Leveraging Slate Research to Support Advising and Student Success at Barnard

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My name is Ken Higgins and you are if you think you're supposed to be. You're probably right. This is our apply to alumni series. Slate presents apply to alumni. We actually started it off a little bit differently this time around. Typically we start with kind of the beginning of the life cycle where we move from likeslate.org to slate for admissions into student success and advancement, or flip flopping a little bit where we're actually starting with student success. Kind of the middle part of the of the student life cycle.

So again, you're in the right class if you're in here. If you're looking for leveraging Slate research to support advising and student success at Barnard College, as I said, my name's Ken Higgins. I'm the general manager of student success here at Slate, a technician. So hello to everybody.

Uh, we are joined by the the one and only the unstoppable Noel Cavicchia Oli from Barnard College. She's going to introduce herself in just a little bit, but I want to go over some housekeeping items real quick before before Noel takes the reins. So the weather this is being recorded. It'll be made for viewing. Made available for viewing shortly after, maybe later this afternoon or tomorrow in the near future. Closed captioning can be turned on by your upper right.

Side of your screen where you've got some options there. It can be enabled by clicking the CC button full screen viewing. Same thing the button up there if anything. If you're if solar winds or you lose Internet or something like that and you need to resync audio or video, just hit the refresh on the share window where we are right now and post your questions in the chat. Noel's going to be doing most of her presentation and then we're going to save questions.

For the end, we won't be running out of time by any means, so we'll absolutely get to your questions. They will be answered, but we're going to save them until the end and that's it. Hey Jim, what's up from John Carroll? JCU? What's up all right? So yeah, with that being said, I'm going to disappear. My little video tells going to disappear to get you to the main event Noel Cavalli from Barnard College. She's going to take it from here and please welcome me in welcoming her. I can hear your silent.

Clause from the chat so well. If you want to share your screen and then I'm gonna disappear and I'll see you in a little bit.

Thank you. OK.

Hello everyone, my name is Noel Cappuccilli. Thank you for being here. I work at Barnard College and I'm going to be showing you a little bit about what we do with our student success instance and how we use like research.

So just to give you some context about Barnard, it's a women's liberal arts College in New York City. It's affiliated with Columbia University, so our students can take CU classes and CU students can take classes at Barnard, which makes everything in the administration administration super fun. Some majors are shared across the two schools. There's about 2700 undergraduate students at Barnard. We are just small enough to allow manual.

Processes to survive without forcing us to streamline. Colleague is our SSIS and we currently have two instances of slate, one for admissions which was the original instance since 2016. It also includes our financial aid office, our pre college program and pre health advising run out of our career services. And then our second instance is our student success instance since 2020.

A little background about mice and my experience with sleep. I am essentially an IT project manager at Barnard. I consider myself to be a non-technical technical person so I'm very good at Googling. I used to work in the financial aid office as a counselor and a systems person and I've helped both the Columbia Business School grad financial aid office and the Barnard Financial Aid Office go paperless using shared instances of sleep with admissions.

So I have some experience in that area and then I've implemented the student success instance that we have at Barnard and it's so funny. This is a recycled slide and it says my life's motto is. It's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. I don't even think I ask for forgiveness anymore, so that's kind of where I'm at. But everything you're going to see today is meant for sort of the average slate user. It's not going to be fancy SQL or things that you can do.

Beyond what you know, the standard slate.

Functionalities.

So the presentation is sort of divided into 3 main sections. The first is just going to be a little context about our student success database so that you know how we've set things up. We I received a couple questions prior to the start of the webinar about how we've sort of set things up, so I wanted to add a few slides for that. Then we'll talk about sort of advising the advising office at Barnard, their needs, and how they're using slate, and then finally.

The sort of main part of the presentation will be to use cases within sort of the research section of slate, and I'll go through why we made those choices and how they support the advising office.

So just as a quick timeline, we implemented the student success database in 2020, which was also during COVID. We went live with online forms for the registrar in the fall of 2020 year two was this past year and we put more effort into sort of advising workflows and the study abroad office. And then we're about to come up to our third year, 2022 to 2023.

So the users that we have in our instance include staff from the registrar advising offices on the Study Abroad Office or Barnard global programming and then all Barnard faculty are users in Slate as well. So we have set up Barnard faculty with reader access so they don't use the main slate database interface, they just interact with the reader and approve forms that way.

And then we're also looking to put additional offices into Slate this year, potentially including the Opportunity Program Office and the office that supports first Gen low income international students.

