Dive Deeper with RHB: Approaching Student Success Projects in Slate

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OK everyone, thank you so much for joining our dive deeper series with our preferred partner VHB. Today our web and R is going to be on approaching student success projects in Slate, so we have two of our partners from PHB Alana and Abraham, but we also have two guests, Kate from the University of Indianapolis and our very own Ken Higgins at technicians. So they are going to be with you for the next hour talking about.

Student success and how how that's managed within Slate. But before we get started with the webinar, I do want to go over a few housekeeping items. For those of you who have attended more than one dive deeper, these are probably familiar to you, but just as a reminder, we are going to be recording this webinar so it will be made available for viewing afterward. So if you have to drop off for some reason, don't worry. This is going to be recorded.

You can enable the close captioning by clicking the CC button at the top right of the screen, and you can also view this in full screen as well by using that expand button up there as well for any reason. If you need to re sync your audio or video that will fit, you can refresh your screen and that will fix that pretty quickly right there. And of course we encourage you guys to ask questions and the chat will be moderating that chat and hopefully get to all the questions that you have as well.

And if for some reason you'd want to turn off that chat option, you can turn that off by clicking the chat icon up front as well, right? So without further ado, I'm going to hand it over to Alana, who is going to kick us off.

Thanks Don D.

It's so wonderful to see so many people here, and I think we are just going to get started 'cause we've got a lot of things to cover. We're excited to share lots of information with you and hear your questions too.

We'll start with a quick introduction for our panelists to tell you who we are, why we're here, and what we bring to the conversation. Then we've got some prepared, prepared questions.

Based on questions you all submitted when you registered and then also things that come up often with clients and with folks who are using slate and and then we'll have time for audience questions at the end, so make sure you are submitting your questions in the chat along the way and during those prepared questions and will will cover them at the end. Hopefully we'll have a lot of time.

So I'd like to start with introductions for the panelist. My name is Alotta alcotan with VHB and I'm here to moderate today. So you'll hear me asking questions along the way and keeping track of those questions in the chat.

And Kate, why don't you head off next?

Sure, I'm Kate Kaufman. I'm the project director in the office of the President at the University of Indianapolis, and I am kind of managing a large grant around student enrollment and retention for the university.

Ken Higgins, I'm the general manager of student success here at Slate technicians, the company that brings you slate happy to be here today I focus and work with all of our schools and prospective schools who are interested in exploring utilizing slate as it relates to student success. Student success is a broad stroke brush term, but anything kind of related with currently enrolled student efforts. Retention, persistence, advising, kind of all of that so.

Happy to be here with you all today.

Games Abraham know. I'm a consultant at PHB, started a year in a couple months ago. Prior to that was at Macalester College for a number of years.

What my work at our HP includes system implementations. A lot of advancement. Once we have more admissions, a little bit of advancement and a little student success. So I get a good smattering of different types of implementations. And I also do portals as well.

Thank you for those lovely introductions and I'm excited to be here to hear what Kate Cannon, Abraham all have to add to the conversation about student success. And so we're going to jump right in with the prepared questions.

And.

Here they are for us as we go through them, you'll see our progress along the way, and that's for those folks who are jumping in and watching this. Well, it's being recorded, so you can kind of navigate through the conversation in that way and at the end of these questions we will have time for audience questions. So again, submit them in the chat and we'll get them. That will get to them at the end.

And so our first question.

Is why are people deciding to use slate for student success?

I can jump in if that's OK.

So at the University of Indianapolis, we were looking at our most at risk students and we partnered with a company that helped build us a data analytics model called resultant that was sort of predicting who would enroll in who would not, or I'm sorry who would retain and who would not. What we realized was we needed staff to intervene on behalf of those students and contact those students, and we thought having a CRM to manage those relationships and keep track of that. Those conversations would be helpful. We worried that.

If it was just in people's emails, if you know financial aid had a conversation and then someone in advising and someone in student affairs, we wouldn't have that history.

So we looked at a variety of different partners. We were using slate as our admission system and we're really happy with that. So we decided to create a second instance of slate and build it out for student success, and we've been really blessed to have our HB as our partner doing that work with us this past year and we just launched it this fall. So still a little bit of a pilot, but it's going really well so far.

My my my two cents on this it out. Maybe zoom out a little bit. A lot of the conversations that I have revolve around kind of what Kate said, amplifying what Kate said that this need for a tool set or a tool that allows a focus on.

Retention or persistence or student success rate success with you. However, that's defined if they. If it's a milestone that needs to be achieved. If it is some type of communication effort to currently enrolled students from from the zoomed out 30,000 foot perspective, there is always been this really, really highly tuned focus on enrollment, right? So a new enrollment, right admissions it? Oftentimes it would come up in presidential conversations or at the cabinet or board of trustees. We always need to worry about this.

New neck new right. What's the new incoming class looking like?

And maybe an OFT under. I don't say underserved or under resourced, but certainly overlooked area would be something like retention and persistence, right?

The past year and a half or two years with the the pandemic certainly has amplified the focus on that area of the student lifecycle, right? How can we ensure that our students are getting their resources? Getting the service is getting the service that they need in order to to retain them or in order to making sure ensuring their success. However, that's defined if it's retaining them and seeing them through to graduation, that's fantastic.

