Dive Deeper with Waybetter Marketing : How Vanderbilt School of Nursing Rebuilt Slate for Recruitment

Alright, excellent.

Hi everyone.

Hi. Hello.

Hello.

So John, in the 90 seconds or so as we wait for folks to jump in, what, uh, what are we looking at here? What's, what's our little teaser?

Yeah, we're, uh, gracing our audience with, uh, background video as opposed to, uh, background music today. So what you're, what you're looking at is, uh, an applicant portal that we were able to work on with the, uh, Vanderbilt team. So you'll see a lot of, uh, different fun features in there, all designed to improve the, uh, experience for the, for the students. So, yeah, just something to.

Look at as opposed to our faces for the full wait time as people come in.

Excellent, excellent.

All right, so yeah, you'll see a lot today. I'm really excited to to jump in Big focus of today's presentation will be the faculty portal that assists the Vanderbilt University School of Nursing team in reviewing applications. But do again, just as we're waiting for folks to jump in, do you want to give a bit of a teaser and to some other, you know, assets that we've constructed for the school and nursing team? So give these another couple seconds and then.

About 30 or so seconds from now we will jump in and get started.

Yeah, it kind of serves as the answering a question we received on the front end too is how to, uh, better recruit students. So this is UH-11 technique right there to give them a better uh home base and a better experience throughout the process. So that that checks off one of the questions, gentlemen.

That's good.

All right, very good.

All right, so we got a critical mass of folks in here. So I'll turn it back to Sarah, who will kick us off and then we'll jump in.

Thanks, Clay. I really love it. I love the background video instead. It's a nice way to get people acclimated in and a nice thing to watch while you're waiting. Uh, I'm going to disrupt that a bit and give you a dumb icebreaker while I introduce myself and introduce this event. So I'm Sarah Brown, I am the assistant director of strategic partnerships here at technologians, which means I liaise with all of our preferred partners. So our preferred partner network as a part of our platinum preferred partners. They offer these dive deeper sessions, which is where you are today. So I'm going to turn it over to them quickly. But if you.

As an icebreaker in the chat, let us know what time do you wake up in the morning? We were talking about this right before you got here. Some of us have little ones and wake up earlier whether we like it or not. So let us know what time you wake up in the morning and also let us know what institution you're representing. As a quick few points on housekeeping, I want to Orient you to the share platform. First and foremost, This is going to be recorded so shortly after the session. You can find this recording to either rewatch or share with a colleague in your home Slate portal under web.

And recordings. The closed captioning button will function and provide you closed captioning within the chat. You'll just have to toggle on the icon at the top right hand corner that has two CS.

Similarly, you can toggle off the checkbox if you find it to be distracting, but we hope that you don't because it's really a more fun time if everyone is engaged in the chat, either responding or giving your thoughts as to the content being provided. Or ask any questions that you'd like during the time set aside for this, dive deeper. I'll be compiling the questions for a short question and answer at the end, so don't be shy if at any time you sense or hear some sort of audio lag or something just doesn't sound quite right or an echo, a simple refresh of.

Your browser should take care of any audio issues. OK, I think I've got everything. Oops. One more quick note. Uh, the very right hand side icon with the four arrows pointed outward will give you a full screen viewing experience. So without further ado, thank you so much for the way better team and the Vanderbilt team. And let's let's get started with this tab deeper. Thank you all for being here.

Excellent. All right, well, thank you very much, Sarah. I'm very excited to speak with you all this afternoon about how the Vanderbilt School of Nursing team rebuilt slate. So before we officially dive in, let's do some brief introductions. We've got four of us here today, so kick it's an earning and we'll go around the horn.

Sure, Ernie Rushing. I'm the Associate Dean of Enrollment Management and Student Affairs for the School of Nursing, overseeing the application processes and and all of the inner workings that go along with it.

Hi, I'm Jed Poston. I'm the Director of Enrollment Operations and Data Analytics, and I oversee our Slate CRM and support the systems and data that drive our admissions and enrollment strategy. And I'll pass it back to Clay.

Alright, well, great to see everyone. I'm Clay Myers. I'm the VP of Technical Services here at Way Better. I lead up most of our technical sleep projects for the Way Better team, so anything from implementations to portal builds of all shapes and sizes. Spent a number of years on the university side as well. And also from the way-better team we have, John. John.

Thank you. Yeah, I have, uh, dubbed myself the least important participant on this webinar today, but nevertheless, uh, I am the VP of strategic partnerships and that means I help, uh, our partners really grow and shape their enrollment and improve process at the same time. Uh, I now also joke that I've been with way better for 10 years, UH-5 on the client side where I worked on a college campus and now five years on this side helping colleges and universities across the country. So.

I guess we'll just get right into who, uh, more about way better.

Enrollment improving BACKSTEP.