So this is kind of a crazy slide, but it'll give you a sense of how we are thinking about our data and why later on in the presentation, we've gone towards the research side, so all students, current students have a person record set up in slate. This is that in from our SSIS and all of the person scoped fields are like sort of point in time current data. So who their advisors assigned at that moment what their current major is their current address?

Emergency contacts that sort of stuff. We also have a sort of dummy hidden application round added to each student as they're registered, so if a student is registered for the academic year, they have an award year application added and the reason for that is that the registration information by year helps us to run some of the person status rules. So whether as soon as enrolled or on leave or.

Be registered incoming and then also it is connected to our student portal, so this was a lesson learned but you cannot have the Upload materials widget in a person scoped portal, so we wanted to reserve that functionality for our students and that's why we also have the dummy application app. And then we basically use.

Forms instead of the traditional slate based applications, so all of our forms are built on the regular form table, but they are applications creation scope, so every time a student submits a form, it also creates an application round for that form and the reason for that is because in order to review each form as an individual form in the reader, which is how we review.

Forms it has to be application based, so you can't send a form response to the reader, but you can send an application so a little detailed. But if you're setting up an instance, you should kind of think about some of these things as you go.

OK, so the original goal for our student success instance was literally just to save the registrar's office from paper. We wanted to basically move paper, academic forms and workflows online. There were some underlying goals like automate the form routing and the required reviewers allow students to track a form in process and see, you know when it's been be notified when it's been processed.

And then also to provide a smooth transition for trying to get faculty on board to go from. You know, signing a paper major declaration to processing something in the reader and the end result for year one was that we did it and we were really successful. So the forms, like major declaration, degree audit, adjustment, all of those are online. They are reviewed by faculty and staff in the slate reader. They are routed to the appropriate person automatically.

Some rules and approval decisions are recorded on the reader review form, so very bread and butter slate application review and then students are notified once the form has been processed.

So what this did in our first year was sort of serve as our model for how we typically now route forms inflate. So even as we add new forms, we don't necessarily alert faculty that like oh, the minor form is now online inflate because the process that they're doing is the same for every form, so they actually just have no problem. Kind of processing a new form as we add them in, so we've been able to make a lot of forms online and just sort of.

About them as needed.

And let's see.

For year two, which was this past year, we shifted our focus from the Registrar's office and sort of more transactional processes to the advising office for some of the more Messier workflows, and also to start tracking engagement type data, risk factors, and other things to support the advising office so.

An example would be the academic exceptions petitions, the leave of absence process, the study abroad credit approval process we put into sleep this past year, which could honestly be its own 6 hour presentation, so those of you who know know, but the other thing we did was we started using the research tab and tracking data.

So for those of you panicking, we're already on to section #2 or the 2nd Circle, so stay with me. So how does advising work at Barnard? Ultimately there is a advising office largely responsible for advising policies and directing students to different resources. There is a head Dean notes the crown and underneath her are four class level Deans, one for each academic year and then under them.

Are the office admins that support various aspects of the workflows and processes that a classmate may need or be in charge of, and it's also worth noting that students are also assigned academic advisors who are faculty, which this office the Dean's office supports in terms of training. And, you know, policy guidance. But the student would have basically a class Dean assigned and also an academic advisor. That's a faculty member. The academic advisors.

Typically focusing more on very specific academic advising, and the class Deans sort of have a wide breadth of what they have to cover, including academics, but also personal things as needed.

So these are just some examples of high level advising office goals and initiatives that this office is, you know, sort of tasked with. They all relate to student success.

Things like graduation rate retention, early intervention for students that need help collaborating with other offices for you know that are student experience or for resources.

And they also basically are in charge of these operational programs that support the goals that I just mentioned. So the peer tutor, application process and matching students to peer tutors again, the leave of absence request to return the satisfactory academic progress review the academic probation process, and meeting with students and making an academic plan the they are in charge of the Committee on Programs and Academic standing, which are is basically a committee that.

Views the academic exceptions or if student wants to declare a special major. So all of these things are very kind of complicated workflows that they also are in charge of.

And somehow they are doing that. Or they did that without a central system. So the advising office did not have a central system. They used for everything all of their data was sort of spread across different places. A lot of it was in Excel or e-mail exchanges. They did use the Advocate system, which is our school conduct system, but it's intended for.

Serious conduct issues for students. It's not really made for advising, so they did track leave of absence and the more serious interactions with students in there, but it was clunky and not every Dean was able to like use it for more general advising notes so.

