Strategic Campus Visit Portals

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Some kind of secret, but I will share with you.

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Guys.

I love you.

Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us this afternoon and Monday to listen to our presentation on portals, specifically strategic campus visit portals. Very excited my the only thing I like more than data is portals. 'cause you can do so much with them.

First, I just want to start off with a little bit of housekeeping. A few things to remind you of this web and R is being recorded and will be made available for viewing within 24 hours. For festival passholders closed caption can be enabled by clicking the closed captioning button on the top right corner of the share window. Full screen viewing can be enabled by clicking the expand button on the top right corner of the share window. Should you need to re sync your audio or video, just refresh the share window. Any questions you have can be posted in the chat.

And the check may be turned off by clicking the chat icon on the top right corner of the share window. My name is Elizabeth Taylor. I'm a product manager here at tech dilutions. I'm also join LB or moderator for today and I'm also joined by my colleagues in product management, Sarah McGinnis and Cody Homan. Gray, who will be available to answer any questions in the chat as they come up. If it's not something related to our presenters with that, I'd like to just dive in and hand it over to Suzanne and John Michael too.

Introduce themselves and let's get started.

Hi, can you everybody hear me OK?

Yeah.

Can you hear me?

Yeah OK thanks. Sorry I've never done asleep share session before. I've only helped to coordinate them. But thank you everybody for being here. Thank you Elizabeth for that introduction and thank you for joining us today. Once again, my name is Suzanne Young and I'm the director of our admission Information systems team for Rice is undergraduate instance of slate. My team includes three assistant directors who are just the best and together we are responsible for managing, configuring and developing rices undergraduate.

Instance for prospects through matriculation and just generally supporting any related admission functionality as it as it relates to Slate and it. Our admission events and processes, and evaluation and so forth.

We, as you probably know, John Michael was part of my team for four years before he left for RHB an I am so grateful and we are also fortunate that he is still part of this late community and I just can't wait to see everybody in 2022 as well. But here's a little information about rice. Rice was founded in 1912 and is in Houston, TX. We have about 4000 undergraduate and 3000 graduate students.

We've had our undergraduate instance of slight since 2013, and that's the instance that my team of four, including me, manage, is rice also host for other slate instances that are managed by other teams for our Business School or graduate programs, and our summer visiting programs. And this past year we received nearly 30,000 applications for about 1000 First Europe spots.

How do I do the next slide? I'm sorry.

No problem, I'll take it. I'll take it from here.

X-ray?

That's why I wasn't able to drive OK, thank you. That's how our life was before you know, and I'm lost without him now. OK, but we wanted to talk about John Michael Skinner to introduce himself. Sorry about that, yeah?

Sure, thanks exam everyone. We're both really glad to be here since we didn't get to present this to you back in the 2019 Slate Innovation Summit. My name is John Michael Cueshe. My slate adventures began with Suzanne as a member of her team at Rice. I started as an assistant director on her team than associate director for Admission Information Systems. Suzanne and I are also both rice grads so working together and.

On admission projects always had additional value ANAN meaningfulness for us I joined the team at VHB at the beginning of 2021 as an integration consultant. HRV is a higher education consultancy and we just celebrated our 30th anniversary. We've guided more than 300 institutions. Tord greater relevance, and ultimately success in achieving enrollment retention and revenue goals. RHP delivers expertise across these four practices, including slate and related technologies.

Yeah.

Where we have a footprint in more than 10% of all slate instances offering best in class implementations, diagnostics, advanced builds and training. RHB is a platinum preferred partner in the slate preferred partner program.

Sure.

One other out one other thing outside of RHP. I'm also the senior program director for Debusk Enrichment Center of Texas, a nonprofit HERE in Houston, where I've been involved for almost 25 years. Established in 1994, D Katz is a three week summer academic enrichment program for gifted and talented students in 3rd through 6th grade.

Our mission is to provide a qualitatively differentiated learning experience in the realm of education. Developing young leaders to use their gifts for the betterment of the world around them.

