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

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

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

3. 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

4. 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.

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. Questions Chris Kearns, kearn012@umn.edu Colin DeLong, delo0041@umn.edu Tina Falkner, rovic001@umn.edu