The idea is that basically we wanted to take all of this and move it into sleep to make things smoother and better.

On a personal note, I love the Deans. I love the Dean off the Deans office. Every single person that works in this office is patient and kind. They consistently put students first in everything that they do and I sometimes miss working directly with students. I don't really, but the next best thing is working to support a group of people that care for these students, which would be the Dean's office at Barnard, which means they basically got whatever they wanted from me. But also, I was really impressed with.

How much they actually do as such a small office, so that's sort of a theme throughout this as well. Just I didn't want it to note that.

So the goals for the advising office and slate were basically create operational efficiencies, streamline the complex processes, again, move the data into one location for consistency and standardization and then keep the high touch sort of personal feel that this office has with students while streamlining everything and making it a little bit easier.

So for the advising office, we started with the leave of absence and request to return processes. I'm sure we all know this, but a leave of absence is when a student withdraws from the semester or in between semesters for a variety of reasons. And doesn't, you know, is no longer enrolled and the request to return is when that student is ready to come back to Barnard and Reenroll. We started with this because it was. These are very cumbersome processes for the Dean's office and they're also high.

Had a high level of data sensitivity and compliance, so when a student takes a leave of accents, there are a lot of offices across campus that have actions that need to be taken like the Registrar's office, Financial aid housing and I wanted to make sure that we could support the sensitive nature of this information for the advising office. Before you sort of moved on to other things.

So before sleep it was original paper forms for the leave of absence and the request to return the letters that were sent out, which again are important for compliance and had to have specific language and C specific people were manually sent and sort of clunky through advocate and then offices across campus would sort of track data for these students who are returning or leaving.

On a Google spreadsheet, so that was its own little nightmare, but then after sleep we basically put them out online forms right to the forms are smart. They know information about the students. They don't have to fill everything out there, they're reviewed in their readers, which is how we do everything.

Robust automated emails sent out with language that is personalized and just.

Easier to manage and then we also set up a little portal for offices to track these students instead of the Google spreadsheet. So what's nice is that the portal is just a reflection of what's inflate, so as things change, maybe the student you know decides not to take a leave or something like that. We don't have to worry about someone not updating a Google spreadsheet, it's just reflected and refreshed live data in the portal for everyone to see.

So it's very great.

So what did we learn and then what's next? So basically we wanted what we learned was this was a great item to start with because the workflow piece we already had an idea or a model of how that would work, right? Our forms through the reader.

Our usual stuff, but what we realized was that pulling the data for a particular workflow is one thing, but trying to aggregate the data across other types of information for the student was a little bit cumbersome, mostly because the data lived in many different places and across different workflows. So we definitely realized that and then we also realized or noted that the Dean, who is in charge of this process, so one of the four Deans is also in charge of all the students.

Taking a leave or returning, she was having a lot of meetings with students that were basically not tracked anywhere, so it didn't reflect how much time she was taking meeting with students every time they were returning or taking a leave just in terms of her other work that she had, but also it didn't track students that were considering taking a leave that met with her. And then she helped them find other ways to sort of finish out the semester like that.

Wasn't tracked either, so we wanted to figure out a way to really like, keep track of meetings and what they're for, and you know the outcomes after and then in general there are risk factors that exist before the student ends up taking the leave, so by starting at the end of the process, you're able to sort of work backwards as to what we wanted to track and pay attention to so that we could potentially intervene with these students before they end up taking a leave.

So again, just a great thing to start with and dip our toe in for the advising office.

Now the use cases, OK. So the two use cases we're going to talk about are the advising meeting notes form and then the faculty early alert or early academic report workflow.

So I knew that I wanted to keep track of the data.

That students sorry that the class Deans were having meetings with students about in in fields that were mapped to the student record in some way not just housed within a form. So I liked the idea of Class D and submitting a form you know with meeting notes and information about meetings they just had with students, but I didn't want the information to just live at the form level, and that is because of reporting. So from doing all of the other workflows.

In the forms, it's not that you can't get at the data, but I wanted the flexibility of changing up a form view as often as I wanted to, based on like feedback from students or you know, making things clear without having to worry that every query I'm referencing is, you know, pulling on that form. I wanted the the fields to be mapped, but I was also worried about the sensitivity of the data, so I didn't want to have to make millions of fields to track specifically classing advising notes.

So that they could be secured only to the class team for viewing, when I knew that long term we'd want other offices to be doing this.