We are one of fewer than 10 organizations using slate with a primary or elementary school audience at DECAD. Slate is not only our enrollment management, an advancement platform, we actually also use it as our science and our ERP slate succeeded our homegrown platform in 2019. So onward portals portals are what bring us together today and we're happy to show you a bit of our work with some of the strategic choices that we made to help us amplify.

The experience and the impact of portions of Rice's campus visit program go ahead, Suzanne.

OK, great thanks so much and if we didn't mention it earlier or it wasn't clear we designed this presentation to be a 30 minute presentation that we might run a few minutes after that. If Elizabeth allows us to. And if we need to, but our presentation today presentation today is less about how to build a portal and more about possible use cases for a portal. Portals can have very diverse applications. You want to consider them when you want to gain control or guide the experience of the end users.

And you also want to think about who your end users can be, or your constituents can be. They can be more than just perspective students today, and in fact, our examples today are going to include also student volunteers and faculty as end users for constituents. Portals can provide a customized experience. The information provided is accurate because it's directly from your slate instance. The experience can be dynamic and responsive and.

Uhm?

Because the portal is leading this constituent through the process, it's just easier for them to use. Internal benefits include the ability to automatically trigger functionality based on portal activity. Work can essentially be delegated to the end user, since their responses can update site directly without staff intervention, the data entered into slate can be more standardized based on how you design your portal and the processes and data are more structured. There's just less chaos, you know where the current.

Data is and how it got there.

We will be giving a high level overview of two projects that enjoyed all of these benefits mentioned on the previous slide. These projects were our overnight hosting program and our class visits program and once again this overview is this overview is meant to demonstrate a variety of use cases for portals and not the specific details about how all of the portals were built and John, Michael and I will be happy to talk to you after this presentation on going about any particular technical questions you might have.

But know that we're just trying to plant the seeds of ingenuity with you.

So Michael previously mentioned we had intended to give this presentation last year, and admittedly these projects have been on hiatus due to the pandemic, but regardless, we're dusting them off and giving them ready to be adapted or evolved. However, these new these programs will be launched going forward.

For our first program, we want to talk, hang out a second. See, I would be quiet.

For our first program, we want to talk about is our campus visit portal and basically the confines of that program are that we have allowed high school seniors to visit and stay overnight on campus. They have to be at least 17 years old. They can stay on campus for up to one night Monday through Thursday night. We do that program in the fall and some months we've had more than 200 visitors, although that's really the the Hiace, Highmark, and the Student Admission Committee.

Volunteers, there's a core group of on the overnight hosting committee that's about 5:00 to 7:00 volunteers and they will match for prospects from a group of overnight student volunteer. Host of that can be as many as 100 different hosts.

The pre prior to our portal solution a high level view of the matching process looks something like this project registered via a slate event. We would down excuse me, stuff would query the registration results and manually append this information to a Google sheet that was shared with the sack, which is a stupid machine committee, overnight hosting committee sack would update the Google sheet with the matched host assignments and then we would have staff again.

Manually updates this prospect slate record with the assigned host.

You can probably imagine what many of our pain points were the Google Sheets information had to be manually updated and thus was not always current. And of course late had to be manually updated with the assigned host information and it was not always current. This Google sheet had to be manually audited for unmatched process prospects, or mismatched gender, or just whatever other kind of audits we would we routinely.

Conduct and the experience was a bit chaotic. The data lived in multiple places, which were often not In Sync, so now I'm going to head over to John Michael to talk about our solution.

Thanks Suzanne. So as she mentioned this, this word experience is really key here and that port are about an experience. OK so for our overnight host matching portal we did utilize a couple of different views and the slides that I'm about to scroll through there just little snippets or screenshots of portions of it, not the entire page view because we couldn't kind of fit all of that on one single slide. So this portal, the overnight host matching portal primarily faced internal slate users, whether they be staff.

Or this matching committee that Suzanne mentioned and the data would populate into this portal by virtue of students registering for these overnight events. We had a couple of different list views. Students who were waiting who still needed a host match, and students who had already been matched. This particular snippet is from the area of the portal that shows students after their match had already been done so very high level information. The student where they're coming from the date of their visit, the status of whether they attended or they no showed.