If it's helping them kind of be more fulfilled during their time on campus, whatever that is, COVID or the pandemic. Certainly kind of threw a wrench in those efforts or or amplify the need for this kind of ongoing conversation about once you get them there. That is not to the end of the race, right? You have to keep them there and you have to be able to get them out in a reasonable amount of time.

And so there's that right. And then you start looking at Slate and the tool set that exists. Since you say, well, wait a minute, it's late, does an awful lot of these things that we want to do with are currently enrolled students from communications to kind of managing it from the structural CRM standpoint, right? It's at its core. It's kind of this good data repository, reporting event management, so on and so forth. You kind of go through the list of, like Ken Slate, do that. And you say yes, in most of those cases.

Right, so there can certainly be an argument.

To utilize all that slate is but just view it through the lens of a student success centric world.

But also helps his slate can create a lot of information that is in different systems on a campus. So for us we were able to pull in things like information from banner, you know information from our financial aid system, information from admissions limit, who can see what but have it in one place so that when someone is trying to help a student, they didn't have to go to all of those different systems to find the information so that that simplifies it as well.

You know to kind of add to. I think what what everybody said. One of the things that is important about Slate is it has all this wonderful functionality that you can bring to bear on this. And I think Ken was kind of alluding to some of that as well the.

You know the idea that you can take all the things that's like can do for admissions and potentially use it for student success operations is sort of an amazing thing. It's incredibly flexible tool, and it allows you to kind of expand it into spaces that maybe it wasn't originally intended for, but it could easily accommodate you if you think about the flexibility around communications. The flexibility around being able to create auxiliary datasets, portals, all those tools come into bear, and it gives you the ability really to create a custom version of the system.

That is really strong.

Yeah, it's a. It's an interesting point about communication. Sometimes I'll have conversations and that's all they want to slate to do for their currently enrolled students. So it's all you know, they say we just need to have an effective kind of robust communication tool 'cause we don't have that now either with the current system. Or maybe it's operated they're operating out of like Outlook or Gmail, right? In the standard mail client, so allowing just that kind of core functionality is a huge step in the right direction. Be able to track emails or opens, or clicks or whatever it is.

Tech.

And for us it was texting. We felt like students didn't necessarily respond to email, especially students who are at risk.

So being able to have that ability to text them was really helpful.

Sure.

I mean the other thing, I think I'd highlight two is.

And we've kind of touched on this a little bit, but slate is particularly good at integration, so it has the ability to kind of push data out and pull data in through a variety of formats, including web services and where that is really important to a project like this is that typically this system the student success system is not going to be by itself. It's going to have to play nicely with a lot of other systems on campus. You know, we alluded already to NSIS banner and you know, Lucian banner is a robust system that does many different things.

But it does not have a particularly strong CRM component. So when you think about a slate standing alongside of that.

That's where it's really powerful. But to do that work you need to be able to do integration and and I would argue slate. That's one of the strongest points of slate. It does that integration work exceptionally well. Upload data set is the tool if you're not familiar with it.

Yeah.

But having that ability to kind of push data in and out on an automated basis allows it to do all the things you need to do to keep it synchronized with system of records, which is what we'll talk about maybe later in the conversation, but that's, you know the fundamentals to do that work and kind of do it in a way that is not going to require specialized.

SQL Skills other than getting the data out of the system is there so you get sort of all the goodness that comes with slate for that one thing. And that alone could make it worthwhile.

Thank you all for sharing and the perspective that you bring in terms of the modules and the functionality that you used in slate or that you saw in Clayton said, hey, you know what student success can also use that functionality and the integration pieces and the different things that we added. So thank you.

For really talking to why people are kind of deciding to use slate for student success in addition to maybe admissions authority, using sleep, and with that in mind, the next question is sort of.

If folks are already existing slate users.

And they're deciding to bring student success into their current. You know what they're offering with Slate?

How do they decide between building a new instance or building within an existing slate instance?

We chose to do it a new instance. Uhm, we we had a lot of different conversations about what would make sense and and truthfully, our admissions staff just felt more comfortable if we had a separate instance. We also were going to be looking at different data points than they were looking at, and we were going to have different communication flows. So I mean, we are very lucky because we have grant dollars from the Lilly Endowment funding this which you know made it.

A lot more affordable for us and some other schools that maybe have to be a little bit more cost effective, but for us it just felt a little bit cleaner and and and less stressful for our admission colleagues to to do a separate instance.

That's totally fair, and I think a lot of the decision comes down to kind of institutional nuances and complexity. Maybe right or maybe kind of institutional climate. How inter department? Totally strong I think or or regulated the institution is.

All of the functionality of this late functionality that is available for an admissions user is also immediately available. It's not like a different module that needs to turn be turned on. You don't pay like an, you know an ad or a per user fee or something like that. So so to do it in an already existing environment costs nothing right? And this I'm not. This isn't Microsoft Excel or anything like that, but just I mean it's already available, right? So if there is that to case point, if there is that.

