Becomalum - Education datapalooza

PRESENTATION And please now welcome the CEO of BecomeAlum.com Christina McIntyre, welcome Christina. [Applause] Good morning. So we're talking today about using technology to gain access to education and most importantly to have students be successful at completing their degree. BecomeAlum is a software as a service that helps students to plan out their degree so they can graduate. But while we're focusing on technology I want us to take a moment right now to think about the importance of relationships in higher education, and that was alluded to earlier this morning. Relationships are important but relationships take time. So I'd like to ask each of you to take a moment to think of that individual, that professor, that instructor, that advisor, that person who was your mentor, who saw you through, who was your sounding board, who believed in you. You got a name in mind each of you? For me it was Dr. Forest T. So I'm going to do a little bit of stepping out of the box here and on the count of three, I want you to shout out that person, and this is a little nontraditional. You got a name in mind? Okay, one, two, three. [Participants] Okay those are relationships that's important. Today's challenge is a numbers game the number of students versus the number of faculty. Tenure track faculty who have increasing pressure for research bringing in grant funding and getting published, and to be honest advising if it factors in at all to tenure promotion it weighs very little. There's also faculty who are adjunct or part time and they often teach at multiple colleges and universities. The increasing presence of professional academic advisors has helped but the numbers are still daunting. Wes Habley, one of the founding members of the National Academic Advising Association states that, "Academic advising is the only structured activity on the campus in which students have the opportunity for one-to-one interaction with a concerned representative of the institution." According to a 2011 survey the median individual advisor caseload for large universities is 600 students per advisor. And that's the median you can think of a range there. I happen to know of many colleges and departments where they have two advisors for thousands of students. Remember relationships are important. There's no single path through a degree. Students come to college at different levels and at different places in their lives. Students enter needing remedial work and other students come right out of high school with a junior standing in college through AP, IB dual enrollment credit. And we want to keep in mind that 72% of college students are what we call nontraditional. And while some messages are appropriate in group advising there are key times when an individual one-to-one, face-to-face, phone call or online chat is essential. Many times advising meetings are prompted by students requesting courses for the upcoming semester and that meeting is about what courses to take next semester. Navigating college one semester at a time has unforeseen consequences. Imagine trying to drive across the country with a GPS that only gives you directions one turn at a time you can see where you're going to end up. Many courses are only offered once per year and we know of examples of courses once per year, and we know of examples of courses that are only offered spring semester of odd years. And if you're graduating spring of 2012 or 2014 you might have to stay a whole extra year just to take one course. Many upper division courses have pretty complicated prerequisites. These two factors alone limited semester offerings for courses and prerequisites can cause students to stay an extra semester or an extra year. That's expensive and I dare say that there's people in this audience who have personal stories related to that, maybe a nephew or a niece or yourself who had to stay for an extra semester or an extra year to take that one course to graduate. Some students do create a comprehensive plan towards graduation and some departments actually have an assignment that they do this. But making a plan by hand or by spreadsheet there's many sources of errors. Information needs to come from a variety of sources and it's difficult to find that information. Students don't know what they don't know when they're making this plan. And overlooking just one requirement, one prerequisite, one caveat that a course is only offered in spring semester of odd years can have significant consequences. So our solution was to create BecomeAlum. BecomeAlum is an online software that integrates critical information from a variety of sources like degree requirements, semester offerings, campus locations, maybe it's online, prerequisites, co-requisites, etc. And this allows a student to create a plan to see them through to graduation. They can actually visualize their progress and they can see their path to graduation. Inspired by social media we've incorporated a student profile that ties in with this plan. I'll just give a shout out to Brandon. We have Strengths Quest also incorporated in this so we need to talk about our data buttons MyData talking to each other. The key thing is that advisors can view this plan and the profile online and they can make comments that are emailed or texted to the students for immediate review, and then those comments are retained with the plan, they're date time stamped. So a student can refer to them six months or two years or four years later. So when something was said by one advisor can be made referenced four years later when that advisor maybe gone and someone else is picking up that role. This plan is dynamic and can be adjusted and can allow students to explore other options. They can quickly evaluate how close they are to a second major or a minor. My seventh grade science teacher Mrs. Fox she emphasized me intelligence is the ability to adapt to a changing environment. And students life gets in the way and when life gets in the way they need to adapt, they need to change their plan. And this is a dynamic plan. Intelligence is the ability to adapt to a changing environment and the environment on college campuses is changing. When the majority of students have a plan through BecomeAlum the school has powerful information. They can forecast the change in course enrollments and it's not always up sometimes it's down. And they can identify students by a specific interest and send out targeted messages, that quite honestly the students feel is being sent directly to them, and they feel that there's an individual attention there. This powerful business intelligence from BecomeAlum can help students better serve their students. And isn't that why we're all here today to explore how we can share data to better serve our students? BecomeAlum does not separate the student from the advisor but our goal is to foster a more collaborative relationship between student and advisor. So relationships are important and relationships take time. Think about that person who you shouted out at the beginning. So advising meeting should not be wasted on what courses do I need next semester but when a meeting starts with an accurate student created, student authored plan, then that meeting can be used to discuss student goals, interests, passions and dreams. Charlie Nutt the current Executive Director of the National Academic Advising Association stresses that any retention efforts must clearly recognize the value of academic advising to the success of students and the necessity that advising become an essential part of a collaborative campus wide focus on the success of our students. Ultimately our goal is to get students to graduation that they BecomeAlum. Thank you. CHRISTINA MCINTYRE, CEO BECOMALUM.COM © 2012 OfficeOfEdTech Page 4