student persistence, retention and graduation. With this knowledge, our staff will be able to better guide students toward support and resources, which will enhance the quality of their college experiences.