And Marbot Vanderbilt, I'll just keep rolling here. So, uh, in addition to the four bullets, you can see there about way better. I hope that you take away that we are about, uh, driving enrollment, improving process, uh, as well as, uh, umm, giving the students a good journey. Uh, parents, family, students all deserve the best experience possible. So that's what drives us. Uh, we work with colleges and universities across the country, uh, schools that you've heard of and some that you may not have, but nevertheless.

Our North Star is giving a good experience to all students and families, and I will pass to the Vanderbilt team.

Sure. Yeah, the Vanderbilt School of Nursing has been around for a while.

In 1908, early just a few years ago, we have a number of specialties, 13 different specialties and entry level to nursing, graduate level, doctoral level nursing programs, nurse anesthesia currently in the top four nursing programs in the country, competitive application review process and for selectivity for our programs, which is great, which is where we needed some help with how do we manage all of this in an effective way.

And that led us into trying to find solutions for for the school.

Excellent. So John, tell us what, what are we going to cover today, this afternoon? What's, what's kind of on the docket?

Yeah, Quick lay of the land here. I won't go into too much detail, save time for the really good stuff, but, uh, really a spoiler alert, the challenge, a shared instance, that's what we're going to talk about really, uh, quickly at the top here. And then we're going to dive right into the audit. And what is an audit? Uh, an audit is, uh, deep dive into the instance to see what's going on in there, see what's working, challenges, strengths, weaknesses, uh, things we can do. So that's what we're going to talk about, what we uncovered in that process.

Uh, we're going to take what we learned there and use that as a solid foundation to start.

Today here.

Start the rebuild now that we were very comfortable with where everything was. We wanted to be in a position where we could, as you see here, build an instance that's configured to perform and obviously be scalable at the same time. The fun part is next with the demo. We're going to really dive in and see what you all signed up for today here. And then maybe the most important impact, what is it doing? What is it done for the Vanderbilt team? What has it done for the internal audience as well as the external?

And that is probably the most important. So we'll get right to it and I will pass it back over to Clay.

Yeah, excellent. Thanks, John. So to set the stage a bit, the School of Nursing team at Vanderbilt approached us a number of years back to perform an audit of their existing slate instance. And you know, Ernie, if you could put yourself, you know, in your shoes two or three years ago, what were some of the challenges? You know, what were some of the pain points that you know your team experienced in that shared instance and how did those manifest themselves?

Sure. Yeah, we, we had been on a shared instance for over a decade without any problems. It was pretty cut and dry. We were in alignment with all the other schools that were on the shared instance. But then nursing accrediting bodies started changing their requirements. The School of Nursing started adding additional programs, which meant now we had to capture different data points. Then we added a January start to all the other schools, which had a false start.

As we started to look at this program, there was also.

So the development of a third new program of a nurse anesthesia, which was going to have a summer start and all of those changes that we were trying to capture for nursing, we couldn't we couldn't get everything done without affecting all the other schools. And it became, it became a fight to try to figure out how do we how do we not break everybody else's application while trying to navigate through these nursing.

Specific requirements and so that became the the challenge that.

Nursing Requirements.

They were up against and at some point we were. The concern was that our the demands of the nursing requirements would go beyond what we could do in a shared instance without literally breaking the other schools.

Yeah. And and you know, as our team jumped in and performed that audit of this late instance, you know, we saw things that are really all too common, you know, across some of those shared instances, especially older instances that have been, you know, stood up for 10-15 years. When you're first building, you know, an instance like that, you're taking into account like best practice at that time. You're also taking into account your own business process as well. And certainly as the years pass needs change processes.

Change recommendations from slate change, you know, certainly can find yourself a bit lost or a bit out to sea, you know, in terms of the the instance. And ultimately after that audit, we decided alongside the the School of Nursing team to start from scratch to provision a brand new instance solely for the School of Nursing team, giving that team, you know ultimate keys to access and ownership and really custom configurations that are going to, you know fit what those business needs are today, you know in.

Year 2026 and I think that process was especially smooth given that, you know, Jed and earning the rest of the team had a solid understanding of where they wanted to be 6 to 12 months from the start of that implementation. You know, it really allowed us to March forward, you know, to that to that end goal, keeping what we wanted that instance to look like, you know, in in our minds again, a year from, you know, from that actual kickoff, you know, there were also some very specific, you know, kind of pain points, you know, around reviewing these.

Patients. So you know, for a very competitive nursing schools application review, there are over 80 different reviewers that will have some impact, you know, on these records that will review these records in some way based on their degree selection and based on their program selection. And so as we were constructing that instance, we had to keep all of those realities in mind.

It really made the rebuild for us very purposeful. You know, we needed to set up the data architecture in such a way to again fit the business needs of the School of Nursing today and also to make sure that that review process could be executed smoothly as well. We have a very, I would say, creative, innovative way of calculating Gpas across many different institutions that students might have. It's not uncommon for the School of Nursing applicants to have transcripts from 10/12/15 different institutions.