A little screenshot, little preview of their their arrival information. All of those in the example happened to be about driving, but we would have students who would fly in as well and it would show their flight information that they had provided on their registration high level information about the host to which they had been assigned, and then a column at the very end showing whether they had submitted our overnight consent form. This column that you see labeled as management only showed up to certain staff inside of the admission team.

Didn't show up to the student matching committee because this screenshot comes well after having any campus visits. There are some of the data that's just not showing up in this particular screenshot, but we had links in this column. This column would only render would only show up in the portal for staff, and it had administrative links in it. A link to jump off and open the students full record an indication as to whether the student still owed payment for the overnight visit and a couple of other administrative tasks. So the portal became the place where.

Even internal staff went to check students in to accept their payment right there on the spot to look up something on their record instead of going into Slate's main administrative interface and having to go to the record to look for payments and then having to go to the event to check them in and many other stops along the way. We consolidated that experience. We brought it together into a place that made it a lot more manageable, manageable for them.

Another view when you click on one of these students that you see in the Rose here it would pop up what we called our profile card and it's separated really into these four quadrants. Student information travel itinerary that they had given us profile questions that they'd answered for us in an area for the committee to do their matching.

At the very bottom we had a place where the committee could indicate whether they were still working on that host assignment or whether they were complete. They had there satisfied with what they did that gave us a little not only an indicator about are they still working on this, or are they finished with it there? They don't need to change it anymore. It was not just cosmetic visual from that perspective, but it also helped drive some communications that fired each week. We had some automatic communications that would go out Saturday mornings too.

The current rice students who were hosting with information about the students that were coming, and likewise to the visiting students who were coming with information about their hosts before.

There was a lot less transparency and a lot less visibility into the who's who and kind of brokering that introduction prior to when the student arrived. In this screenshot. I'm not sure if you can see, but under the host matching heading this particular screenshot I thought this was a happy little accident that the screenshot I grabbed the student who was going to visit requested at least know my name.

That is so important and it really remarkably changed the experience and gave our hosts the ability to know so much information about the student who was coming and really make them feel welcome to the campus like they had known them for such a long time and just completely made it less of a robotic thing to check off the list. So I'm hosting a student this weekend to forming a relationship with them and also with rice.

So from a very high level in this portal list of components and some resources for you, some jumping off points overall, what's at work here? We've got a form collecting registrations in event form specifically, so these are set up as events.

Most of those fields on the event form are indeed mapped back to fields. Application scope fields. I think application scope maybe person scope on the person's record so that that data also in addition to landing in the form response, it lands straight away on their record, and it's a little more easily usable in that way. Of course, we have prompts for some of those fields, picklists for certain things, and then the portal itself. Overall, one point you to a very specific slate Knowledge base article and you'll see this slide again for our second.

It'll type. This is the actual title of a Knowledge Base article, portal table and Table Row class is going to mention this again in a second, but that's a knowledge base article that will help you give you some information about how we put together some of these table displays, made them loop, made them searchable, made them sortable. There's a lot of onboard classes that are built into slate with respect to tables inside of portals that you don't have to build the functionality you know it already exists and you just need to know how to call appan that functionality that's built in.

These are of course some advanced topics, so being familiar with liquid markup, HTML and CSS is also going to be advantageous for you, and I want to point you to clean Slate showcase, particularly the showcase provision, not just the default clean Slate factory model. There are a couple of portals in the Clean Slate Showcase that will have helpful examples of some of the things that you'll see in this portal and in the next one in particular. The ones I can think of are the alumni interviewing portal with captains that's in Clean Slate showcase as well as the athletics.

Portal that's in Clean Slate showcase. There are some pieces that kind of served as the Genesis point or the really helpful resource for how to build out certain aspects of it.

I'm going to pop the hood just for a second on a couple of these pieces. It won't be a deep dive, but just a high level just to show you where there are some special things at work that you might find inspiring. So I mentioned that Knowledge Base article a moment ago about the table classes. OK, you're going to see in this first image those things that I have boxed with the Gray outline that table sortable those two class assignments as well as down on the table header item, the sortable ascending class you're going to see those things referred to in that Knowledge Base article of.