So the normal way that and so these are some of the data items that we want it to track. But the normal way that I think admissions or other offices might use slate would be to use the interactions feature on the timeline. And the reason we couldn't do that is because of you're not able to lock down certain interactions for certain groups. So we didn't want to take away the timeline from everyone, so.

Slate introduced research, so it's kind of hard to explain what research is because I'm not that technical, but I think of it as sort of this. A new table associated with the person record that serves as sort of like an umbrella for entity rows, and you can track many different data types under in one place that doesn't require you to create a million different fields.

So why do we use it? It protects sensitive notes. So basically we were able to create to protect to create certain research items and protect them with permissions based on realm so that only the Dean's office can see the items instead of using you know, interactions on the timeline that can be seen by anyone.

It also allows us to recycle.

You know common data fields across different offices or research sources without having to set up private fields on every single tab.

It's easy to pull many different research items into queries and reports, so reporting was easier. And it's also slate standard functionality. So whenever we can, I try to use what Slate has delivered, and we can still be custom without being too custom.

So what does that really mean? It means that when the class team is submitting a form for their advising meeting, it's also adding a research tab row to the students record automatically, because the fields on the form that the class gene is filling out are mapped to the research item type and the data that we want to track are actually research data keys within the row that is tracked to the student, so.

The research source we named classing advising again the realm is Dean's office, so we're able to like lock down who can see only they can see that item and then.

What it looks like across the data keys is basically so there are things like alert type or term or academic year. These are basically fields that we would want to be included in all sorts of, you know, advising notes, but we can share them across research items without having to create individualized fields and still keep them locked down by whoever has access to the actual research source.

And then there are private keys that are meant only for a particular research source that you know we don't need across all of the different items. So you have that flexibility without having to make a million app scoped fields or person scoped fields, which was great.

So how do we motivate the Deans office to submit this form? So basically if the Deans were too busy or they didn't see the value of submitting the advising notes form it defeats the purpose of this whole thing because there won't be any data to track. So my goal was to provide sort of instant value for the Deans to motivate them to submit the form after every single meeting they had with the student. So one way I did that was pretty simple, it was just.

The ability to send customized emails to the student after the form is submitted. So again, this is a high touch office. The Deans often followed up with emails after meeting with a student, but they would have to look up the students e-mail. They might have to look up you know who their advisors are to see see them or other people or links to resources they wanted to refer them to.

And fleet knows all of that information about the students, so it's easy to let them just check a box on the form. So this is like part of the form that they're filling out, and the question is, would you like to send a meeting summary e-mail to the student now so they can choose yes or no? Again, flexibility? They can check off? Yep, I want the academic advisors COCC the registrar.

And the template for the e-mail is shown to them, so it's steer the students name. I'm following up to our advising meeting and then there's basically what will be a merge field into the e-mail and so in the box they're putting their custom.

E-mail message, uh, the emails can also be hidden from the timeline, so if they have sensitive information they don't need to be shown on the timeline, but the actual message box of the custom e-mail is mapped to a research item so that if a Dean wants to know what they sent to the student, they're able to see it on the research item.

And.

So another way to motivate them to do this form is basically we added a feature that allows them to allow them to have sleep follow up with the student at a particular future date, or to follow up with them to follow up with the student at a particular future date. So what does that mean? Basically, we say, would you like to set a follow up reminder to yourself to check in with this student and the options are they?

Say yes, slate should e-mail the student on a future date and the basically slate will send out that sort of standardized e-mail. Hey, just wanted to check in after our advising meeting. You know, let me know if you need support. Here's the link to book a meeting with me and they can choose the date for that e-mail to go out and sleep. We'll send it at that time.

Which the Deans really like. The other option is they prefer to send the e-mail themselves, and you know make it very customized to a particular student. They can have slates. Send them an e-mail to remember to follow up with a student now there's lots of different ways that we can have these follow-ups sent, but the DNS typically like as adjusting to this whole process they like emails so they can send them an e-mail saying, hey, you wanted to follow up with this student. You know two weeks after your meeting. Here's the link to the.

Students you know the meeting form that you submitted for the student and they also really like that. It helps them kind of keep track of everything without like the burden of having to add you know tasks or write down student names to follow up with.

And then finally we pull the, you know we created a query that pulls all of the class team meetings that they've had with the notes. The e-mail messages that were sent, the the reasons for the meeting and it's simple. But they like that because if they are trying to find a student that they met with and they can't remember who it was but they remember, you know it was in October they can pull a report, a query to just see if they if anything prompts them like oh that's the student I met with. So it's. And it's also satisfying.