Prior to coming to the School of Nursing with that as well with those 80 different reviewers, it was very important for us to make sure that the assignment of those reviewers was also automated as well. So in that prior instance, the handoff of applications to these reviewers was very manual. It involved, you know, someone looking at that application, seeing the degree in the program to which that student was applying in for.

Choosing from a pool of a couple of different reviewers and assigning that application accordingly.

So we wanted to take out that entire manual step. We wanted to make sure that, you know, for every single applicant in the instance at various stages of the review process, individuals were being assigned to those records automatically.

It was also very important for us in that new instance to make sure that permissioning was top notch. And faculty say from DNP Dr. of nursing practice, you know, we're not seeing master of nursing students or vice versa in certainly a number of other, you know, kind of iterations from there. So any solution that we put into the instance, whether it pertained to the application workflow or not, needed to have that reality built in as well. So again, making sure that based on who you are as a faculty.

Number or as a program director, you are only seeing the students that you should be seeing, no one less, no one more. And as Ernie alluded to, umm, you know, at the, at the top of our call today, umm, you know, this is very much a growing school. Umm, you know, nursing as, as you'll see is, you know, very much in demand. You know, application numbers, enrollment numbers are growing. So anything that we put in, we needed to shy away from, you know, over complexity. We needed to make sure that as new programs.

Three's entry terms come online in the years to come that this is easy enough to manage, maintain and build upon over time. And I think as we progressed forward, you know, as we built out, especially the review process within that new instance, it really became apparent to us that a custom portal solution, you know, very much might be in the cards. And you know, yeah, this was something that, you know, you came to our team.

You know, partially through the implementation, a few months since the implementation.

This was entirely, you know, your idea, what were, what were some of the first things that you were hoping to get out of that faculty portal? And then from there I'll actually jump.

With that faculty portal look like, but but what was your kind of vision of this faculty portal when we started off with with this project?

Sure. So again, you know, we were originally operating in in an amazing shared slight instance alongside multiple graduate schools working with an amazing team. And what we came to the realization was that the customization was just extremely limited for us as we begin to grow and the personalization for our faculty reviewers just wasn't where it needed to be without.

Where if we meant to make small changes.

It would become very risky for other schools. And so when we were looking in our own instance, what we decided was we wanted to to have something that was purpose built for our reviewers in our own environment where our faculty felt empowered with the right tools and in our enrollment outcomes could improve. So we wanted to build something that would improve.

Review accuracy.

That would make the process more efficient, and it would significantly hire faculty.

We noticed.

Satisfaction. What we realized when Ernie and I have been meeting over the years was we didn't want just more control as administrators, that we wanted to give that control to our faculty because we noticed our reviewers just aren't full-time academics, they're clinicians as well.

Now their parents, their coaches, they have full complex lives. And so the goal was to create a review experience that fits their schedule and not force them into hours. And so we wanted to build a dedicated faculty portal where we gave them flexibility to review applications on their own time in a way that works for them. And so we were very intentional. I think it's a great word about designing this portal.

Around how the faculty and the committees actually work, and so that meant.

Customization meant different rules and emit tailoring queries and so.

Uh.

I would say we didn't want A1 size fits all system. We didn't want an umbrella. We wanted to create a more personalized and relevant experience for each individual reviewer and for each individual committee.

Yeah, excellent. And you know, at this point I'll go ahead and jump out and actually show you what I'll what this tool looks like. You know, a couple of kind of notes from the top. This is all demo data. It's all dummy data really. Will give, you know, folks here on the call today an idea of what that portal looks like for true reviewers. We'll talk about the look, we'll talk about that functionality. And I think it's also important to note as well that you'll see four tabs on this portal today.

This approximates what your average.

You know, kind of reviewer at the School of Nursing would see though note that, you know, on the back end of that portal, there are upwards of 20 different views, 20 different tabs showcasing, you know, students fitting various criteria. So without further ado, I'll go ahead and jump in. And again, keep in mind this is all demo data. It's all dummy data, good representation though, of what the team sees, you know, when they are encountering this portal. So Jed, just kind of walk us through, you know, let's maybe pretend like you're onboarding some.

Faculty, you know, to to review applicants, you know, in this portal what what would be some of the guidance that you would give folks here.

Definitely so first.

Definitely. So first thing to know is that the faculty portal is a comprehensive role based platform that's going to provide a streamlined access to your key admissions data, your review workflows as a whole, as well as real-time analytics for all your faculty members, program or specialty directors and committee members as well. So the first page you come to that Clay is showing you is your welcome page, so all users would see.

Page what is happening?

