Connecting Students With Campus Services

In other words, if it’s digital and designed to improve student learning outcomes, it’s in Cory Stokes’ domain.

Last week, Cory co-hosted a webinar with us—“Bridging the Belonging Gap: Connecting Students With Campus Services”—to discuss how the U. of U. uses the ConexED digital student services platform to:

• Improve belonging and success for online students who don’t feel meaningfully connected to the university.
• Provide equitable access for on-campus and online students to financial aid experts, academic advisors, career coaches, and faculty mentors.
• Improve student engagement through tutoring, peer work, group study sessions, and presentations.

If you missed the live webinar, don’t worry. You can still watch the recording.

The Diamond: Touch Points in an Interactive Student Experience

During the webinar, Cory explained that ConexED provides a way for the university to implement a service model they refer to as “The Diamond,” which includes all the touch points in an interactive student experience.

In the center of The Diamond, “Analysis & Alerts” represents all the data from campus systems—the SIS, LMS, CRM, plus data and reporting from ConexED—that helps staff and faculty understand student behavior and performance, and know what they need to succeed.

During the 2018–2019 academic year, ConexED helped connect U. of U. students to advisors, coaches, consultants, and faculty for 53,000 appointments across these touch points.

The Five S List

Cory and the university’s Integrated Student Team outlined “The Five S List,” a framework for creating a unified system for campus services. To connect all the touch points and transactional units in “The Diamond,” they determined that a digital solution must be:

1. Student-Focused. Does the technology emphasize the student experience through opportunities for engagement?
2. Supported. Does the provider support students who need help using the service or technology?
3. Streamlined. Do the tools support an optimized user experience? Do they simplify how students pass through all the business processes at the university?
4. Standardized. Does the solution support enterprise use across the institution? Does it serve many touch points in a cohesive way? Does it use standards-based systems to connect with other key university systems?
5. Sustainable. Does it deliver results? And do those results provide a return on the investment made in this larger ecosystem with every integrated point?

Watch the Webinar

Watch the webinar to learn why Cory and his team determined that “ConexED was a perfect match for our Five S list,” and how they streamlined campus services for a 1,500-acre university with more than 31,000 students.

(You’ll also learn why Cory deserves such a big title.)

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