Last week, VTSU’s Vice President for Student Success Kelley Beckwith and transformation team members representing functional areas including advising, academic support and TRIO, disability services, international student support, student life, and residence life presented to sponsors. The design proposal outlines how the various functional areas in the VTSU student success division will be integrated and coordinated. Next steps scheduled to begin in September include staffing plans for all areas.
The goal of this model is that students will no longer need to visit multiple offices, complete inconsistent processes, or search for multiple web resources for common questions and transactions, thereby ensuring that person-to-person interactions are high value and efficient.
To support the preference for a single “front door” and because students frequently blur the lines among the functional support areas, all students will have web-based digital access — along with in-person access at primary campus locations — to the functional areas in the dark green, purple, and pale green circles on the concept map below. The Student Success & Advising Center will include support for all student success functional areas within the center (dark green circles) as well as frontline support for digital tools (e.g. Self-Service, Outlook, Aviso, eRezlife, Canvas) related to other frequently accessed services, including registration, financial aid services, wellness, student life, residence life, library resources, and IT (purple and pale green circles).
Students tell us consistently that they want “one-stop” access to consistent tools (Bookings, Self-Service, Portal) and in-person access for regular transactions, such as making an appointment at Wellness, paying a parking ticket, starting a club, scheduling a meeting with a staff advisor, requesting a tutor, or requesting housing. Frontline staff in the Student Success and Advising Center will help students navigate those tools for all functional areas in student success. VTSU libraries at primary campus locations may serve as ideal locations for the Student Success Commons.
One driver in this new model is to increase the time our faculty and staff experts in student success spend doing what they do best (counseling a student, assessing a transcript for a transfer student, helping a student start a club, supporting a student to navigate the conduct process, identifying connections between academics, life goals and career options, etc.) and less time on the transactional tasks like scheduling appointments, submitting ‘paperwork’, or paying a bill.
Specific to advising, a detailed update on the work on the new advising model is currently being shared with faculty via the Faculty Assemblies Canvas site for feedback to the four faculty representatives on the team: Margaret Miles (CU), Nora Beltz (NVU-J), Meaghan Meachem (NVU-L) and Carolyn Stannard-Carlo (VTC).