This landing page, but it's going to greet them with a personalized welcome page that would have their names on there. Today's date. It would highlight important announcements or updates that's relevant. We would have liquid markup on here that also can show or hide based on specialties or majors or committees that they're a part of. You'll notice that we also have dates and deadlines for application reviews so that they're not surprised of when the next committee meetings come up.

Or when they need to have their reviews done.

I have to refuse that.

You can also, if he scrolls down, you'll also notice that you can add PowerPoints or videos here, so you can have training documents available for reviewers. And then we also wanted to have Technical Support available just in case anyone has an issue. It's a quick way to contact someone, whether it's through e-mail or if you use Teams Outlook, you can call somebody real quickly.

Real quickly.

Yeah. And important to layer in as well that this is a facsimile of what's currently present in that portal. We've inserted some dummy information, deadlines, etcetera, but again, giving folks on on the call an idea of what this looks like. So let's now jump into, you know, our next page here. This is the key page, you know, showing faculty exactly who is in their queue at any point in time. And again, mind you, there's 80 different reviewers, all of those reviewers being assigned automatically on the back.

Jen, I'll have you walk through kind of what this looks like first. But but Ernie, do you mind layering in, you know what, what was this process like before? You know, how were faculty jumping into their, you know, into their cues into the students they should be reviewing? And, you know, what were some of the pitfalls of of the prior system?

Well, it was they were all available. We would put filters in the on the reader side of things to, to block out particular programs, but they had access to see all applications. And if they, if they didn't have their queries built right, that would get very frustrated on that end to just, they were seeing the wrong files. So the other part of this that that came about in the last few years was the School of Nursing implemented faculty LED admissions committees per each of the degree options, which meant now we have to.

Take all of the faculty reviews and put them in a in a some sort of format that an entire faculty committee could review. Now historically that has was done on everyone's favorite data protection mechanism and Excel spreadsheet that lives on somebody's computer without any protection at all. And the problem with that outside of the glaringly obvious ones, were any applications that may have come in late.

Were not going to be included on that worksheet, which meant they would have to wait for the next decision.

Meeting in four to six weeks.

Which is unfair to the applicants. And so the, as we started to look at all of the needs of the school, it wasn't just the, the scoring from the two reviewers, we have clinical placement strains that we needed to start thinking through. How do we, how do we account for how many people could we put in a clinical site in Middle Tennessee, in the Nashville area? And, and there's sort of a, we have to be careful with how many we're admitting into that world.

So every specialty faculty director.

Knows those numbers, but that didn't always get to the committee and so we were as we started walking through.

What was needed? That's where the conversations of as Jed was working, can we do these sorts of things? And that was the how do we make it easier to find, easier to review, easier to make a decision and easier to post that decision? That was the ultimate goal. And then we have all those little side variables that we have to account for that had been blind spots previously.

Yeah, excellent.

So Jed, you know, in addition to kind of presenting individual, you know, faculty members with the folks that they are assigned to review and read, you know, what kind of resources are built in here as well for those, you know, for those actual program directors. And then we'll jump into the actual committee process and what that looks like.

Yeah.

Sure. So in the queue itself, I, I think I'd like to jump back and just talk about our old process. So when you're just in reader, I think one of the pitfalls we had was.

Our admissions officers would assign to faculty members or to program managers or everyone had access to all the populations. And so we wanted to add a security level so that the the faculty reviewers themselves would only see the applicants that were assigned to them. They don't need to try to find anyone else or grab somebody that wasn't part of their population. So we created populations for applicants as well As for.

Faculty reviewers themselves. And So what they see is only those applicants that are in their queue. They don't see the everyone in the population for a major or degree, just what's in their queue and it's automatically assigned to them, built on the rules. So we've cut out the middle people. And so we've removed a lot of barriers and a lot of people's times we've given back to them, whether it's admissions officers or program managers and so in the queue itself.

It's everyone who needs a review.

So now the reviewers themselves can take a look and as well as we have distributed delivery mechanisms for communications to the reviewers to let them know how many is in there on a weekly occurrence.

And so when they go in there, they can now say, well, how is my day going to shape out or how is my week going to shape out for reviews And what you see on that page in front of you, the real estate at the top, those are filters. So they could filter out the type of.

Applications that they want to review and those columns are also sortable. So they can we have defaults that are sorted on the query themselves. Then they can go back and sort themselves based on GPA, days in the bin terms, etcetera, which is very helpful.

The once you click on the name or the Read Application button, it'll open up this application card. We've designed this card specifically for our needs. It's customized and you'll see a.

Uh, focused view.

Of an in-depth information and action links on the bottom in case they want to interact with the admission officer that was in charge or get some technical help as well.

I would say what's been very interesting with the application card is how customizable we've made it based on the degree and program. Clay and I have worked really hard to customize it through all the different programs and specialties.