Maybe fiscal restriction right? Or you just don't have the dollars you could explore and say, well, we could, you know we can kind of expand and explore. Andrew brought up the question right. I mean, we can do realms. We can do permissions, we can do rolls, you do population permissions. It's absolutely possible, but to Kate's point. And in this kind of pun intended if you need like a quote, unquote, a clean slate, right to build up your own objects in your own process is a new database. There's absolutely benefit to kind of provisioning a standalone database.

That is solely focused on the currently enrolled student student efforts. There are certainly benefits to both. I really do think it often comes down all the time. Comes down to that kind of institutional nuanced. What do you? What do you actually need? What's your use case that will help dictate whether you should just share right or purchase a separate database?

I like the sandbox analogy for this a little bit because you know to me is if you go with a single instance, can everybody play in the same sandbox? Can everybody in essence and and to kind of broaden that out? Do you have the both the capability people and systems sort of infrastructure questions worked out where you can do that. So for example, if you have a mature admission instance you know like like Ken was saying, if you want to try out something in that that student success.

Related, that's a very easy thing to do, but then the minute you get another department that maybe is not admissions focused, it potentially changes the equation a little bit, because all of a sudden you might have to give access. Well, Slate is incredibly granular in terms of its ability to do. Permissions is not infinitely granular, so there are always going to be compromises.

At least right now the one area where you have to be careful is timeline and communications inside of slate. Now I know I suspect tech delusions is working on ways around that in the future, but today if you have access to timeline you see everything in timeline. So that's a core consideration for this. Is it OK for folks who are maybe working with student retention to see messages from admissions and vice versa? If it's not, then that's a sort of drives you toward maybe having separate instances, if it is.

Then you can maybe work through that, but that's there's kind of nuances and subtleties to that. The other sort of piece to this is just the level of system administration. So while you can do lots of permissions and populations and realms on different things in slate, if you have several system administrators, none of those apply to those system administrators generally, and because of that, then you have to sort of work through the if System Administrator A and admissions wants to do something.

Versus everybody else. There's nothing in the system that will prevent that, so they have to be able to coordinate and come to a, you know, kind of a consolidated way of doing it. And sometimes it's not possible and it it can be a combination of the fact that they are under different leadership. It can also be a question that they are maybe have different goals, so you have to kind of look at those things and decide what best fits your situation. I will say somebody who's helped set these up starting from a brand new instance of slate is always really nice.

'cause there's no history, there's no legacy with that. You really are building it custom too.

A student success realm or student success usage case so you don't have to kind of work through all the things that come with admissions.

But you could also argue if you want to do everything in one instance. Maybe there's a way to do that.

Yeah.

In that in that org structure or kind of architecture of your institution might fit that, you know might really play well in that in that shared environment. If you if your office is work so well or closely together anyway, it might behoove you to say that that's great. There's nothing really stopping us. We were there are efforts are so closely aligned, right that that it just works that way. One thing that Abraham said you know about kind of its system administrators. Something that's popping up?

Or more often in conversations that I have. Is this concept of a university slate administrator right as opposed to? Again, we're we're broadening out beyond the doors of admissions now we're into student success and advancement, right? So as opposed to relying on the admissions instance, captains to build everything out and to be reliant on the structure it that, that role or roles can also expand out into the student success world, whether it's multiple administrators.

Abrahams Point or or a slate to university or university slate administrator.

Just to build on two things that you both said. We also didn't want to pull our admissions team away from recruitment to be thinking about some of these things. We felt like their time was really sensitive and and we are a enrollment independent institution. We also I know we're going to talk a little bit more about this and security and user management, but we we had a lot of conversations with our legal counsel around FERPA is, you know, you texting and emailing that history is kept in the timeline.

And as Abraham mentioned, anyone can see that timeline. So as we're opening this up to student affairs, and as we're possibly opening this up to our academic advisors, we wanted to make sure that you know, if we texted a student and they said we said, you know, why are you not in class and their response was, you know, I've been sexually assaulted, you know, now we have a Title 9 situation and we wanted to make sure that we were. We're following all legal guidelines, so part of the separate instance also allows us to kind of protect students rights.

Because there's difference between students going through an admissions process we're not yet enrolled in your institution, and students who are enrolled in your institution and the different responsibilities you have around their, their rights and their data. So for us, our our legal counsel is very cautious, but she felt very comfortable that anyone who had an educational reason to see these timelines could. And we're working on those permissions. But we just wanted, you know, we wanted to make sure we were being responsible to our students.

Good point.

Definitely.

Yeah, thanks for thanks for jumping in and so it sounds like the decision between instances where there is new or existing.

Really comes down to what your your university or what your institutions needs are and what you're building now versus who might be in the system a little bit later like you were saying. Abraham and.

Or what data points that you have that you.

That might need to be.

You know, hidden from other folks or used in other places. Whether you want a clean instance or something that's shared between lots of folks and also budgetary concerns seem to be something that people consider to, and we also kind of jumped to this question about security and user management and how they can affect implementation because we talked a little bit about who's managing the entire slate instances or all of this late instances, that institution and different strategies for approaching security and user management conversations.

So if we can just I, I guess continue on this question for a couple minutes too.