Built in ways that you can create a liquid loop table and then apply these classes against it to have it automatically sorted, or to be sortable where you can click on column headings to sort it ascending or descending. A keyword that you don't see in this screenshot. At the moment I think I might have it on one in a coming up slide. There's also a class that you can add for searchable and you know how in many of the administrative interfaces in slate like form responses, there's a little quick search box for that where you can start typing in and it goes shoot filters down to just the people.

Where it's finding text that matches that's available on board for you to use. You don't have to redevelop that functionality, and the Knowledge Base article talks about that. I also mentioned that that management column that you saw was only visible to certain people, and so here's just a quick little snippet about how we were able to use a single point of experience but only have certain information render based upon who that person was. So when a user logged in and had a role that contained the word admission, or had the administrator all access role.

The column the management column rendered for them and showed those links that gave them jumping off points to accept the payment or go to the record or check them in, or edit and cancel the registration for the students on the match committee who logged in. They did not meet those that user criteria, so that column didn't render for them, but they still got the complete experience that we wanted them to have. We didn't have to make a bunch of separate portals or a bunch of separate views. Strategically, we brought them all together to really change the experience for everyone.

One more quick look under the hood here. In those examples I've mentioned in the Clean Slate Showcase you will see some methods, some portal methods in those portals that are being utilized to save the information back to a record. So from this overnight hosting portal this is a screenshot of the method itself being a post method, but then a custom SQL query that.

Drives the saving of that information that's called by the method when the method is called that this query is what executes. This is a very advanced technique. You will see this in Clean Slate showcase. This is more than just going and creating a form and letting that form response save. Save the information back to the record. You'll see this used in the Clean Slate Showcase environment, so just wanted to call out here that this is a bit of an advanced technique and you're going to see it again in the next one that we present. Suzanne. I think we're ready to move over. Crossover into.

The second one, our class list management.

So come on back in and take away, take us away on that.

Great, thank you.

So I'm really excited especially about this next project because it actually uses 2 portals and it just makes a very old fashioned process look much more user-friendly. So this is this.

Particular project was related to our class visits, an kind of the overarching, the overview of the whole program. We allow perspective students to visit classes. We don't make them register at a time, although I think they can let us know, but anybody, any perspective student can register. I'm sorry a visit a class we would provide. We have provided them with static list by date of course is that they could visit and.

The cast list for had been generated once a month prior to each semester and updated periodically as we received new information about a causes, availability or location and we would contact faculty prior to that semester to allow them to exclude their classes from the list if they wanted to. The process kind of this is the very high level view of the process. Basically, we would obtain a list from the Registrar of all the classes that were scheduled to be offered.

For the next semester, including you know, information about the date, the time, the location, we would do, some initial clean up with that list, such as removing graduate level courses or independent studies prior to the beginning of the semester, we would send an email to faculty inviting them to exclude courses from that list. That faculty submitted their responses via email. They just reply to our email we generated. We updated that information in generated PDF.

Cast list for each day of the week and those PDF's were printed as hard copies and also linked to.

Our website and the prospects would use those lists then to select courses they might want to visit and then attend those classes.

Once again, probably some pretty obvious pain points. Faculty really had limited opportunity to opt out or share pertinent information, such as when exams might be.

Scheduled and so we wouldn't want students to attend on those specific dates. You know they could if they came across our email and there you know, inbox months later they could reply and give us an update, but that was just a pretty unlikely scenario, so they really had one shot, usually per semester to up their class out or give us some updated information. Those email replies were manually updated on the PDFs.

For prospects, that list were not dynamic or filterable an you know this is a common problem on many campuses. It's just really hard for visitors to locate various buildings like campus and so our process didn't facilitate them getting to where they wanted to be. In addition, we then up and learn that this from visitor feedback that cost locations had changed and.

I think that made it not a great experience on multiple many different levels from both the faculty and the prospects, so I'm going to hand it back over to John Michael for some of our solutions.

Thanks so as Suzanne mentioned this piece, this project is really two portals, one for faculty that required authentication and one that faced the public that was configured for anonymous or guest access. So let's start with the public facing components. So this is just a snippet and the starting point is that we required the person to pick a weekday.