So Jed, you mentioned having communications out to, you know, these reviewers to ensure that they're logging into this portal, they're accessing the applicants in their queue. What, you know, what does this look like for program directors? You know, if you're a program director, you are, you know, managing your, your team of reviewers. How have you? I, I guess what have we put in here to ensure that those individuals are making sure that their team is doing what they need to be doing?

Sure, definitely. So with the queue, for a regular reviewer, once they've completed their review and submitted a, the applicant will remove off of their queue list. But for the program director, they get to see everyone that is still in their major specialty. So they get to see all the applicants and how they are progressing through the enrollment funnel so they can filter and see what is happening.

At their who they are with in the review process.

They can see the app card as well. They can log interactions. If they are contacting the student, they can still perform the filtering at the top and the sorting at the bottom there. So they get a little more to drill down, a little more in depth on the information than a regular reviewer. What's also very interesting is they're going to have more in depth analytics. So we've allowed them the program directors.

We've empowered them to monitor the progress.

To assign tasks and to oversee how the reviewers are proceeding with the targeted applications. And so they will be able to actually see dynamic reports such as a specialty major funnel visualization to track applications from start to deposit. They'll get an application count report showing each faculty reviewer and their current workload. So then now they can manage how the applic.

Are are moving within their own specialty and if they need to contact their reviewers to make sure that they reviews are getting done now it's on them and they don't have to work within other departments.

Yep, excellent.

One of the best places.

And I would say also one of the best things, it used to be manual and they would have to wait for a report from our office, but now all reports are current and they update automatically within the system as the applications progress.

Yeah, excellent. So kind of brings us to the the last tab in here before we jump out. And this is the, you know, one of the committee tabs, a demo committee tab, you know, here and and you know, while you know, essentially these applications are being reviewed for any of these review processes, all of these applicants are eventually getting funneled to, you know, to this location based off of the Gray and.

The jitter, Ernie, tell me again, kind of you know how this particular piece.

Is being utilized how faculty are now coming in better prepared to make some of these decisions? What's what's kind of been the secret sauce with this specific tab?

Well, there's access to information like Jed just mentioned the fact that it was, someone would have to generate a report from our office and send it to them and, and they would be using that report for who knows how many weeks, which means it's outdated almost within 30 minutes of getting it. But that's where we were stuck. Now, Middle Tennessee area clinical locations, that's a high priority for us. We want to make sure we can place our students in the, in the area when they want to be here and, and so how.

One of the problems the committee had was that was a blind spot. They didn't know how to keep track each round of reviews, how many had been admitted, MTA and OMTA, there wasn't a clean way to track that. And so we built this filter to show how many people have been admitted within Middle Tennessee already. So as we're going through each round of reviews, we know there's, we don't, we can't accept any more Middle Tennessee admits. The other thing that's important with that is that varies from specialty, from specialty to specialty.

It also varies from full time to part time. And so the fact that the committee now can run an academic program with those counts and those caps in place, building out and filtering out those decisions by their full or part-time status, that has simplified the admissions committee meetings exponentially. What would take hours and hours for them to go through to to keep up with with.

They all can look at these, these data points before the meetings. They can go over it, have a sense of what the applicant pool looks like. They can discuss the applicants much faster, make decisions faster. Beyond that, the the one of the things that we mentioned for the admissions officer, I mean we were.

Prior to this, the, it was taking 3540 minutes to get through all of the the review form that we had to fill out. Thanks to the automation, we're down to about 15 minutes for the admissions officers going to faculty. They're getting through their files at a record clip now within this because they're not having to hunt and Peck for what they're looking for. It's all right here. So everything has been it's, it's literally a spoon feeding the necessary audiences with everything that they need to make the decisions necessary. And that is where.

The the time component is most apparent because it's it's it's right here. With the click of a button, they can get through their decisions so much faster.

Yup.

And and you know, where do you, where do you hope to, to take this portal? You know, again, as I mentioned, this is a demo version, you know, 20 different kind of times in the back end. But but how is this growing with you? You know, how are you using this to facilitate, you know, student successfully enrolling at the Vanderbilt School of Nursing as well?

Well, it's, it has been a, a constantly growing and evolving thing. And this is the danger of working with y'all. And we say here's what we want to do. And you say I think we can do that. And that's been great. And So what we've been able to do now from the front side, the application review process, great. But then what happens once someone has been admitted, their notifications are going out easier now because of how we've got things set up.

There, and once they've been admitted, now we can take this same thought process and apply it to a student.

The Nobel and so.

Portal, the student sort of access portal for once they've been admitted giving them all the information that they need so they don't have to hunt and find it there. There's a, that onboarding process for students can be overwhelming because there's so many things they need to know about. And so the idea was take all of that guesswork out and you can see right there all the those five things at the top, you know, their compliance things that are required for clinical placements and they're all of their registration requirements and all of their financial aid.

All of these things are active so that they don't have to guess anymore. They don't have to get an e-mail from us going to some third site, fourth site, fifth site. They can, we can bring them in here and, and help them show where they are in the process to get them through this faster. And so that has been, you know, we joked, I don't know if you all know this, Vanderbilt's great at sports now, right to the student experience, like how do I get to the sports? Well, we can share that information within this portal and make it John's experience different from Jed's.

It's different from clays experience based on the academic program and their interests. And so that has been to me the, the, the overarching approach this has been how do we make the experience better. And so that was the outside of the application review process that's that's internal. The external audience are the ones that we're most concerned about and how they interact with Vanderbilt. And so that has been, we've taken that same thinking of how do we make this efficient.

And applied it overall to the student experience.

Yes.

Yeah, absolutely. And at the end of the day, obviously the the faculty portal, you know is very much an operational tool. However we can use that to get decisions in students hands faster, you know, with more accuracy. It ultimately is going to be a win for the entire school. So I think we talked a lot about that review accuracy. We did talk a lot about the efficiency. I think most well, you know, another very important piece, you know, for those 80 different reviewers, what has their experience been like with this portal and with this new.

You know, it's no faculty can often times be a challenging group to work with. But but what is that kind of, you know, qualitative feedback then from the folks who are actually using this portal and and living in that new instance?

Uh, Jed has been working with the faculty in setting this up, so I'll let him talk about how that back end side of, of what it's been with our office.

Yes, I would say it, it has been great feedback. And I think that's, you know, this is just the, I would say the foundation now that we have control and flexibility, the question becomes how do we continue to evolve their experience and and the experience of the faculty, I think so far has been very, very positive. And because we now own the system and own this instance, we can iterate quickly.

And.

We don't really have to create workaround limitations and it's not a static system. And so it's something we can continuously, continuously improve based off the conversations with the faculty. And so I think we want to go even further with our personalizations, not just on program level customization, but tailoring the experience to the individual reviewers and the committees, what they need to see how they review and make their decisions.

And not just faster, but give them clearer data presentations and better rubric alignment and surfacing insights with, you know, that matters most in the review process. And I think, you know, that's what we continue to hear from them. They, they like it. And the best thing is we can do better. We can make this process more cleaner.

And perfect it and I think you know one of one of the issues.

We do have, it's not perfect right now we cannot make batch decisions off queries and portals. That is something we hope Slate will help us with. I think that'll be a goal for us. So we'll put that in the forums and we hope everyone will vote for it. I think you know that will that will make this, that will help perfect this portal making batch decisions off queries and portals.

But we are definitely moving from a building a system to building an experience.

And Kelly, I would add, one of the things that I've seen in watching the faculty work is, is the great part about this is because it's internal with us when the faculty, when we first started out, we always have an idea about how they're going to react to it. And then they get into it and say, it would be really nice if we could do X, but because it's Jed literally in meetings would say, all right, refresh your screen. And what they were asking for was then added to what we didn't think about it, but faculty told us that we needed to see that portion. And so.

I think the ability to customize this to, to continue to make it what the faculty need, that's really important. That's a strong thing to be reminded. This is not static, where this is how it sits and this is where it will sit forever. As we start to see more things become needed, we can add them into this. And and that has been where faculty have really appreciated this new system because it's now what they want it to be and what they need it to be.

Yeah, excellent.

I think that's a wonderful place to jump to some questions and answers at this point. So we received some really good ones, you know, from folks, you know, alongside some of those registrations. So I want to start with a handful of those and then I do see there's been a number of questions come through in the chat. So, you know, I do want to definitely take some time and answer those. The first one that came through, you know, alongside the registration was about maintenance.

So, Jed, you know how? Now that you know, you own this portal, you own this experience.

What has that maintenance piece been like for you as you know as a slate captain?

We're told to report.

Yes, so you know, it's definitely something that you you have to keep in mind with the portal build is you need a structured maintenance plan. So whatever tool you use for your regular maintenance of slate, definitely build alongside. So we use Asana. So we have a maintenance plan built out in Asana. There is regular maintenance, but I think it there's flexibility in it so.

You can.

You can let it get too big, you could keep building onto it, but as long as you have the maintenance plan built out specifically for the portal and keep it structured, it's really not too big of an issue.

And, and one more from the prior questions, you know, we have a number of questions about communication, you know, to faculty. You know, Jen, you know, you mentioned having some of the automated messaging to faculty when there is someone to read in their queue. I know as we were speaking a little bit earlier this week, you mentioned the possibility of having actual internal campaigns to these faculty members. What what else are you doing in the world of communication, specifically internal to faculty knowing faculty aren't using this for, you know, for.

You know, outgoing comps to students.

We send, we have campaigns that are built out to faculty that are specific to let them make them aware of what is available for them in their queues. We are now building out.

A robust campaign for the faculty, not just based on what is available in your queues, but also the deadlines and dates based on the rounds. So it will alert them. We'll use content blocks.

It'll alert them not only how many you have, but what is coming up, when you need to get them done, the deadlines, urgency for that matter. And we'll set them up using liquid markup and set them up on a weekly and or daily basis.

Yeah, excellent. I have a couple looking at the chat, a couple of specific questions on, you know, some of the technical functionality of the portal. You know, looking here, Michaela Parker asks, are applicants removed from the list after they leave the queue or do they remain in case they want to return to them later? So in that second column that you saw in that faculty portal, the queue list.

Those applicants will drop from that particular tab once the application has been read and reviewed. So the actual review process of that application does take place in a traditional workflow. So behind this, you know, front facing portal, the traditional workflow with a bin structure, with rule automations, with reader review forms, you know, here the faculty is instructed to action on that student to evaluate that student.

The student will be pushed, umm, you know, to one of a couple of different landing places. Umm ideally as the faculty are reviewing those students, they're being saved later on for committee. And it's during that committee review in that 4th tab of the final decisions are made, umm, you know, on those records. So queue functions very similarly to, you know, your traditional queue that you might see in a reader in a workflow. Umm, you know, as as applications are reviewed and processed, they are dropping from.

You know from that list.

Yes.

Next one, this is a really good one for the School of Nursing team. Do you have any faculty still request an Excel spreadsheet download of data and how are you managing some of that expectations? I know you're both very against Excel, so so how have you tackled that with the team?

So uh, yeah.

Go ahead, Jen. I'll let you handle that.

Oracle.

So, you know, we've gotten great support from the university as a whole to work as data, work within data governance. Yes, people do want Excel spreadsheets, but what we've been able to do is we've been able to provide within the system. So we created, that's where we have multiple tabs, we have analytics tab and we created different populations and we've created their own reports.

That are live to pretty much provide the information.

That they need instead of an Excel tab, we'll create them queries in the portal on those specific tabs and we can base it on the population of the requester, usually the committee and or program director. And we can drill down on the X or Y axis and provide them pretty much all the information that they need that is on in Excel and usually.

Better with all the pop-up information that the system houses instead of what you're going to get on Excel spreadsheet.

It's policies that are.

And then that will fall into the the data governance policy that our university has.

We have a couple questions in here about applications and application source. Do you want to elaborate a bit on how applicants are entering the ecosystem?

Yeah.

Yeah. So I think I saw somebody asking about nursing Cass. So we, we don't use nursing cats. Everyone comes in through Slate. So we don't use any external tools. Everybody comes in through Slate. That is our our dedicated workflow is bringing all applications in through Slate.

Excellent. There's a couple umm, a couple questions I see Katie O'Brien time was the time saving component apparent to faculty slash users from the get go? Were there any obstacles to setting this up? And then I'll I'll combine that with another umm question about kind of faculty having hesitation about leaving comments and and things of that nature. Would I guess was there any pushback as you roll this out to the larger review team?

I, I wouldn't say there was pushback, but everybody loves change. Everybody welcomes change with open arms. Umm, but certainly there was, uh, there, there was concern about something new happening. And, and so how we mitigated that was we ran a lot of testing before we rolled this out to we, we chose some key faculty members to sort of kick the tires on it. That's where we got some immediate feedback on this doesn't function.

The way that I need it to. OK, that's great. So we sort of customized it with some test runs before we rolled it out school wide. Once it was out school wide there really it wasn't that there was obstacles or pushback, but there were requests of can we add this functionality? And that's sort of what I mentioned earlier. The the conversation was was not it was more inquisitive of this is great, but can it also do right? And the answer so far has been yes.

It just takes us some doing but but.

Again, like Jed's been in, we want this to be the tool that they can utilize without concern. And so, yeah, we, the obstacles were only it's not showing this and I needed to see this. Refresh your screen. Oh, now I see this. And so that has been the, the benefit I think to the faculty is seeing how quickly, how nimble this this system is, this portal is to get them what they need without having to wait for a response.

Yeah.

And, and I would say we had a learning curve. I mean, there's a new system that's there's always going to be a learning curve. And so like Ernie said, when when we there's a learning curve for the faculty and there's a learning curve on the technical side as well. And so.

The the genesis of all this, though, is.

Flight and.

Bernie and I had we, we knew we had a problem to solve. So when we went to create this, you know, working with way better, working with John and working with, with Clay, they also had to help take the, the information out of this beautiful bald head and try to create it and put it into slate. And working with that team was it was an amazing foundation.

And then there was a a learning curve to try to implement that insulate.

And then have the faculty to understand what was in front of them, this whole visual, new visual portal that's in front of them, not just the process.

Not just the process.

But this new instance that they have to work in, and I would say this work that we've done with way better has been absolutely amazing. Because I think Ernie has also said the faculty have have asked it would be in committee meetings or in emails before after. Can you make this update? It's something that we never thought of because we're we're not faculty members.