See how many meetings they've done. It's accurate numbers for the head Dean to track so.

In general, it's just a really nice balance of flexibility and ease for the Deans when they use the advising notes form, but it also is standardizing data on the back end, which is improving reporting by using the research tab, so anyone in the Dean's office can now pull up a student in fleet to review the research tab items or interactions they've had with other Deans. If someone's on vacation, or you know something of that nature, there's all of the rows of every sort of meeting.

The student has had with the office which didn't exist before, and there are numbers now for how many meetings these teens are having with students, so that you know you can start building a case of maybe we need more class times.

So my last youth case and then we're done, but the in addition to the class being advising form, we had another form process that we wanted to track in a more standardized way, and this one was a little bit complicated. So it's called the early academic report, and essentially it's a form used by instructors in any class to report a concern for a student, and the concern can be academic. It can be personal.

But the idea is that the class team will follow up with that student and make sure that they're OK, or refer them to any resources they might need. It's meant to be an early intervention thing, so we want faculty to do it earlier in the year with us the name of the report, so that way the Deans can intervene before you know a student fails a course or with has to withdraw.

So the idea is that this whole workflow should be as fast as possible to give students the opportunity to kind of turn things around.

And we did the same thing. So same logic as the class scene advising form. But basically we mapped the ER report form that the faculty fill out to a research source item. So every time a faculty fills out a form, it adds a research row. As you'll see, it's not an easy one to one sort of ratio for these forms, so using the reader for the workflow, part of like a Dean following up doesn't make sense because.

There could be many ER forms submitted by different instructors for one student at A at the same time, and so we wanted a way for the Dean to basically look at all of them during that class steam meeting that they have with the student without having to fill out. You know, one process within the reader for every single form.

And this entire process used to be manual, so just keep that in mind. So how does this work?

Basically, a faculty. Instructors submits the form when they're concerned about a student, and immediately the form sends the student e-mail from the class team. So obviously that says, hey, this instructor you know reached out said you're struggling, or he's worried about you, can you set up a meeting with me to come into the office? Ideally, the student schedules the meeting and they discuss any issues with the class Dean at that meeting.

And the class Dean does their typical advising notes form after the meeting and uses the type of ER follow up as the primary reason for the meeting, and that automatically closes the workflow and beautiful emails go out to the instructor and the students. Sort of summarizing that is the ideal. So this is an example of just like the top of the notice to meet e-mail to the student, which is immediately sent once the faculty submit the form without the class scene having to do anything.

So we also set up because this group of students potentially could be struggling and may not might not follow up or take action right away. What we did was we set up a campaign so the student enters the population of ER form submitted as soon as the faculty member submits the form and after three days of being in that population, if they still haven't made a Class D meeting, slate will send them a reminder e-mail saying hey don't forget.

Like and it's from the glass team like I'd like to meet with you. Please. You know, schedule a meeting with me.

Ideally they would then take action after the reminder e-mail and they go right back into the workflow as usual and everything works out.

But in cases where a student hasn't taken action after eight more days.

Basically, they're still in that population, so instead of sending another e-mail reminder to the student, what happens is a remind. An e-mail is sent to the class Dean for that student, and the admin associated saying that this student hasn't responded to any or in ER form submitted. Please file a DC report. I can't even remember what DC stands for, but basically they are a committee that meets weekly to review students that are in crisis, or, you know.

With special handling of some kind and basically they decide OK. Does this student need a Wellness check that we want you know what? What's do we know anything about this student? Should we have public safety knock on their dorm door. If they determine that everything is fine, great. If they determine that they do need a Wellness check, then they take the action to have that happen. And again, this workflow would then close and follow up emails go out as needed.

So because this whole process used to be manual, it relied on the Deans to follow up with students who haven't made appointments. And since they're so busy, it would sometimes take a while for them to realize. Oh, this person hasn't made a meeting. You know, scheduled a meeting with me so students would fall through the cracks and maybe not get the Wellness check that they needed as early as possible. So by automating everything, it makes it so much easier for the Dean and they're still just following their normal process doing their class.

In meeting group, the other thing is by using, not the reader and using populations. Essentially other instructors might submit forms for students at the same time, and the reason for that is most of these instructors might do it after like the first exam period, or midterms or something like that. So it's often that a student might get two or three instructors submitting an AR.