Because the basis of the campus visit registration was by a particular day, so we forced them in creating this portal experience to pick the day first before showing them anything. Using this as the starting point allowed us to provide more custom by a more customizable experience for them to search for classes that they might want to visit, and it might have influenced them on which day they actually wanted to register for in the campus visit registration. We didn't have them pick. Oh, I'm going to. I want to go to math 101.

Or ECON 102, they could just leave openings in their schedule, their itinerary themselves and kind of self manage, choose your own adventure for when are they going to go to classes and which ones they want to visit so they could do more than one they wanted to. But having this approach just based upon how Rice had elected to set up its campus visit methodology and philosophy, was the best way to have students engaged with this data in a dynamic way. So the magic really started with this portal when.

Somebody picks a weekday and then choose this to search right below that. Then would come up a listview simple listview of the course information that Suzanne mentioned that we would load from office of the Registrar and that would just be data that was coming out of the SIS. Rice uses banner as it's SIS, so we structured that into an entity we had volunteer. We had faculty stored as data set records in our volunteer data set. We created a courses or classes. I can't remember what we called it, but.

Courses entity inside of that and loaded this course data into those faculty volunteer records and that's what drives the display of. That's where the state is coming from. So simple list read out and again this is the public facing view. So very friendly names, friendly course names, friendly location names. Friendly instructor names. I mentioned that search field that on board searching that's built in that we see very commonly in the administrative interface which is accessible to you.

Inside of a table in a portal like this, so you see it over on the right side, search by keyword. It's the exact same functionality they could use that too.

Touchdown by any word that's in the table. So I typed Cohen into the search field and it found all of Daniel Cohen's courses I could have typed math or one of these course codes like civi CVE and it would have filtered down to those it's searching any of the text that is displayed in that particular result.

They could then move forward and refine their results by division of study if they wanted to.

In addition to the weekday, so show me in this particular screenshot, show me natural science courses on Tuesday that are available. You'll see that in this particular view, there's some additional information showing up on some of those courses and courses with unavailable dates or special notes displayed in line with that course so that students knew those details upfront and didn't end up having a poor experience when they came and went to which one is that Bioc 335 and we're like, oh, it's February 25th or taking an exam.

I just wasted my time by going to that class. We provided all that up front so they really could dial in the experience. Have a great on campus experience, but then also this portal itself being inexperienced for them on the general phase. One Phase 126 you see special notes about it being a large lecture class. Happy to have you but just check in with me at the beginning of class. Some of the language courses would have like this. Course is taught entirely in German, so be sure that you're aware it will only be in German when you come. Some labs would say.

Wear clothes to choose you know, don't wear flip flops. We need you to be safe while you're here.

Picking one of these, the last thing to kind of tell you about is clicking one of these courses in the public view would then generate a pop up with that building's location in the university map system, so I must have clicked on a science course. It took me to the Keith Weiss Geological Laboratories. This is a public portal. They would get back to this on their device on their day of arrival, and they use this to navigate their way around the campus. They click on the course that they would want to go to. It would show them precisely the building that they need to go to an this visual layout hopefully would also help them.

Connect with where are they standing right now versus where they need to go. It wasn't quite, you know. Google turn by turn type of directions to help them navigate around the campus, but we gave them a lot more information and it really improved their experience with this aspect of the campus visit program.

It's the one portal that's the public portal that students and their parents and the external audiences would use. Let's look inside now on the faculty management side, we provided them with a personalized link to access this portal versus using login credentials like connecting it with shibboleth and the universities SSO system and using the net ID single sign on system. Because this was the very first time that we were giving faculty at large an experience with any kind of portal system, so we weren't really ready to cross the login bridge yet.

In terms of go to this link and just log in with your net ID, we just weren't ready for that. So instead at the top of the semester we would send them a nice invitation email with a personalized link that they could use anytime all year. They could put market, it would take them right back to the same place when we flushed out the fall data an loaded the spring data. They could still use that same link and get right back in. They didn't have to grapple with the log in, they didn't need to have that link, but we would send it to them at the top of each semester.

