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This article includes best practices that you can use and adapt to keep your campus app relevant and engaging for students in all learning environments.
Things you can find here:
Figure 1 - Campus Guide
Best Practices for In-Person/Hybrid Learning Environments
The Ready Education platform supports your student success initiatives by providing multiple modes of communication and a centralized location for key academic and campus resources. This article provides best practices for leveraging your campus app for both in-person and hybrid learning environments throughout the academic year.
Enlist Ready Education App Ambassadors
In working with more than 400 campuses worldwide, we see that cross-departmental participation is vital in creating an amazing in-app experience for your students. We recommend that you enlist a team of app ambassadors, starting with Marketing and Communications, Information Technology and Student Affairs (including Student Leaders!). Members of these departments should work closely with one another and their assigned Ready Education Campus Success Consultant to strategize and build a campus app that offers a one-of-a-kind experience to students.
Snapshots of the Academic Year
There are common milestones that every campus makes throughout the year, regardless of whether they are in-person or online. For each milestone, work with your cross-functional team and your Campus Success Consultant to optimize the app’s experience for the student.
Summer Connections
Summer is an excellent time for those from Marketing & Communications, Information Technology and Student Affairs to collaborate with your Campus Success Consultant to review data, strategize improvements, and update the campus app.
Institutions can also avoid summer melt by engaging students in the app during the summer break. Improve retention and eliminate back-to-school jitters by providing centrally located resources via the Campus Guide. Resources can include critical dates (FAFSA application, Orientation), deadlines (Last day to Add/Drop) and Student Life opportunities (Events, Club Fair, Intramurals etc.) to look forward to as your students prepare to return to campus. Help them meet other students with shared interests in your online Community or send direct messages to one another to stay connected. Recruit and train student leaders to welcome students back to campus via the Community. Contact your Campus Success Consultant to assist with training.
Back-to-School
Back-to-School season offers a variety of welcome activities and checklist items for students. Consider centralizing your welcome activities and Back-to-School checklist within an Orientation module to keep students on track for a great start each semester. If the actions and to-do items are vastly different, you might consider creating two or more Orientation modules (Freshmen, Transfers, Learning Online) to reach both your in-person and online students successfully.
The Orientation module provides the vehicle for Marketing & Communications and Student Affairs to deliver the information and resources incoming students need for a successful start to the semester. To learn more about this versatile module, check out our Back-to-School webinar.
Day-to-Day on Campus
Each semester students need to find resources to meet their basic day-to-day needs. Mobile availability will drive repeatable behaviours and build muscle memory within your student body. Leverage the app to make it easier for students to find these resources, and encourage repeatable behaviours within the app by grouping resources by theme. For example, students living on campus will need quick access to housing information, laundry, dining, etc. Similarly, commuter students will need to access commuting, parking and transport information.
In any case, campus navigation and contact information are necessary for all students. Within the app, you have the ability to create robust Services, Locations and Dining pages. Ensure that each field within these modules is complete and that you build as much detail in-app as possible. Additionally, the navigation within the app should be seamless to the information. Customize your Campus Guide to provide easy access to the information students need.
Academic & Career Preparation
The first 90 days of college life are critical. Make sure your students have seamless access to academic resources. Consider including the following resources in your campus app:
- Academic Advising
- Tutoring Services
- Study Groups
- Course Schedules & Catalogs
- Bursar and Financial Aid Information
- Career Services
In a hybrid learning environment, it’s more important than ever that these resources are mobilized, accessible, and easy to find. While your Services are easily accessible in person, creating robust Services within the app for those students who are not on campus regularly is crucial. We also recommend that you leverage the Community for such opportunities as study groups, mentoring, and tutoring information.