On behalf of them. But the class Dean really is just gonna have one meeting because it's all happening at the same time. So because we use populations and because the IT it's not tied to a particular form response, but instead it's tied to like the student. When the class Dean is meeting with that student, they can review all of the AR forms submitted by going to the research tab, and then they can close the report if so.

If for some reason an instructor then submits something on behalf of the student after the report has been closed, the whole process kicks off again.

So this is what it looks like on the research tab. You could have two ER forms submitted. One Class D meeting follow-up form submitted. This is an example of the same thing, but the process restarting, so it's requiring another class unit advising follow up for the subsequent ER forms that are submitted for that student.

By housing all that data in the research tab, it's really easy to pull into e-mail, so the follow up e-mail to the student can list all of the ER that are submitted with the class and the professors name. The Dean can still put a customized message if they want to, and on the class team advising meeting form, they check off any resources that they're referring the student to, and we use translation codes.

Like link them and list them in emails that all used to have to be by hand before, so it it makes it look like a very personalized e-mail. It gives the students the resources that are selected for them and it comes from the class theme without them having to do anything other than you know. Submit the notes for the meeting that they had.

And this is just an example of every ER form that's closed goes to the instructor with the course reminding them, hey, you submitted this form on behalf of the student. Just wanted to let you know I met with them. Please let me know if you have any other questions.

And then so that's also really helpful that I don't think that used to happen that often, so you would be an instructor. You would submit a concern for a student and then, like not hear anything for a while and not know what's happening. So this is much better. And then the other thing is that the Dean, the Queen Dean, she can manage this process from an operational she can look at a report that pulls in statuses for students that are currently like pending the Class D. The scheduling of the class.

Seeing how many students have received a R's, what types of concerns are there so senior management can get a picture at any point of you know how students are doing just in general and before there was no way to oversee this process really because it was so separated and relied so much on emails. You know from the class being themselves, and now since everything is in fleet and in the research tab, it all sort of pulls together.

So the research hub future.

At least in our instance that we're thinking is right now we have two sources, so the class unit advising and the early academic report we plan to add something with satisfactory academic progress, so we plan to basically put the workflow of SAP review into slate. But then we also want to basically add if as soon is on probation to the research tab, so that way you know the concerns and the risk factors that are listed on the research tab are right next to the sort of.

Academic outcomes all within the same umbrella. Easy for reporting and the idea would be to and then also adding other offices like the first Gen low income counselors that have advising notes with students. They can add that to the research tab so that the class genes can see them and you know, make collaborating with other offices helpful. Be trends that we would want to look at would be what types of students are receiving ER's? What are their outfit outcomes?

Umm?

Is there a way to target students based on the risk factors of the class and advising meetings that are, you know, being posted on the research tab?

Again, looking at the fact that a student can interact with many different people and have advising or counseling from different people, it would be great to be able to use this sort of template and have other offices submit. You know either risk factors or information that would be helpful for the students ultimate success.

OK.

You made it through.

It.

OK, I'm back.

Sure.

Awesome amazing somebody said it. Somebody said it back in the chat, Selma earlier on it was like this is all amazing. I agree with Selma, a lot of really good questions came through.

Let me pick, yeah, but first of all, yeah, that was amazing. You know, so like you, you set it up or you tee it up so nicely so that there's so little involvement from the end user. Meaning like the Deans or the advisors. It's just. It's amazing, you know.

And also addresses problems, challenges, right? Like you. You mentioned them all like.

Yep.

You know, just kind of people, kids slipping through the cracks on and so forth. So yeah, no, totally agree. First I want to get to somebody. They zoomed out, zoomed out a little bit, which is good. Explain the role of the class Dean. Like, what's that designation? Like? How many students did the class Deans have, like as a caseload? So is this like 600 kids? Is it 20?

Yeah.

So the model of advising at Barnard the way that it works is like there's one plasteline for every grade level. So you're looking at like 700 students in their caseload. On top of that being their caseload, they also have all those other processes that they're in charge of. So like leave of absence there were, you know, meeting with all of those students. I would say that we need more class Deans and that it's not realistic, sort of. The proportions right now, but there was no data to show that, so this is really something that.

Ohh yeah.

And actually, I think since putting the Levi vaccins process into slate and sort of organizing things a little bit more in tracking meetings, they've actually been approved to hire AA case manager just to do leave of absence. And I'm not saying it's just because of sleep, but it sleep provides the data that you know. The Deans are all trying to explain to senior management.

