Student Course Performance Monitoring: Explore the Role of an Online Student Success Coach at the University of New Hampshire
Concurrent Session 5
Brief Abstract
Join the Student Success Team at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) as they discuss their roles and services offered to online graduate students and faculty. The Student Success Coaches support students from the time they inquire about a program all the way up until they graduate from the program. One valued retention strategy in which the SSC team employs is course performance monitoring. During this session, we will provide detailed information about how we use this strategy to increase student retention.
Presenters
Extended Abstract
The role of the online Student Success Coach (SSC) is multifaceted at our Public Flagship University. The Student Success Coach Team works with potential students from first inquiry to graduation and beyond. Additionally, the SSC role supports the on-boarding and marketing of new programs and programs moving to an online modality.
Recruitment/Marketing
Part of the role of a SSC Team is to work with Departments to on-board online programs to a successful launch. We work closely with faculty to identify key strategies and communications to promote their programs.The content we create is highly researched for timing, type of communication and for consistent voice. The SSC Team supports program faculty with online information sessions, student/faculty spotlights, on-campus events, as well as attending industry specific conferences to recruit and promote each of our online graduate programs.
Student Support & Retention
Once enrolled in the program, the SSC Team continues to support students until they graduate. We send out onboarding information in the form of welcome emails that feature instructions on how to register for courses, access their university accounts and connect with campus departments. We also send frequent start of e-term and registration reminders and host celebrations for National Distance Learning Week. We continue to serve as the first point of contact for students and are easily accessible via email and phone. Another area where we strive to support and retain our online students is making them feel a part of our larger institution community by providing personalized reach outs through phone calls and personal mail outs with a University swag item that we hope will resonate with our online graduate students and make them feel a part of the larger university community.
One unique role of the SSC is student course performance monitoring, as this service is a valued student retention strategy across all programs. Explore our student performance monitoring strategy history and techniques and how our methods developed to the model we use today to present to program faculty, the technology tools we use, how we divide the growing workload and how success is measured. We will demonstrate how we use a technology tool plugged into Canvas to identify online program students and basic key indicators of student performance within the online course. Then, we will show how we manipulate the pulled data to show a snap-shot of the online student’s progress and how we identify “concerns.” After reviewing our weekly data pulling process, we will share how we communicate to faculty program directors with the concerns and how we develop a plan of action for next steps in supporting the seemingly struggling student.
In conclusion of our presentation, we will explore the following questions:
- What ways do you currently monitor student course performance?
- What challenges do you face when monitoring course performance?
Attendee takeaways
- Explore how you can take our model and implement it at your own institution.
- Recommended next steps to implementation.