Marianne Stickel PACRAO 2010 - Calgary

1. Dominican University of California How We Linked Advising, Registration, and Retention Solutions Marianne Stickel PACRAO 2010 - Calgary

2. Context • SMALL BUT COMPLEX • Founded 1890 • 2,200 students • 60 academic programs – Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees

3. Software Sungard Higher Education PowerCAMPUS • small user base • meets most, but not all, our needs Converted from Sungard BiTech IFAS in 2008 Self-Service online registration – Spring 2010

4. Advising model • Faculty advising model – 89 full-time faculty • Academic Advising & Support Center - Six professional advisors • Advising and schedule planning occurs once each semester • No mandate for required advisor training

5. Business Processes Board ordered a 2009-10 review of all university business processes that touch revenue, so…. Business Services discontinued the up-front registration fee as trigger for registration access Established new parameters for Priority, Open, and Late Registration periods Established earlier deadlines for populations that have consistently enrolled late

6. What were we trying to accomplish? To transition from paper-based to interactive form Keep a record of the advising session Track advisement activity for retention self-study Create an appropriate trigger for online access Create an online toolbox for faculty advisors

7. Retention Concerns Needed to add real-time tracking of advisement activity to the data already being collected on persistence Needed to establish a baseline on conversion of “advised to registered” continuing students as a predictor of continued enrollment Needed to ensure that new online processes did not hamper re-enrollment of students

8. What did we need to preserve? Advisor’s approval to register – in lieu of signature An archival record of the advising session – in lieu of the paper registration form The 4-year Guarantee – ensuring that students follow the advisor’s instruction & stay on track

9. What did we need to prevent? Students registering without advisement An overload of “approval monitoring” by the faculty advisors Requiring yet another userID to access the Self-Service online registration site Attrition or delays in registration due to new processes and/or unclear communication

10. Who worked on the project? Information Technology Registrar & Operations/Data Manager Director of Academic Advising & Support Business Services Retention Work Group Pilot group of faculty advisors and advisees

11. How does it work? Advising begins 4-5 weeks ahead of the Priority Registration period for the upcoming term Fall – Early March to mid-April Spring - Early October to mid-November E-mail notices to all enrolled students go out in advance, with periodic reminders to meet with their academic advisors before registration

12. How does it work? Advisor training sessions are hosted by the Director of Academic Advising & Support and the Registrar, with support from the IT HelpDesk Advisors use the same local area network site to access the Advising Session form that they use to access class rosters, degree plan information, and to do online grading Instructions are provided on the Advisor Portal: Screen shot on next slide.

13. The Advisor Portal

14. The Advisor Portal 2010 Developed by the Director of Academic Advising & Support and her staff Previewed in Advisor training Spring 2010 Provides an online toolbox for academic advisors Lives on the local area network front page, the same site used for Self-Service access

15. Instructions for the form

16. Advising Session Form - 1

17. Advising Session form - 2

18. Advising Session Form - 3

19. Advising Session form - 4

20. Where does it go? Once the advisor hits the submit button, an e-mail message is generated to: • The student being advised • The advisor who submitted the form • Information Technology archive Since advisor access is via the web, advising appointments can occur from the advisor’s home or office, via telephone, chat, or e-mail, and can be asynchronous if necessary

22. Then what?? The students use the e-mailed Advising Session record as their guide to select courses when they register The advisors have the option to archive the e-mailed forms in whatever type of e-file they choose. The pre-designated subject line makes indexing simple. The advisor can also forward the form to a Dept. Chair, or to another advisor, if desired

23. What data is available? When the form is submitted, an e-mail is sent via a “Stored Procedure” in the PowerCAMPUS MS SQL database. Reports are created by our IT Department in MS Reporting Services Various reports feature drill-downs on certain fields All are exportable to a variety of applications Reports are accessible to all on local area network

24. What data is available? These reports are available on the local area network to University administrators and faculty: • Advised but not registered • Advised Student List • Advising and Registration Counts/Comparison • Advising and Section Counts • Advising Audit by Advisor, by Major • Advising Counts by Date • Student Advising vs. Registration Audit • Students Not Advised • Students Registered but not Advised

25. Report Descriptions

26. Sample real-time report showing number advised into a section vs. number enrolled

27. Sample report showing how many in a given major have been advised for the next term

28. How Did it Work? Excerpt from Registrar’s May 2010 Board report: “Online registration for Summer and Fall 2010 began with the Priority Week April 12-16. In the first three and one-half days, we had registered a larger number of students for the upcoming fall semester than in any other full five-day Priority Week since the Registrar began tracking this activity in 2006. We enjoyed the full cooperation of faculty, staff, and students in this new venture. The software performed to our satisfaction, with a few wrinkles yet to be remedied before next fall. Student and faculty satisfaction levels are high, and we are beginning the assessment process for the next round which occurs in November.”

29. Enrollment in Week #1 -Fall 2006 through Fall 2010 TERM ENROLLED IN WEEK 1 • FALL 06 864 • FALL 07 803 • FALL 08 801 • FALL 09 781 • FALL 10 883 (at 1pm on Day 4]

30. Advisor Satisfaction Zoomerang Survey Results 32 respondents (of about 80 advisors) = 40% return rate Have you used the Advising form? 30 YES = 94% Has it functioned as you expected, based on the training you received? 29 YES, 1 NO, 2 BLANK = 91% YES On a scale of 1-10, how pleased are you with this new advising tool? 7.73 AVG - 73% scored it 7 or higher Are the e-mail features useful to you in your advising process? 30 YES, 1 NO, 1 BLANK = 94% YES

31. Credit Where it is Due The Wizard (and son) peter.mentzer@dominican.edu Peter Mentzer, Director of Online Technology Created the Advising Session Form

32. Credit Where it is Due Academic Advising & Support Center Creators of the Advisor Portal Everil.robertson@dominican.edu

33. Technical Specifications 1 • The code for this tool is ASPX custom code in custom pages on our SharePoint intranet • Developer Note: You can add custom ASPX pages to SharePoint by using SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio, and then modifying your root web.config file to allow custom code to run on those pages • Eligible students are pulled from a modified VIEW in the powercampus MS SQL database • Available advising terms are pulled from a modified VIEW in the powercampus MS SQL database • Available sections are pulled out of the powercampus MS SQL database and populate dropdown lists so that section data is “normalized” and standard reports can be run against it later. • Developer Note: This is pretty inefficient because we query the database once per dropdown. There’s probably a much smarter way to cache these results and then re-use them, but we didn’t have time to figure that one out.

34. Technical Specifications 2 • The data for the advising session is written into two custom tables that we added to the powercampus database: one for the session, and one for each course advised in that session. • We create more advising sessions in the database if a student is advised more than once. We don’t add data into the advising session once it’s created. We simply create additional advising sessions. • Developer Note: This was done to make it a simple system to develop and maintain and to make sure we had a record of everything that was advised. A possible improvement would be to support “versions” of a given advising session. • When the page is submitted, and email is sent via a Stored Procedure in the powercampus MS SQL database. The email body is a record of the advising session, and it is sent to the person who conducted the advising session and to the student. • Not only does this provide feedback to the users that the form was submitted successfully, but it’s a great “cheatsheet” that the students can use when registering online for their classes. • We provide various reports on the advising data in the database. • The reports are MS Reporting Services reports

35. THANK YOU FOR ATTENDING! Questions? Mstickel@dominican.edu