Connect with your Campus Success Consultant to learn about our LMS and SIS integration capabilities to allow for additional functionality such as:
- Assignments
- Grades
- Discussions
- Announcements
- Roster
- Finances
- Holds
- Add/Drop
Getting Involved
Use your campus app to promote organizations and activities to connect students to what they love most! Leverage the Community to encourage collaboration and participation. Recruit student leaders to drive engagement in your Student Feed. Community can be by students to ask and answer questions, promote events, sell textbooks, promote affinity groups, and engage with administrator announcements.
Getting students involved with campus organizations and activities can be one of the most challenging pieces in a hybrid environment. While students who are regularly on campus will be more inclined to get involved, those who are not on campus can often feel overlooked and excluded. Leverage Community to encourage collaboration and host virtual or hybrid events and activities. You can share virtual meeting links within the app so that students can join directly from the app. Use Assessment tools to track attendance and gain valuable feedback, whether on campus or in a virtual meeting space.
Meeting Deadlines
The Ready Education campus app allows you to communicate deadlines to specific groups of students clearly and effectively reach both those students who are on and off-campus. Features that can be leveraged to communicate deadlines effectively to students include Audiences, Community and Push Notifications.
Start with segmenting your student population into Audiences using either Custom or Dynamic Audiences. From there, you can send targeted urgent messages to students. In addition, you can leverage various Channels within the Community to establish two-way communication with students regarding information and deadlines surrounding registration, financial aid and graduation. Reach out to your CSC if you’re interested in integrating Dynamic Audiences.
To ensure that students can meet necessary deadlines, the communication from campus departments must be timely and effective. Marketing and Communications professionals can help support consistent and effective messaging, both in-app and on campus. Additionally, the Student Affairs and Information Technology teams can work together alongside the Campus Success Consultant to ensure that the Audiences tool is working correctly so that the right student is reached with the proper messaging.
Getting Support
By mid-semester, students may need support in several areas (academic, social, time management, and stress, to name a few). So make sure that resources are easily accessible for all students. Leverage the Campus Guide to highlight specific Services, Organizations and Resources. And share helpful information in Community to keep students on track.
Leverage push notifications by using Notify & Audiences to remind the campus of important dates/events or to intervene and encourage students to work with their advisor or mentor to get back on track. Additionally, we encourage institutions to consider our Health & Wellness Interventions feature to reach those students who may need support as it relates to mental and physical health.
Often, various Student Affairs departments will come together to offer consistent support and messaging via the app to intervene with students during those most critical moments. We recommend that student support service departments such as Academic Advising, Tutoring, Health and Counseling, and Financial Aid connect with Marketing & Communications for branding and messaging advice and work with your Campus Success Consultant to strategize on the best ways to reach students via the Campus Guide, Community and Health & Wellness Intervention tools.
Planning Ahead
As the academic year reaches a close, there is an increased need for effective communication with students. Students will begin completing final assignments and exams while also registering for the next semester or preparing to launch into the workforce. It’s essential to keep students connected to valuable resources through the Campus Guide during this transitional period. It is also recommended that you continue leveraging the Community to check-in and communicate with students. Use the end of the spring semester to thank your students for a great year and remind them to continue using the app all summer long!
As a proactive approach to planning for the future, our top recommendation is that those designated as a Ready Education App Ambassador take the necessary time to evaluate the assessment data collected during the semester or academic year and meet with your Campus Success Consultant to strategize for the future.
As always, your Ready Education Campus Success Consultant is eager to support you.
Best Practices In An Online Environment
These tips can be applied to either:
- An Online institution;
- An institution with a cohort of students who take courses online;
- or an institution that needs to move to online instruction for a period of time.
Fundamentals
Enlist Ready Education App Ambassadors
For the most optimal experience with the Ready Education campus app, we recommend that you enlist a team of ambassadors from the following institutional departments: Marketing and Communications, Information Technology and Student Affairs (which includes Student Leaders). Members of these departments should work closely with one another and their assigned Ready Education Campus Success Consultant to strategize and build a campus app that offers a one-of-a-kind experience to students.