And to be flexible to be able to.

Create on the fly or not have.

Say OK, no.

A stringent template way better didn't say okay, you know, we've made this you have to stick with this template. They would allow me to do the programming myself or they come back and edit it or say that's great, that's good to go We've learned from you. You've learned from us that has been that this.

Just one of the best compliments to to work with a team that I've ever been involved with and that also I've seen with the faculty. So for them to be able to say, can you make this? And we've been able to do a turn around within 30 minutes or a day less than a week. I think that's where the high satisfaction has also come into play.

Next one.

I'm looking through the chat, just looking for some additional questions. I think the first thing I'll say is we have some very early risers on this call. My goodness, I'm seeing, I'm seeing some sixes, some fives, some four in the morning. My goodness. Well, not surprising from from a sleet, you know, webinar. I think the one question that we just received, you know, was a bit about time.

So you know, Jed, you know, it's both really talked about, you know, kind of the evolving of.

This tool and then either kind of accommodating requests, what was, you know, like 0 to 1, you know, what was the kind of start time from when we began to, you know, when do we have a portal that faculty are actually jumping in? That was probably what, six weeks or so?

Yeah, sure.

I think it's probably relevant to tie in a previous question we got also, which was just a little hurtful. Can you do it without someone like way better? So maybe, uh, the timeline question will, uh, tie in there.

See, yeah, I mean, first of all, Ernie and I, we it it's been in our heads for a long time. And then when we decided to actually try to make this come to fruition.

We couldn't do it on our own right, Ernie.

Yeah, yeah, For a decade we've not been able to do it.

We we and so once we finally teamed up with way better yes, we had something first we had to actually regurgitate it out of our mouths and to have.

Way better to come to the realization that this could actually work and then to turn around.

Doing a full implementation, create the faculty portal and have something working. I think it was, uh, six weeks.

Yeah.

And then from there.

We had all these. We've had updates. I think we've had probably an update every couple weeks I would say, Ernie, don't you think?

Umm, yeah.

Yeah, I think we're on 10 or 11th iteration of this portal to make it what it is. I mean, just constantly evolving.

Next slide.

I think I see one question about getting a deadline column for this and one of the columns we had on that faculty portal was and it was important to us to get it in to encourage like speed of reading. It was days in bin. You saw in the demo version, I think the top one was 60. And and you know, the sort that we have by default is if you've been in the been the longest, this is the first applicant you should take action on kind of all things otherwise health equal.

So yeah, really just kind of looking at time stamp of the bin when it was placed.

And then looking at Teddy's date to make that happen.

Yeah.

Uh, great. I believe we've covered most of the questions. I'll allude to one additional one we received in the registrations currently about wait list. So here, you know, we're primarily moving to admit students or not, but certainly they're kind of based on decision progression and the ultimate endpoints for students, you know, would absolutely be applicable for less as well.

Yeah.

And I think there's one thing we didn't get to talk about, which is that portal has more than one workflow that is feeding into those queries. We have up to right now, we have up to three workflows, separate workflows that are feeding into that.

That portal so that are simultaneously happening, reviews are happening in those workflows at the same time feeding into those multitudes of tabs. So that is something that you know you should all be aware of is you can add multiple workflows into that one portal to do the reviews on the same applicants.

Excellent. Yeah. And certainly as kind of the instance grows and really looking to streamline incoming students, you know a number of different, yeah workflows and and other items that are built will interact with, with this.

Well, excellent. We'll really appreciate everyone's time this afternoon. We'll we'll end with one final thought. It's really a theme that we like to keep top of mind here at way better. It's do something, make it better. You know, the beauty of not just this faculty portal, but really the full instances, you know, starting small, you're experimenting, you're seeing what works and you're iterating from there, always seeking to make it better. It's making it easier to make it a more robust, you know, student experience as well. So, you know, again, appreciate.

Everyone's time, uh, these are our contact information have up here on the screen for myself, for John, for the Vanderbilt School of Nursing team as well. So if there's any questions that we can elaborate, walk you through, you know, show you what's what's possible in slate, we would be more than happy to do so. So again, appreciate the time and I'll kick it back to Sarah to, to close us off.

Yes, yes.

Thank you all so much. Thanks for being here. Thank you so much to our presenters and sharing insight. Probably my favorite part is that that the Vanderbilt team was interested in catering and customizing to the faculty readers, which I feel like is often a time that folks report a lot of friction. And instead you kind of embraced it and really made it something custom order, which I would imagine at least helped in part to change people at least a little bit, which is I think a good tidbit to take away. So thank you all for being here. Don't forget, this is going to be available.

A recorded way in your home sleep portal. We hope to see you at Summit and let us know if you have any questions. Thanks so much for being here.

Thank you.

Thanks everybody.

Alright, thank you everybody.

Thank you.