Using To-Do Items Inside and Outside of Success Plans to Best Serve Students

Paul BreitkreutzCoordinator of Advising Technology SystemsUniversity of Nebraska-Lincoln

Using To-Do Items Inside and Outside of Success Plans to Best Serve Students

Exploratory and Pre-Professional (Explore) CenterAdvising home for students who are:• Undecided (1115 students)• Pre-Health (780 students)• Pre-Law (31 students)

Advising load was split between 6 advisors in Fall 2014

Where I advise

Identified a number of problems related to our upperclassmen undeclared students:• Too many (180-300 Juniors/Seniors)• Poor GPAs• High percentage of unearned attempted credit • (F, Withdrawals, No Pass, Repeat)• Pursuing unrealistic majors

The Problem

COMPASS (Collaborative Outline for Major Planning and Academic Success Strategies• Registration holds placed on students at Sophomore or above standing who

were Undeclared• Students required to meet with an advisor to develop a major exploration plan

each semester on COMPASS• Students are allowed to remain undeclared for 2 semesters• Must declare by end of third semester in COMPASS

The “Solution”

How do we keep track of many semesters a student has been in COMPASS using Starfish?

Considered 3 options:• Relying on notes• Creating a success plan (or three)• Create To-Do items

Our New Problem

NotesAdvantages:• Easy for advisors• No added work on my partDisadvantages:• Hard to track from a data perspective• Blend in too easily with other advising notes

What we didn’t go with

Success PlansAdvantages:• Allow for multiple tracking items per plan each semesterDisadvantages:• Could these plans create confusion on our campus?• Do we really “need” multiple tracking items?• Take longer to create in an advising moment

What we didn’t go with

Single Tracking Items for each semesterCOMPASS Semester 1• First semester of COMPASS PlanCOMPASS Semester 2• Second semester of COMPASS PlanCOMPASS Semester 3• Third semester of COMPASS. This is the final semester a student can be

Undeclared

Needed to create a unique “Explore Center” role so that only our advisors could create these to-do items, but make sure that all of campus could see them

What we went with

Settings for the Tracking Items

How it looks for Explore Center advisors

What the rest of campus sees

What it looks like in Notes

Advantages• Easy for advisors to work with• Easy to read and identify in notes• Easy to work with the data and identify:

Who has started a planWho has finished a planWhat semester students are in

Disadvantages• Only relate to user-error• Not selecting right semester

Creating multiple to-do’s in the same term

Our thoughts

What questions do people have?

Questions

What is one advising related innovation you have on your campus or that you would like to create?

How could you use single to-do’s in order to best serve students and the data needs of your campus?

Are these better or worse alternatives to a Success Plan in your unique situation?

Would you need to create unique roles in Starfish (beyond what you currently have in place)?

What could you do on your campus?

Questions?

Paul BreitkreutzCoordinator of Advising Technology SystemsUniversity of Nebraska-Lincoln

Using To-Do Items Inside and Outside of Success Plans to Best Serve Students