How does this security and user management affect implementation and institution?

So one thing I'd lead off with maybe with this is that if you're familiar with how slate for admissions or advancement works, it's the same. For this, you're really working with the same system, so you have all this sort of robust controls around record management. And the biggest one is population based security, so you have the capability to assign a population to a record and then constrain that to a certain type of users or groups of users, which is really powerful. The other thing is the realm based security, which is for database objects.

So with that you could hypothetically create different sort of communication streams where different users are in charge of those streams or different types of queries.

And you can sort of combine the two. There's a nifty population base called applet or application by popular. Actually, that wouldn't apply in this case. Person by population most likely would apply here. And what's nifty about that is you can have the same query show different.

Yeah.

Different database records, two different types of users but have the same query do that, so those are the kind of things that really are powerful with what slate has and where all that derives from is if you think about an emissions world where you had maybe a Graduate School, lots of different programs, kind of looking at the records differently, all that functionality comes into a student success instance.

The thing, though, they think about this, that is fundamentally different, is that unlike maybe that situation where people are essentially are doing the admissions job in a student success, since it could conceivably be anything. So you know, we've seen examples in my consultancy of retention, we've seen student adjudication, certainly advising communications. But you could also use other things like sports management. So think about a team management that's a possibility. So when you kind of mix all those things.

Together, you really need to think about what do the user groups look like and what are they going to have access to. And then this question of where are the edges currently so you know we identified the timeline is maybe one of the current edges. I do want to clarify one point. You can turn the timeline off so, but if you do that you lose the CRM aspect of slate, which is the ability to see what has happened with that individual. What are all the communications? So that's something we're.

This sort of different permissions can be layered over top of each other, and if you understand how they interact you can get some really nice sort of different types of views of the same record. I think the other thing too is portals, so the one thing portals gives you is if you build a portal for something that really even goes above and beyond what Slate does in the sense that it goes beyond those standard permissions. You can cut highly, customize that portal to show only what you wanted to see, and typically that gets used for like a faculty scenario where you want faculty members to see very specific.

Places of the record be able to do very specific things, but not anything else, so you know those I think are examples of how you could actually manage some of this.

Segmentation is is one of the most the first, very important strategic conversations that you have to have right already. Hit on K and Abraham already hit on a couple of good points. You know who who has, who has, how much access to slate and by slate, meaning the person you know the person records that live in slave. But Abraham then as it relates to realms of the things inside the other things, other objects, so queries and events and forms and mailings. Those fall into that kind of realm conversation. And if they do have.

You can start it. You can start this segmentation in the broadest sense. You kind of putting them into buckets, right? Or or segmenting them out by the largest kind of population of users that you can get. We've got faculty. We've got administrators, and maybe we've got our advising stuff. I know that's probably two simplest. I'm oversimplifying it, but really, really broad buckets that you can put your users into and then further bifurcate their use cases by splitting down those buckets further.

Because it doesn't take too long before you say you always find the exception and oftentimes, or sometimes that exception will ultimately lead to the rule, we say, well, Abraham needs some person record access, so we can. We can absolutely do that. Let's set him up with a population permission.

But there's particularly one tab that, to Kate's point, you know there's an advising notes tab that's on all person records, but Abraham should be able to see a person record, but particularly not that tab. I know I'm getting kind of in the weeds, but but that type of slicing and dicing is is really where you get down into the meat of the conversation of who's supposed to see what and and how they're supposed to interact from a user experience perspective, how you're expecting them to interact with with slate.

Or zoom all the way out to Abraham's final point and say, well, the the the power of portals allow you to entirely control and kind of filter through just the information that you want that portal user to see and experience. That way they're kind of viewing slate from outside of the window. You know they're outside of the house looking through the window there and died inside of the house.

Yes.

So something that's been really nice at Abraham has been able to set up for us is almost a case management functionality, so we have retention happening in sort of three lanes to very simplify it. We have 300 students that were identified at the beginning of the semester as being at risk, and they've been assigned what we call a campus connector and Abrahams like. An admissions counselor would have their territory. Abraham was able to help us set it up that they have just really their students, so students are emailing. It goes directly to their.

Campus connector all through slate. Then we have anyone could be a retention alert form could be submitted on any student or concern form and that creates a new case and we have someone managing that and assigning it out. Similar to kind of assigning a new student coming in on the admission side.

And then we have this data model running behind the scenes that looks at 400 data points every week and says the students behavior is concerning and is more likely now not to retain and so that triggers a case and then we use slate to manage the the case management with that student and it's just all of those user permissions really allow us to make sure people are sort of in their lane dealing with their students, not. There's not like a messy like oh there's 40 messages in the inbox. Who's answered?

What like it's just all is very nicely channeled to who it has to go to.

Sure.

Thank you for all speaking to that and security and management user management. The ways that you can get around. You can really design how your users can interact with the data.

And sort of how slaves built initially and then how you can figure out how to use slate functionality with your specific users in mind. So that's wonderful. Thank you for sharing that.

Uhm?

Moving back in our lovely little order of questions because that new and existing slated sense really fed well into this at security and user management. Question, jumping back to the question before that.

About choosing systems of record for official data. So how does an institution decide when in the student lifecycle a different system might house the official data?

About that student at that time, what are some things that people think about there?

So we use banner as our student information system and that is our system of record. So everything that we've built in Slate will eventually update banner and vice versa. So one thing that we wanted to make sure we captured in Slate correctly was a a mobile, a cell phone number so that when we're texting but we wanted to wanted to make sure we would update that in banner. Then for anyone else on campus. And so admissions updates Banner banner feeds into slate.

Along with several other systems and we have come.

Kind of a central.

A server where a lot of this retention data is feeding into so that we can look at those 400 data points, but then update the proper systems.

Yeah, just not, this is just another really critical kind of strategic conversation to have when you're thinking about this right when you're going down the student success route, because enter the conversation now SIS and maybe Reslife tool and maybe a financial aid software right? All those things might be in the same system. Might be desperate systems right where? What information is coming from? What system? Where is it all headed to? Maybe ultimately and which?

Or we deciding is that purest form of data? I think like something like a cell phone is a really perfect example, right? You're likely collecting a student cell phone number, likely in slate, let's say throughout the admission process, right? You can capture that and continue and not have, let's say banner be the system of record for that. Or excuse me, it's not going to be conceived inside of Banner saying, no, we're going to take that piece of data from Slate because we decided that the purest form of that data, the cell phone for this example.

Come would be what it's going to be in banner. We're not going to re ask that question to pull it into a form of banner so it being pulled from slate for in this case would be the system of record for it and having your SES consume it in that instance. Beautiful example. However there are a lot of things that slate might not be need be this system of record for write something like official classifications or official maybe GPA standing.

I'm thinking of like course planning or registration, right? Those things you know you could. You could manage them in slate. However, in that situation, Slate would very much be a compliment to the SES, right? As opposed to kind of overwriting the SAS functionality, right? Use slave for its strength, but it kind of in tandem with with banner to be the official, and we're using banner between the SIS or.

The other systems to be the official kind of system of record. It doesn't have to be though. All the pendulum doesn't have to swing all one way or all the other kind of read case point. Something like a cell phone or something like prefixes or salutations or something that might change. Or you might gather and be able to pull that into your SAS, although even though it wasn't conceived inside of the SAS.

I could personally take this as a personal challenge. Sometimes it is a I'm of the opinion slate could do anything, but I I can be talked out of that when when needed. I think all these points are really important and valid.

What's interesting about this, though, is that.

You know an area where sleep does not have strength necessarily is compliance. So if you have something that's highly compliance related and I think of financial aid for example, so you think of a financial aid scenario where the regs are changing every year.

You potentially have new data formats or coming in constantly.

You know the federal government is involved. That's something we're slate, maybe isn't necessarily going to be the best tool to use because there's no mechanism to do that. You would have to invent that mechanism to keep those things up to date from a compliance standpoint, but it is a fantastic tool to use to aggregate data from a tool that is a good tool for that. So were you in D? We're talking about banner, and Banner has a great financial aid module.

Making Slate play seamlessly with that module is something that it does well already from an emission standpoint, but you can extend it and aggregate so you know one of the things with this is that that financial aid module in banner is incredibly complex. There are many, many screens you have to know all the navigation you have to understand a lot of concepts. What you can do here is really take that data, pull it into entity records or an entity record and display it in a way where it's very digestible by a casual user. To me, that's where it's late lives when it comes to this.

Kind of stuff because it is very, very good at that.

So I think you you know kind of to what Ken said earlier. You play to its strengths. So you have to kind of know what the strengths are you you're not necessarily going to create a new financial aid system in sleep, but you can use it to consume financial aid data and show it in a very simplified manner that is accurate and can be used by the end users in a successful manner.

Yeah.

And we were able to display it in addition to our billing systems information, which is a separate banner instance. I believe on our campus so we could not only see their financial aid, but did they have a balance? How much was the balance? So as people are working with these at risk students, they can really.

Drill down without having to be in all of these different systems and sort of figure out what's the problem. You haven't bought any books yet, so you can't study for any re classes. You still have this balance. OK, we need to intervene here and get you connected to financial aid or emergency student funds and try to get you that money to get those you know book spot and that balance paid. So it's really just made conversations flow and allowed our staff to connect the students in a way that helps them succeed because the staff has been trying to find information.

In all these different systems or systems they don't have access to normally.

Yeah.

Miller

Well, well said Slate slate becomes this kind of centralized data hub. You know this state of mind, right where everything is pouring into slate. It doesn't have to be the system record for all of those things, but it comes. It becomes this one stop user shop right where, where, when the student walks in for that ad hoc walk-in appointment you can pull up's latency, but everything that you need to see to have a productive conversation or to serve the student appropriately. And that's critical, and maybe.

Gets lost sometimes on all of us in higher Ed, right where you say Oh well I like I'm so used to bouncing around all the different tabs and all the different systems. But if there's a process that can be made more efficient or with less steps, put it in slate for sure.

Since I've heard you all talk about.

How?

The things that really affect.

Thinking through.

Thinking through other questions that we have and using it's late or not necessarily assisted record. But that is like a way to processes and aggregating information and dispersing information easier around your institution.

And I know that you've mentioned entities, and I know that you've mentioned integrations. Can we talk to the technical demands involved in creating student success, either when it within the current instance or a new instance and then speak to sort of?

The attention and resources that go into the technical demands of of having student success and sleep.

Good question.

Well, first of all, I would say start the conversations with your IT department. You are going to need their support to make all of these systems connect together and get access to systems. We had to have a lot of conversations because people weren't necessarily comfortable. We, you know, we started looking at retention very differently on our campus. You know I keep mentioning this tool with resulting, but we're we're looking at everything from students Wi-Fi access to their their meal swipes and.

Uhm, things that we just had never studied before and everyone was sort of like we don't know if you can see that and then wanting to aggregate some of this into slate, but our staff really was open to it. They didn't necessarily have the capacity to do all of the work, which is why we partnered with VHB and we still don't actually have like a a person whose full time job is to update slate moving forward when we don't have already to be anymore. So that makes me a little like want to vomit, but.

It's Abraham, just call him Abraham.

That yeah, I keep telling him I don't want him to leave.

Uh, right, right, sure.

Ken, there's going to be some service tickets coming your way and.

But what we do have is an IT staff who was willing to kind of think out of the box, build the the links and the joins that needed to happen and provide us a project manager to kind of keep it moving forward. But it it really did.

It it took a lot of time. I mean, I think we've been working on it about six months and we're still, you know, building the plane as we're flying it. And sometimes I feel like we're crashing it as we're flying it. But it's it's moving forward and we're and we're helping students.

Everything that Kate said for sure. You know getting the getting the on campus support that you need to get them in the conversation early, right? Kate said you know, contact your IT folks. If we're talking about data integration specifically, or brought that up quite a bit right? And and that might be an area where from a technical perspective you know's latest.

Purpose built for the user to not have required technical acumen, right? However, you might say, well, if I'm working on FPS or web service pushes that might be outside of kind of your to define skill sets. So you need kind of other players or other departments on campus to help you support it in those areas, right? And because let's stay on data integration as a as a whole, that becomes as important as it was for the admission.

Process, but now you're not maybe just talking. We just talked about this. We're not just talking about Slate to Banner Slate SS. There might be other systems that you need to integrate with and and that setup might require.

Some technical acumen that comes from maybe your IT department or or other kind of partners or colleagues on campus.

To Kate's point as well, you need somebody to be thinking about this stuff right? And you need somebody to be implementing and building. Slate is exactly that. This kind of clean slate for you to build in to make your own. And without hours of dedicated hours, you know whatever without time dedicated to doing that and exercising it and practicing and building things out that can become more of a challenge. So it does require some some attention to be paid.

I mean what we're trying to do is, instead of intervening when the students already falling off the Cliff, we're trying to predict when that fall might happen and prevent the fall, and so it's a really different way of looking at retention. You instead of waiting till mid term grades were looking very early in the semester at attendance patterns and great, you know we we built a link within our new learning management system, so it it just, you know. And those conversations with faculty were challenging. Like you know, faculty still don't necessarily want to.

Take attendance in every class. So how do we create those? You know that data in a way that's easy for campus, so I think that student success will will be constantly changing, just like admissions is constantly changing. And the great thing about Slate is it's so flexible that as you maybe change a decision or want to look at a data point, it's really easy to add where a system like banner just doesn't necessarily have that flexibility. Like we love being a banner campus and will stay at Banner campus.

But it just, it just doesn't nimble in the way slate is.

Maybe maybe this is kind of built into this too. I think some of the things here are you should approach this as a project, it's always going to be. It's going to have a starting middle and an end. And you know, maybe that's obvious to everybody on the call, but.

Where I've seen this go off the rails on occasion is when schools kind of don't know what the endpoint looks like and that did not happen at uindy, which was fantastic, but they say they want student success, but then they kind of have a general idea about what it is, but they don't.

Have a specific endpoint and I think it's critical because you have to build it. You can't just drag and drop a thing and drop it in. You have to have a plan and to me that plan encompasses well. First of all you need to have an infrastructure for the basic records, so generally there's conversations around what does a person record mean in this new instance? You know what kind of statuses go with that? What does it mean from the standpoint if they come and go or they withdraw, how do you reflect that in the record?

Then there's this layer of OK. Now that we have that, what? What is sort of the modular piece we want? And in the case of Uindy they wanted to do student retention. So we kind of built out the person record and then the student retention and case management came with that and we used all the tools that come a slate to build that piece out. But what's nice about that is once you kind if you think in that way, then if in the future they ever want to add something new, you build that other module and kind of drop it in and slaves flexible enough.

Yeah.

They can do that, but that all being said, having a beginning, middle and end point with then things that are in scope and out of scope. Sort of basic project management is key to making this work. Maybe that's the case for all systems, but in particular with this system, because it's not an out of the box. You get everything set up sort of deal. You have to build it. You have to configure it. You have to have some basic knowledge of slate to do that. There's great, great documentation. There's great examples. You know I can. I know you have that great example in in the clean slate instance that you can spin.

Yeah.

So you can see how the records look, but to me that's a departure point. That's not necessarily the end point. You have to then take that and sort of customize it to what you want in your institution.

In in Cape just one final point brought up this kind of critical next step, right? We've talked a lot about like the structure and the infrastructure and the architecture of this and how you're building and what model you know what tools you're using is like. But then Kate really kind of, you know, spun it in the right direction, we say, and ultimately, what's the what's the result? What are we trying to do?

Here, right, this proactive approach to say now that this this structure is built. How can we use that to appropriately intervene and effect? Let's say student retention and in case point, right? How do we intervene proactively as opposed to looking at data at the end of the semester? After all, the students have already left or decided to leave, right? Or putting their transfer requests? If these mechanisms that you've structured in in these modular kind of projects or processes that you built out in slate?

Can assist that's kind of where this come getting up on my pedestal a little bit like that's where you can actually really impact student success, right? If it were just retention, that's great, right? If if you're interested in the the retention or graduate persistence graduation rate, that's the real end goal. Here, you know, using the tools, building these things out to allow you to have a positive impact on the students experience at your at your institution, right?

I'll get off my end end and soapbox rant.

I mean, for me and I come from admissions. Originally, I think admissions has become a very personal experience for students and admissions counselors.

In some ways or even like hand holding through the process and then we expect them to get to our campus and just sort of succeed. And the campuses that have done really creative things like the Agnes Scott's and the Savior who have created these Nets around their students are seeing success and so that's what we're trying to do and and not treat them like children or anything. But sort of back off of this idea that they're adults. You know, because ferment for our campus especially we have a very large first generation population in Pell eligible population.

So they don't have people in their lives who can help them navigate. So if we're not helping them navigate, they're not going to succeed.

Yeah, well, well said and somebody said preach to yeah absolutely and they have as a customer right as a paying customer there is in a lot of cases that level of expectation they are expecting that right? So when they do hit that kind of strange cold wall after the admissions process which is very.

High touch, very like you know we love the you know and then that's kind of like OK, good luck. You're on your own there. There's a broader, a bigger challenge there and and that's that's opposites, incongruent with what they're expecting right as from from a customer experience perspective.

You know another, I think. Another thing to this is that slate is so robust that one of the things you should think about with the technical or project side of this is what is it going to displace and what I mean by that is think about a scenario where.

Student, you know you're a student affairs person. You're doing this work already, and you're using maybe five or six systems to do the same thing. That's like can do. A great example would be standalone texting systems, and that's and I'm not knocking those systems 'cause there's some really great examples of those out there, but Slate has that built in. So when you do the technical sort of considerations, you should take that into account when you think about not only the sort of time and energy around that, but also the the money aspect of it 'cause you're going to have the capability to maybe shed one of those.

Additional systems another example would be communications. You know lots of communications tools, same thing. The one that always gets me is, you know, I think another particular strength of slate or the forms engine. So all the ability to set up forms. Essentially it's a non technical task. In Slate it's very analogous to Google forms which many people are familiar with, but it actually has some strengths over even that system. So you know you have all those tools at your fingertips. Now what is that going to displace in terms of all the things you had to deal with?

Before and you know, think about that as part of the technical aspect of it, and so it may actually simplify your infrastructure relative to all the things you had to support. If you take it from a pure standpoint, you may go from five systems to one, and that can be really advantageous to doing this successfully.

So we are at about 10 minutes left to our conversation today and I wanna.

Start moving on to sort of audience questions, and we've talked a lot. We've answered a lot of questions along the way from the chat, but there were two big themes that I think came out in those questions and also questions that were being at that were submitted with the registration and then one of them was about specific slate functionalities and how they are used with student success. So Abraham, you just mentioned forms, and I know that we've talked about scheduler and we've talked about portals and we've talked about.

Case management through workflows. If we could talk more specifically about examples of.

Workflows and custom datasets.

Hand deliver campaigns and forms for student success. Specifically, I think you would answer lots of questions and the other question that I want to get to for sure is.

Around how to get started? Like how do you start these conversations? What what's the best way for people to explore, sleep for student success?

Uh, we've got that template with the student success showcase.

And what other resources are out there to sort of demo?

Ideal users for slate.

With student success online.

So let's.

Does anyone want to jump in with either one of those questions?

I could do the first one so the how do you get started? That's actually one of my favorite questions. This is potentially a really intimidating project because it's a lot of unknowns and particularly the the audience that's doing this is not the admission audience typically, so they don't know slate, right? How do you even begin to have the conversation what you want to do there, in my opinion, is make friends with people in admissions because that's typically where your slate instances and ask them. Can you spin up?

A clean slate instance, and now that you have that clean slate instance now, you can begin to look at what would it look like. You can modify it and you can do it in a way that has no impact on the admission instance. Other than they won't have that extra instance to play with.

And you have their expertise so you know you have the ability really to start from an audience or from from your colleagues. If they can give you the time that are experts in it, and then you can begin to imagine how it could work for student success rollout.

So our president charged us with this project, but he told us that he did not want us to be biased by any of the previous retention.

Uhm, efforts on our campus so most of us who were working on it were not our typical retention folks and we initially just started like with a whiteboard. And it was like, you know what? What would we want ideally to be able to happen on campus, but we want everyone to be assigned, you know, an adult, you know our staff member and we mapped it all out and then we started meeting with Abraham. We were actually able to give him this like massive flow chart that we built to and then figure out how do you digitize kind of what we?

Envisioned, and his expertise was really helpful because he could say, well, you know I would. I would create that as an instance. Or well, maybe we need to build a portal for faculty which we haven't done yet.

We talked a lot about with an expert around belonging in the sense of do students belong on campus. So he was able to help us create a survey for students through forms, but that it like personally stores in the students record.

And so just you know he jumped off for a second, but uhm, I am not a technical person, but it's just been we sort of knew what we wanted to do and had those conversations first and then we realized we needed a CRM to do it. So we investigated a couple of options. We as staff did go through slates training on student success that that can host and then made the decision we we needed more help than we felt internally we could manage and that's when we we made the partnership with RHB.

And that's really been invaluable because we sort of had come pretty far along and then Abraham's been able to say OK. Well, this is how I would recommend doing it and sometimes it gives us like three or four options and we go through looking at them and we're like alright, that one makes the most sense to us or we think we could maintain that on our own.

But we were using.

Uhm, we're definitely using forms a lot. We're using timeline and communications a lot and then come.

I envisioned moving forward will probably build a portal that allows more people on campus to see some things, but not necessarily communicate directly with students.

One final edition. Let's say you get to, you get to that point where you say. How do I get started? You've had this strategy, conversations you've put stuff down on sticky notes. You've kind of mapped this out. You've talked internally right? And after that you say So what now, right? And a couple of people brought it up in the chat. You have options you have. You can take advantage of me as a resource. You can. I do. I talk to Kate and her team way back a year ago or something like that when they first started exploring this and saying, OK, well, what can somebody kind of provide a demonstration?

Let somebody actually called out in the questions a demonstration. If you want to talk to me and I can kind of show you this mocked up showcase environment that I haven't said, this is what you can do here. Is this kind of mocked up example, but then you could also just do that entirely on your own in your own Clean Slate database. You can provision this built out student success showcase within your clean slate and you can mess around. You can see what I've built at what we've built out in there. You can edit, you can copy and paste and see. Kind of how it's structured, right? The community.

Forms are also a fantastic opportunity to learn, like from others. I would say right, not only the Community forms too.

Ask questions, kind of your colleagues, but then we have community conversations that are happening and and I've dedicated at least one per week just to kind of provide this student success overview. For those general questions. Maybe once you've gotten to the point that Kate and Abraham brought up, we've made the decision that we'd like to start exploring this. We've got some ideas that we want to kind of conceptualize. Then come to that community conversation and and maybe ask some more detailed questions that we can talk about it. So you've got resources in front of you. Whether it's technicians, whether it's.

Abraham and company. Whether it's your colleagues in the forums to really talk this thing out to decide if it's if it is a a journey that you want to start down the path on.

And I think that kind of answers the other feed. The other question to have sort of.

What are the specific ways that slate can do student success?

Things, and it sounds like having those conversations with either you can or in the community or with another group that's out there to help. You can ask very specific questions about your instance and your institution and what your needs are to see if you can do case management in Slater. If you can use the communications or the texting or a certain type of module.

Sure.

They already maybe know about four admissions, but transferred over to student success. So I think, yeah, the the resources that are out there are also good ways to ask those questions as well about the specific functionalities.

So we do have about 5 minutes left.

And we can continue our conversation. I think things are going really well and lots of folks seem to be helped by the things that you're all sharing Kate from your specific user experience and the things that you learned along the way. Ken from your experience, kind of building out these tools and thinking about what everyone who uses Slate could use. Student could use slate for within student success and Abraham, from your perspective of helping multiple clients with different institutional needs, navigate how to start and how to build out their students.

Functionality.

So I will hopefully happy to have more questions in the chat and we can continue talking for a little bit, but I am going to move on to our final slide just so you can have more information. Get our names again. Welcome back dambi.

Hello.

And I think this was wonderful. Thank you all for sharing.

Yes.

All of the tidbits and information that you have and.

We can definitely continue if if folks have still additional things they want to share.

Yeah, just just one note, there was a question that came in earlier on who we we talked a lot about the timeline right as it related to security and kind of user experience, right? And somebody said, hey, you know, are you looking into that or any any updates? And just to you know, full transparency. That's that's something that we're actively exploring from from a development told perspective from an innovation perspective, how to approach that and and revisit what these kind of expanded.

Stop.

Use cases are really facing right. Some of these challenges so you know the short answer is yes, we're absolutely looking into that right? And we're paying it some attention to see what you know. Kind of slate of tomorrow could look like as it relates to that user experience, particularly around that student record timeline.

Alright, well thank you so much to HRB Abraham, Alana and of course Kate and Ken for our webinar today.

And earlier this recording will be available for you, probably tomorrow, so you can find it on our website or for you know for registered folks here, you can go to your home Slate page and that the recording of this webinar will be available as well. But as always, thank you so much for attending. We love the engagement and we'll see you next time.

Alright, have a great day guys.

Have a good one.