APLUS: Leveraging the University of Minnesota Technology Investments to Improve Student Support

What is User-Centered Design? Business-Problem Driven User Focused Iterative Open Ended

What is APLUS? A tool created at the U of M Developed by collegiate programmers with direct input from academic advisers To provide timely information to academic advisers In support of student success And advancing our retention and graduation goals The data you see in this presentation is not real student data

APLUS Supports better advising service for all undergraduate students Gives advisers one location to view current, detailed information about a student. Enables more timely communication with students, and faster resolution of issues. Ensures that pertinent information about a student, including advising notes, follows the student and is available to advisers across the campus. Helps advisers focus on students most in need of advising Supplies information about advisees’ registration activity, mid-term alert status, GPA, advising appointments, and notes history. Each morning advisers receive a list of their advisees with new or outstanding advising alerts or warnings, allowing advisers to prioritize student contacts. Identifies students who exhibit specific behaviors that affect retention and graduation (e.g., dropping classes, missing advising appointments). Reports can be customized for particular concerns and student groups.

How advisers benefit from APLUS Reframes the advising process to be intentionally and appropriately intrusive. Provides a means to quickly and concisely view a wide range of advisee information, pre-categorized based on student action (or inaction), aiding in advisee outreach triage Helps free up valuable time previously spent manually gathering data from disparate reporting systems to conduct personalized outreach to student with risk indicators Can aid in reducing academic issues which have “snowballed” into large problems provides a means of tracking student data not captured in PeopleSoft

How students benefit from APLUS Makes a large university feel smaller by cultivating a sense that someone knows and cares about their academic progress, even if they haven’t met with their adviser recently Early (and more frequent) adviser intervention can assist students in staying on- track and graduating in a timely manner

Key success factors End-users (advisers) drove the design Continuously iterative development process Roll out to additional colleges in phases and started with them in “sandbox mode” to determine their adoption requirements Adoption requirements in a matrix Functionality working group

Summary Many different ways to identify and work with students at-risk of attrition Personal intervention is important Students appreciate that someone cares and intervenes quickly Real-time or near real-time data is essential We all have a part to play in this process

Questions Chris Kearns, Colin DeLong, Tina Falkner,