It’s All About Access
Your campus app will become your centralized tool where students seek academic information, social connections, and staff support. Supporting your online students through the mobile app requires focusing on the accessibility of all resources and experiences.
Back To School Season: Online Edition
We must first consider how the campus app can support the “melt” period from course registration until the first day of classes. Research with Columbia University* has shown that app downloads significantly increase the probability of student retention.
Results also show a strong correlation between app usage before the first day of classes and an increase in the likelihood of enrolling and persisting by 2x.
Once students receive their campus email and can authenticate into the app, we need to create a welcoming space that will help students feel connected to your campus community while guiding them through the final enrollment steps. A few recommendations to get started:
- Downloading the app must be a required task for new students.
- Your Marketing/Communications and Student Services teams should promote the app landing page via email, SMS, social media, and even your LMS.
- Student Services can host a virtual event with a QR code check-in that will prompt students to download the app if they haven’t already
- Create a section in the Campus Guide named “New Students Start Here.”
- This section includes your Orientation module, checklists/deadlines, and IT Helpdesk and even directs them to their own “New Student Connections” Channel in your Community.
- Pro tip: Create a hashtag and photo contest for new students (e.g. “Post a picture of your virtual learning space” and #learningfromeverywhere)
- Promote additional Channels in your Community that reflect your online population (e.g. Veterans, Parenting While Learning, Going Global)
- Be sure to coordinate your push notification calendar between Mar/Command Student Services, ideally in a unified communication plan with email, text, and social media.
- Create Audiences (or target populations) so that students are only receiving messages that are intended for them (e.g. Account Holds, Registration, Scholarships, etc.).
The Academic Year - In the Classroom Best Practices
There are a number of tools on offer to support Academic Services and Faculty while online. When the physical classroom is removed, and the campus is temporarily or permanently online, there is a greater risk of student disengagement with services and resources. So we need to make information and assistance simple, discoverable, and accessible.
Swiftly pivot to online Advising, Tutoring, or Supplemental Instruction with ‘Services’ in your Campus app. Ensure your Academic Services contact details are up to date and that opening hours for your service are clearly stated. These ‘Services’ should function like Virtual extensions of your physical office in a remote environment:
- Consider a Zoom waiting room set up for virtual office visits and make your link accessible directly from the app (Our Link Preview function makes this nice and simple and supports all major video conferencing services!)
- Leverage the Service Assessment module to track attendance and monitor student visits to your online service. Use the Assessment Feedback question to either test basic learning outcomes from your session (e.g. “What was one key takeaway from our session today?) or gauge sentiment on student’s experiences (e.g. “Did you get what you needed today? “How was your experience?”). Don’t forget to iterate. Please make sure students feel heard, so they keep coming back!
- Leverage the Group Channel and/or Public Channels feature to add another layer of interactivity to these spaces (‘Virtual Office Hours,’ ‘Academic Support Channel,’ ‘Online Instruction Support’ might be some Channel name ideas to consider!) We recommend assigning the management of your Channel to a member of your team. Empower them to log in to the app 3-4 times per day to answer student questions promptly. This is also a great space to post tips and tricks for online learning.
Faculty can leverage the campus app to set up program-specific Private Channels, which can stand in for Office Hours in a virtual environment. You can set this up as an opt-in or pre-populate the channel with your class roster using Audiences. Use the Channel permissions to set up moderation capabilities for your TAs. This could be an organic, open space, OR you can set parameters that make sense for your course, e.g. Algebra101 Channel: Faculty and TAs will be available in this Channel Tuesdays and Thursdays 3-4 PM for live Q&A:
- We recommend Channels because of the interactivity they facilitate. Another way to communicate, however, is using our Notify module. This allows you to send push notifications directly to a group of app users. Consider setting up an audience for your program to relay important notices quickly - Class Cancellations, conference link changes etc. Our Notify module supports deep linking, so students will be able to access your virtual class directly from a push notification!