We showed them a different view of the course data that was loaded from banner, so some of the columns are the same. The display name of the course, but you notice like the location is not the big long friendly name of the building. It's the internal representations of buildings and room numbers that they would report that they would understand the day codes RT&R Tuesday and Thursday coding that they understand creating the experience around what they would, how they are used to looking at this data.

The first column isn't the course name. The first column is course codes in the course number, because that's how they think about their courses. So really dialing in that experience based on the audience.

Clicking on one of these courses in their views, in their view in their portal would generate this popup.

At the top we would show them the data that we originally loaded, and then we gave them the ability to change some of that data so the very top you could see like, here's the short name that came over from banner and the course in the CRM that came over from banner in the day and time that came over for banner. Now the course names and this is true of most places. The course names are often very sistemy right? They're not very public friendly. Think about transcripts. You know they're very transcript E short coding, short labeling.

So we gave them the ability to control what the public display name was of the course. So in this particular example, in banner this course is stored as approaches Hispanic literature, but this professor got to change it to approaches to Hispanic literature and clean it up. I think banner also at Rice. They kept on file a short name and a long name. We loaded both and the long name defaulted to this display name spot. Some professors would move classrooms or buildings like Suzanne set, and so sometimes students would show up at places and be like there's nobody here.

We gave professors the ability to control that and change. Sometimes they had a an official classroom on the books, but another lab space that they were using at the same time or just a different place that they wanted to send people to based upon where course meetings were happening. So we let them pick from the friendly name list of buildings, ankhian rooms as they wanted. They also had control of which days to display the course as available. So this in this particular course you can see in the third line meeting time and days we loaded it as a Tuesday.

Thursday course, 'cause that's what it is in banner. But then there's checkboxes for days to actually show it as available. So even though of course would meet on Monday, Wednesday, Friday if a professor only wanted visitors on Monday and Wednesday, they could uncheck Friday and that would be utilized in the course is display in the public portal. It would take it off of the Friday result list.

The faculty had places to specify exclusion dates and any other important notes that they wanted visitors to know. They're both just free text we didn't want to try to validate that against a prompt list or a calendar or date format. We just let them kind of free type so the the scary caution was they could really type anything in that box and we needed to check once in awhile that people were using them properly and we didn't have funky stuff showing out on the public view. But you saw a moment ago examples of somebody who took advantage of putting in those exclusion dates are putting in those.

Other important notes, again dialed in the experience for those visitors as well as when faculty were working with the portal, made him feel like we heard them and we were listening to them and it created a very simple experience for them to give us that information without a lot of onerous back and forth on the email.

Lastly, they had they, the faculty had ultimate control over whether the course appeared at all in the public list, and that's the setting that you see at the very bottom, we just stored a simple flag. Simple bit. Yes, no ones and zeros. Should this be in the schedule at all? And if they logged in and shows no, they don't have to worry about changing anything else contacting us. Unchecking things days off the list, it just went away. **** it's gone. It no longer renders in the.

Query results when that external facing Portal runs, they could come back at anytime and change this and have it immediately publicly reflected without our intervention at all. So in essence we transferred who does the work.

To a different group, all we needed to do was load the data and send the invitation email an this plate. Just kind of kept spinning on its own. The fact that the faculty affectively managed the rest for us.

Just a quick snapshot of components and resources, very similar to what you saw previously. We have a volunteer data set where primarily the alumni volunteers were loaded, but we would load faculty and other records in there because we needed to have. We wanted them as a volunteer record to then create the second item that's in this list. An entity inside of that data set for the course data that we would import over from banner. And of course there were fields for that entity they were promised for some of those fields, like the room, the room, and buildings that you saw.

And of course these two portals I'm giving you a reference to the same slate Knowledge base article, the one that's called Portal Table an tablero classes to do some of that fancy onboard stuff with tables. Here's the second one though. Filter based searching in portals. Very advanced technique, but it's what's driving what you saw on the tab where students have to pick a weekday.

Or they can pick an academic division and hit search and have a portion of the page rerender. Rerun the query right there on the fly, an load those new results based upon the search parameters that they put in. This is different from that little quick search that was up in the top corner. These are filters, things that they're using at the top of the list checkbox is a drop down list. Something like that. That article filter based searching in portals will give you the underlying theory with this, and there are some working versions of this in the Clean Slate Showcase as well.

Same other topics and areas as before. Liquid markup, HTML, CSS all going to be super advantageous for this and I've got just three more little slides to show you under the hood, so take you behind the scenes and show you some of some of the things that work so same as the overnight hosting portal. There's a method, a post method to save the information back from that pop up that the faculty are filling out where they can control the name and the dates available, and whether it's published.

It's not just a simple slate form, so it's not just a form built in the form editor. I should say relative to using the form editor. This is an advanced method for really customizing the visual experience as well as what happens with the data. You can see some working examples of this in Clean slate showcase.

This is what an HTML form looks like versus building a form in the form editor and embedding it inside of you. This is sampled in clean slate showcase. Again, those two working references for you look at the alumni interviewing Portal. There's a pop up that has an HTML form in it. Look at the athletics portal. One of the versions of the athletics portal also has a very simple HTML form inside of a pop-up that's used in conjunction with a custom SQL.

Siriana method to post what happens in that form. It's just way more customizable, way, more flexible to build it this way, but again, very advanced technique. This is the last slide that we've got. One last little strategy for you as you're thinking about rebooting these things, rebooting your campus, visit activities, and doing these types of things in the earlier images you saw that we had a legend for this vision or the school of study, to which of course belongs. The division was a data point that we loaded.

With each course an we mapped division as a prompt value versus having it as free text.

And then in one of the export values for those division prompts, we simply added an HTML5 color keyword as the export value. Blue, yellow, green, red. You can do a quick search for HTML5 color values. They're just simple plain text words that value that export value is in the query and we pull it in as a merge field with an inline style code, which is what I've got in the little Gray box. We often think of using merge fields.

Simply to display the value to show what's in that field, or maybe using it in some liquid markup to decide whether something else should render. But thinking of strategic ways to use merge fields inside of style code is a way to scale up the visual experience of a portal.

So that little thing that I've got in the Gray boxes, there's a little CSS further up line that's not in the screenshot, but that is what is deciding which of those color blocks what the color of the color block should be at the beginning of the row. So all of these things together overwhelmingly improve the student experience. They not only had a way to identify which classes they were able to visit, but it was dynamically available to them with functionality that help them navigate to different buildings and locations.

Made the day go so much more smoothly instead of them leaving frustrated or confused internally. The staff also had a significantly improved experience because we got rid of all those manual processing steps of having to scrape responses out of emails and record it somewhere in slate. Same thing with the earlier portal. The overnight host matching one I touched on some of those things, but pretty profound impact on the experience. The staff didn't have lots of administrative overhead. Current students who were serving as hosts.

As well as that overnight matching committee, they always had access to the information they needed. They weren't waiting for a refresh of some static Google sheet. The security was a lot tighter because we weren't exporting data at a slate. It basically just never ever left slate from that point forward. And those visiting students got personalized communications about their hosts and the connection between a current student and a visiting student was so much stronger from the beginning. Rather than this awkward introduction later on the new names.

The new interests they knew the things that they wanted to see and do during the visit and they were matched with somebody who was a compatible host who had similar interests, similar experience and students felt really connected before their arrival and left without a meaningful experience. So that's really our whirlwind way through, showing you telling you about some of the strategic choices that we made with aspects of the Rices campus visit program. And again, our motivation with this.

Was as you think, about rebooting and bringing back your own processes, procedures, your own visit program. Take advantage now of having these conversations about the experience and doing something with that information to improve it. Whether it means that you type that into a portal or you even just tighten up event communications or whatever it might be. So I think Suzanne and Elizabeth is going to come back on. Are both going to come back on and Elizabeth is going to navigate us through.

Maybe some questions that have come in.

You under arrest.

During the presentation.

Mary

Yes, thank you for a great presentation. You know we have a couple of questions we want to go through. One is kind of portals be used within an event registration, for example, of students registering for a campus visit and could they include a portal within the registration versus sending them to a separate page to sign up for a class visit.

yeah, good question. We had not considered that back when we built this and again we kind of dove in and and showed you like really specific screenshots of these areas. We didn't really give you a sense. A good sense of like how it all works together. What's the whole ecosystem? What's the whole experience like in terms of where do they start? How do they start choosing their own adventure? Where do they go? We that was one of the things that we wanted to try to tighten up and improve because the campus visit registration at Rice was a related event.

Type of structure you started with your main event and you just kind of check boxes for all the things that you wanted to do and it's truth to the person who asked that question. It is true we had to kind of bounce them to a different place to say hey, take a look at this list over here to help you get to know more about what you want to do with the class visit portion. So we were looking for ways to kind of bring that together off the top of my head, I'm not aware of a way to call in a portal directly necessarily in type of inside of a form, but having seen what technicians did with.

This the Innovation Festival portal. Again, it would be very advanced, but I think that there would be a pathway. If you have this type of experience on your team to build a portal that is all encompassing of the entire experience, the form registration, the list and really put it together in a tight way that helps them do that. Suzanne add something in here now you're good, OK?

Yeah, I will say they are festival portal was that was very custom advanced.

That's a lot of work. Let's see one other one. Maybe our faculty expected to go in and update the info.

You know, uh, if there if test dates change or snow days, or you know how are those kept up to date?

Well, I can feel that that one 'cause it's not very technical. Yes, I mean the idea is that they've got a link that they can have easy access to an bookmark and and and go to at anytime. And I believe that we began reaching out to faculty more frequently during the semester. Took every surface that link and encourage them to think about exam date. You know, before exams or before this or that, you know that that they are encouraged to bookmark it and go and update.

The feedback from the faculty that we got was really positive. I mean on it to be honest, we do kind of up them into their courses. Being on the list and they have to opt out.

I haven't gotten any negative feedback about that, maybe surprisingly, but in all the years we haven't, and I think just part of the rice culture is that things are kind of open, but at the same time, the portal just made it easier to convey that information, and they could even do it well ahead of time to explain their exam days and whatnot so.

Yeah, there are certain that. That being said, if they shouldn't email to somebody will update it for them. Sure, not going to make them tell us twice to to do it, but the idea is that we've given them an opportunity to take care of it in the moment that they think of it so.

It's great.

Another question is how long did it take to create these portals?

Well, we have to wind back the clock and think back to 2019 here on this. I think they both came about in 2019. It did take the truthful answer is it did take some time? I mean the first one that we did was the overnight host matching portal and to be perfectly frank, it was one of those things that I just kind of started poking around with on a Friday afternoon and then the next thing I knew, I looked at the clock and it was Sunday like I just hit kind of a moment of flow of of putting pieces together.

We weren't necessarily under some real strict deadline to do it, but it did take time, especially too because as you saw signing up for this session we categorized, we put it in the advanced category. You'll see a lot of working examples in Clean Slate showcase, but to really get it, get it implemented. You've got to have a really strong understanding of slate and its functionality and the database in general. So I, I'm sorry I'm not able to really quantify it in terms of hours just because for me it the hours just went by and I didn't even know it.

But it did. It did take some time and we did have things that we wanted to iterate on. One of the things that I'm sorry I overlooked saying, but this slide here this some place where they the matching committee put in the host matching information. You can probably see that all those host fields are just static. Most of them are static text fields. We wanted to improve this by having them pick from data set records instead, so they could just search for Dan in that in that list and click him and that's it.

They wouldn't have to key in all of his information every time versus like what you see in that screenshot. So it takes some time, but I'm telling you it's it's well worth it. And while you are considering trying to reboot this process and bring campus visits back to your campus, in light of all the things that have taken place over the last year, have these strategic conversations and make strategic choices and take things out of the parking lot and put them in your primary course of action and do it before you put it back in motion and and just don't settle until it's where you want it to be.

So.

Alright, well with that I think we have gone quite a bit over time since we were aiming for 1/2 an hour, but it will wrap it up. I know. Sorry for any of the questions, we didn't quite get to.

But I'm sure you know, feel free to contact slate, contact our presenters. Their information is available and other than that, thank you so much to John, Michael, and Susan for presenting. And thanks to everyone for attending. Have a great day.

Thank you.

Thanks everybody.