Because.

I'll say it, I'll say it's all because of slate. Sure, yeah, absolutely yeah. No, agreed like that's step one is doing it right. You know, putting the process in the slate Step 2 or the elevated process. The evolution is like cool. Now collect data to make informed decisions to make some impact. Do something about it right. Anyway, great, great great. Somebody else. Did you use texting functionality to contact students as follow up or was it just emails? And if you did text was it effective?

Yeah.

Trial.

So we didn't use texting, but I would love to. I think that would be effective and I think in the level of emergencies you know attacks would be better than an e-mail for a student that might need help, but we didn't have any data to support exactly how many students that was, so we wanted to go through 1 semester and see actually how many students do we have to do like a Wellness check for if we're doing that.

Yeah, great. Great.

Yeah, cool what about so Michael getting sad is a couple of good questions, but this zooms out to one of the other kind of broader questions that came in before. What level of engagement did you find from faculty when it came to the ER? Did they reliably complete them? Did you have strategies for deploying and boosting faculty use? Bigger question is like you talked a little bit about buy in, but it's one of the conversations we have all the time with schools when they're talking about student success. The challenge sometimes is they don't want another tool, they don't want another system.

Yeah.

Faculty say I I can't do this, so on and so forth. So how? What was what was the route for that?

So that's a great question. I think in general, again there was. It was very difficult to assess exactly how faculty were submitting things because even the original form that they submitted through, like Qualtrics or Google forms or whatever it was there, weren't prompts like the data was very like sort of text box reported. So we've standardized the data that they report, where now they can actually click. Actually, this is really for like a personal reason. The students hygiene is concerning me like that's the type of.

Follow up that was not there before, so so faculty didn't know that they could use this form. The other thing is that they didn't really get much follow up about what happened so they would submit the form and then not really hear anything necessarily about what the follow up is. So as that has become better and they're they're getting consistent emails saying hey within two weeks you're going to know whether or not we met with the student and what the result was. We do think that more faculty will submit them, but I think faculty like this form.

To honestly cover their themselves to say like I at least warn someone that you know I'm worried about this student and kind of put it off to the class Deans. But yeah, like there's there's inconsistency on which types of faculty submitted and for what reasons, and we're going to look at that data to try to make it a little more streamlined.

Awesome though. Either way, do the faculty start with the class list like via Aqueria. I know there's Slate users in attendance and non slate users. So like do you is it through the portal you could send them a query of all their students, their caseload.

Yeah, so that's a great question. So right now we don't do that and the reason is.

So all they have to do is put the students uni, which is like a college identifier and it's also the first part of the student's e-mail, so they definitely have that on their roster and that will connect it to a person record or a research tab in slate. But eventually we have a faculty portal that we're rolling out and we do have a query of like.

Cool.

Advisees so we can link it from there. That would be ideal.

Yep.

Perfect does the AR port, so this is Phillips question ER port or have a student lookup field but that auto completes by partial name or whatever, but they're using a unique identifier which is their SSI or whatever their uni is right?

But basically what you could do and which I wish that we could do is you can just make a lookup so like they connect to the student and it fills everything out the way that it works for the class D and advising form. They're not filling out all the students information, but because we're affiliated with Columbia, there are thousands of instructors that could potentially have Barnard students, so we can't have a permission based form. So the UNI is like a back end. They don't see any information if they do the wrong unit.

Like there's a process for triaging it, but yes, you kind of have a look up field, and that's definitely the way to do it.

Yes.

Yes.

Yeah yeah, back to Phillips question. Yeah, it's something you have to think about, right? How are they identifying and matching on the right student? Some type of unique identifier? But then a child? Not a challenge but a thing to think about is Colombia's case, where it's like. Well, we've got 10,000 faculty members or whatever.

Well, actually just so in the Columbia case they have a a roster list and they have a link to file an academic form for NEA report for a student. And basically we want the token of that. You need to just sort of pass through so that way like it goes right and it fills everything out for them. But because they're different school, it's a little complicated to get that set up. But yes, you could do that.

Yeah, I would love to separate.

Correct, so Noel situation is a little unique. Yeah, just because of Barnard Columbia relation, Phillip Campbell and other Phillip, do you do your students receive an automated an automated academic plan of study with output like a PDF or print something? Or is that a manual process within advising so you know some type of academic degree plan or something like that?

Yes, so we have a separate system, so we have a registration system technically, which is colleague that has a user interface for degree audit and transcript. That's typically what is used for, sort of like the plan of a student.

Yeah.

Slate I'm trying to think the only thing we're gonna put into slate that I think relates to an academic plan would be when they are on SAP and on probation they have to make an academic plan with their Dean and have like regular meetings and that I think we're going to put also connected to the research tab to sort of track as a unofficial plan for their.

Ohh yeah.

Mm-hmm

I think that I think saps are really, really nice use case. It's a something that is beginning and an end. It has to be tracked. It has to get approval by usually a couple different people the the the workflow editor and research makes it you know makes sense for that. Francis asked a really good question. I know you did this. How many hours and what methods of slate training did the Deans receive? Or maybe the admins or both?

So.

so very limited let me tell you so. When we first rolled out, played in that first year and we rolled out all of the academic forms, including all the faculty. I did webinars with like one hour trainings for most of the department chairs and that was it and then basically in the slate queue e-mail that they get hey, you've been assigned a form. Go review it. We link sort of like a little PDF of like screenshots, but the 99% of them figured it out within the reader and we're able to.

Like just fill out the reader form. That's all they have to do. The class Deans are a similar case in that even for the advising spirit there, we started with them just filling out the advising form like you're filling out the most basic form. You're looking up the student inflate and clicking a link from their dashboard and it's literally filling it out. And then now that they've done that for a little bit, we are showing them queries and we're showing them how to sort of pull information, but it's been very basic training up until this point, and they've still been able to like get the value of the.

Hi.

Emails because it's just literally not idiot proof. But like you're just filling out the form as I've designed it for you, so you don't really have to be trained.

Click here.

Yes.

Correct, I think to your credit you you teed it up so easily form where it's like click here, you know there's there's you know prompts for them to follow through.

Hmm.

Yeah.

But I also agree, you know if you set it up that way. They don't need a deep understanding of how to use the system or the tools or the features they need to know where to click and what form to fill out, right? So if there's any concern, not concern, but people have concerns about like oh, gosh, how do we get the buy in? Nobody wants to use another system or they don't want to learn another system, right? I think Noel's examples are really good one where it's like they're so limited involved in the actual weeds, right?

You said just just, you know, enter this and click here and type here. It makes it easy, makes it easier for them. You did all the work upfront kind of thing.

Yeah.

Yeah, and I'm the only person that supporting this database pretty much and all of the users and training and issues come to me and it's very manageable from that side. There's not a lot of people that have issues with completing tasks and those I just called them and I'm like, hi, you know.

Yes.

Yeah, Kristen, what's up Kristen? She just asked almost that question like was it just you putting this together? How long did it take? Yeah, Rockstar Rockstar status.

So I actually was able to get a thank you to my boss, who thought me sort of like a slate analyst assistant temp position and she's phenomenal. She, you know, worked admission. She knows Slate backwards and forwards, so she has been doing some of the work with me this past the past six months. But everything that I've showed I have basically set up on my own and trained everyone and all the emails, all of that. So it is overwhelming in the sense that like it's definitely someone's job to manage this.

But it's not so overwhelming that you know you need a team of people with SQL experience.

No, yeah, that's fair. That's fair. Plus you were plus like I said, you, you know Slate well, so.

I think that's it. Great questions, great questions, came through the chat, great questions, came through the pre registration. I think you addressed almost all those like during me because sorry. So one last one, sorry. Before Rebounce, curious if you could see a similar report, research tab process, admissions office workflow. Our transfer team is brainstorming. Oh cool, early alerts for students when we review.

So me.

I it is mimic table or you could mirror that right? It's the same tools in Slate, right? It's the same things you were just the use case is different right? I mean.

Yeah.

Yeah. We want to basically pull all of the relevant application information from admissions that database into our slate file for the student so that academic advisors can reference it and see it. So I think that's sort of similar, but yeah, it would be you could do that.

They're very similar. Yeah, yeah, great. That's another webinar. Let's get, let's get another one on the books.

Yeah, so on behalf of Slate technicians and myself thank you so much to Noel for putting this together and presenting. Thank you all for being here. Agreed with everybody's comments. It's it's great information. It's fantastic process. It's a really, really good. It's good work that you've done. So thanks for doing it. And then thanks for sharing with everybody so stay tuned for the next one everybody and we will see you soon for the next next. Apply to alumni webinar.

In the series. Thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of your Wednesday and we'll talk to you soon.

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Jimmy?