Built for Scale and Support: A Remote Student Services Advising Model at a Multi Campus-Based Institution
Concurrent Session 7
Brief Abstract
How do we provide equitable student support for a campus-based health care institution with 17 campuses in 6 states? Build a Student Services Advising model based on the assumption that ALL students are remote and online. Attend to learn how building for “online learners” is a win/win for everyone!
Extended Abstract
The advancement of online learning has provided the foundation for expanding our view of legacy models and approaches to leadership and education as a whole. This session demonstrates how “online and remote” can foster new approaches to student support even for campus-based institutions.
Healthcare education is largely an “in-person” experience as it is skills-based, and students must obtain clinical hours throughout their coursework. When tasked with creating an equitable Student Services Advising model to support learner success for 17 campuses across 6 states, it quickly became apparent that a typical campus-bound model would not suffice. To solve this challenge, several questions had to be explored:
- What outcomes are we trying to achieve?
- What do all students need, all campuses need, and all leaders need in order to find success?
- What are the non-negotiables?
- What are assumptions that are holding us back?
- What are opportunities that haven’t been explored?
- How do we eliminate single points of failure?
- How do we ensure an equitable student experience?
- What resources do we have and what resources do we need?
- Why? (This was asked of almost everything…)
By exploring these questions, it quickly became apparent that working within the confines of a campus-based structure would not produce the outcomes we were working towards. When exploring advising more deeply, we were able to distill it down to purposeful outreach and meaningful, effective conversations to support students. Nearly all outreach is “remote” (phone, email, text, virtual meetings…), therefore we needed to assume all students were online and remote to create a successful model to support our students.
Attendees in this session will explore the steps taken to create a fully centralized, networked, distributed, and highly flexible Student Services Advising model built on the assumption that all students are remote and online (at a campus-based institution). We will explore:
- Components of the model
- Navigating the challenges of institutional restructuring and change at all levels
- Creating infrastructure for the model
- Launching the model
- Monitoring and measuring success / owning our narrative!
This session will provide opportunities for attendees to engage in guided discussion, create a framework for solving traditional problems in non-traditional ways, and leave with insights into how to implement change at scale.