While we are not an official class attendance tool, our Service QR codes can work well for tracking attendance in small programs. Chat to your CSC about creating a unique QR code for your program, which you can display in your Zoom background or share as a virtual check-in link. Leverage the Assessment feedback question to check in on how your students feel about their online learning experience. Are they getting what they need?
- Supporting students through Midterms and Finals
- We recommend enabling a dedicated tile or section in Studio. Supplement that effort with a fun ‘Finals Preparation’ series in your Student Community Channel(s) - ‘Wednesday Wellness Tips,’ ‘Study Tip Series.’ Cross promoting your Exam Prep content from your tile into your Community will drive engagement by more than 10X.
- Talk to your CSC about getting access to the Duke Health content library as part of our Mental Health Plus module for access to additional quizzes and resources to deploy in your campus app
The Academic Year - Out of the Classroom Best Practices
There are a number of tools on offer to support Student Services and Student Life while online. We learned during the pandemic that when the campus quad is removed, and the campus community is forced online, we must maintain meaningful connections between services and students and students and each other. So we need to make things simple, discoverable, and accessible.
Quickly move Student Services online (Career Services, Financial Aid, Campus Recreation) with ‘Services’ in your Campus app:
- Ensure your Student Services contact details are up to date and that opening hours for your service are clearly stated. These ‘Services’ should function like Virtual extensions of your physical office in a remote environment.
- Consider a Zoom waiting room set up for virtual office visits or manage virtual appointments and make your link accessible directly from the app.
- Leverage the Service Assessment module to track attendance and monitor student visits to your online service. Use the Assessment Feedback question to either test basic learning outcomes from your session (e.g. “What was one key takeaway from our session today?) or gauge sentiment on student’s experiences (e.g. “Did you get what you needed today? “How was your experience?”). Don’t forget to iterate. Please make sure students feel heard, so they keep coming back!
- Leverage the Group Channel and/or Public Channels feature to add another layer of interactivity to these spaces (‘FAFSA Q&A,’ ‘Virtual Career Board’’, ‘Campus Rec presents: AT HOME WORKOUTS!”’ might be some Channel ideas to consider!) We recommend assigning the management of your Channel to a member of your team. Empower them to log in to the app 3-4 times per day to answer student questions promptly. This is also a great space to post tips and tricks for managing the move to online instruction.
- Student Events and Activities
- Showcase Virtual events in the Event Module. Leverage, the Conference Link feature to enable students to access the event directly from their campus app.
- Keep students engaged with simple activities and games in Community - Virtual Bingo, Quick Polls, photo contests, theme days (‘Bridgewater State has ‘Wear The Bear Wednesdays’) - anything with a fun call to action. Below are some excellent examples from Oregon Tech.
- Leverage the Event Assessment Module to track attendance at your virtual events. Use the Assessment Feedback question to either assess basic outcomes from your event, for example, “Who was one person you met today?) or gauge sentiment on a student's experiences (e.g. “How was your experience?”). Don’t forget to use the feedback for continuous improvement. Please make sure students feel heard, so they keep coming back!
- The great thing about knowing WHO is engaged from your online population is that we also know who IS NOT. Leverage the Notify module to intervene early with disengaged students, and try recommending upcoming events they might find interesting - “Hi there, we missed you at our Friday Trivia event! We hope to see you next week at XXX. Here’s the link to attend!”
- Ready’s Health & Wellness Plus Product allows for direct monitoring of mental health, sentiment, and overall wellness throughout the academic year. Research shows that students make their persistent decision within the first six weeks of the first semester, making it even more crucial to identify students in need. Here are a few ways to assess and intervene at the most critical times:
- Set up trigger words in your Community to monitor loneliness, self-harm, and any other high-impact topics
- Send a Wellness Form in the first week of campus to identify students that haven’t made any friends or are feeling homesick
- Build a Workflow that surfaces relevant content based on issues that student groups might be facing
Don’t have H&W activated yet? Try a quick emoji sentiment check-in Community as ASU Beebe has mastered below:
