Category: Blog

Email Advising: Doing it Wrong, Doing it Right

by Sue Ohrablo, Ed.D.

In a recent, interactive online training session, Susan Ohrablo, a doctoral enrollment counselor with the Abraham S. Fischler School of Education at Nova Southeastern University and past advising center director, conducted a detailed critique of a series of examples of advisor responses to students’ email inquiries. Ohrablo reviewed what works and what doesn’t work in email advising. This article offers several key takeaways from that training session. Here are 3 principles that are key to effective, electronic advisor-student communication. 1. Be Available: Treat an Email Response as an Advising Session One significant point that Ohrablo makes is that what works well in a face-to-face advising session needs to guide your understanding of what works well in electronic responses to student inquiries. During the online training, Susan Ohrablo polled advisors and advising directors at 41 institutions, asking what they thought made an advising session particularly effective. The responses: This list of what constitutes effective developmental advising should also guide what an advisor sets out to achieve in an email response to a student. “When you review your email,” Ohrablo suggests, “remember that the student sending that email is an advisee. Treat your response as an advising session. If you do that, […]

Online Giving is Trending Up: Here’s the Data You Need to Guide Your Strategy

At a recent AI online training “10 Tips for Improving Your Online Giving Site,” consultant and blogger Lynne Wester of www.donorrelationsguru.com reviewed recent data on online giving and what this data means for your giving site and email solicitation strategy. Here are several key takeaways that we recommend sharing with your colleagues. Let’s take a look. What Can Be Gleaned First, Wester shared relevant stats from Blackbaud’s 2013 study of online fundraising for nonprofits: Revenue growth in online giving has risen 11.6% in the past year. The average online donation in higher education: $150. “These are not just $10 donors,” Wester notes. “These are people who are of value to us, and it’s important that they have a quality experience on your online giving site.” The average online donation in higher education is higher than the average online donation for any other kind of nonprofit organization. The average one-time online gift to a nonprofit in 2012 was $60, but the average monthly online gift was $19, or nearly $240 a year. “It’s crucial that you set up your online giving site to accept monthly giving.” Also, higher education saw a 73% growth in monthly online giving in 2012 – “so […]

And the Tweets Have It: What Matters in Student Philanthropy

Twitter was alive this week with discussion and shared best practices among alumni relations, annual giving, and student philanthropy officers who attended Academic Impressions’ 2013 student philanthropy conference. Here are some of the highlights and key takeaways from that conversation. FOLLOW US ON TWITTER Can’t attend one of our events? Follow us on Twitter @academicimpress and watch the event’s backchannel for ideas and key takeaways shared by the speakers and participants. Taking the Long View Why is student philanthropy the right investment to make? Because cultivating donors early is the key to a thriving donor pipeline in the long term:   The Key: Educate Future Donors, While They Are Still Students Yet often, institutions face challenges in engaging alumni because they didn’t take steps to engage and educate them as future donors while they were still students. For example, many college students graduate largely unaware of the role of philanthropy in funding their education. This lack of awareness creates a disconnect when annual giving officers reach out to them later to ask for their support. The alum’s perception may well be that they paid a high tuition bill and perhaps took on student loans — in short, that they have […]

Why You Need Your FERPA Policy in Writing

In Academic Impressions’ recent webcast “FERPA Policy and Procedure Audit” (you can order this online training here), FERPA expert Helen Garrett, the dean of enrollment management systems at Lane Community College and recent president of PACRAO (the Pacific Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers), gave an in-depth walkthrough on how to review, update, and communicate FERPA policy regularly, to ensure that departments across your campus are in compliance. One of Garrett’s key points in the training was that while this step is frequently overlooked, it is critical to have a written FERPA policy that is regularly updated. Why This is Important To illustrate why the policy has to be written and available for reference, Garrett shared a personal anecdote: “This happened to me. I’ve been a registrar since 2000, I love FERPA, I love training people on FERPA, and even I was caught up short on having not done this as well as I should have. So even the most skilled registrars aren’t always on top of this. “This is the story I want to share with you: “A couple of years ago, we went through a pretty intense process for an employee who had not been doing things […]

Doing More with Less: Moving Information Literacy Instruction Online

During a June 18, 2013 webcast, Academic Impressions asked librarians from academic libraries across North America whether they are looking to move information literacy programming online — and why. The three main reasons offered: Enrollment growth in online and blended courses, where students may have limited access to the physical library or to meeting librarians Initiatives to support embedded librarians in first-year courses Large numbers of freshman sections needing information literacy instruction, and limited librarians to teach them Offering information literacy instruction in a mediated, online environment allows your institution to offer these resources to more students without incurring the cost of hiring additional instruction librarians, and may empower you to better connect distance learning students with library resources. Barriers to Getting This Done Anne-Marie Deitering, the Franklin McEdward Professor for Undergraduate Learning Initiatives at Oregon State University, led the webcast participants in an interactive discussion about making the move to online literacy programming. During the discussion, Deitering shared the results of a national survey she and her colleagues conducted asking librarians across the US about the most significant barriers they face to offering information literacy instruction online. Overwhelmingly, librarians indicated that the #1 barrier was time. Noting this, Deitering […]

Mobile Learning: 5 Student Safety and Privacy Risks Every Educator Should Know

As mobile learning and remote teaching increase in popularity, so do concerns regarding personal safety and privacy. As you pilot mobile projects in your classes, are you considering how those projects impact both privacy and security? During a recent webcast, Academic Impressions conversed with mobile learning veterans Stephen Baldridge, assistant professor and baccalaureate program director at Abilene Christian University, and Dale Pike, director of academic technologies at Boise State University. We polled the webcast participants to learn what they regarded as the greatest threats to the privacy and security of users of mobile devices at their institution. The options included device settings/glitches, end user license agreements, and malicious hacking, but nearly all participants selected users’ “personal habits” as the #1 threat. “You can have all the security in the world,” Baldridge cautions, “but this doesn’t take into account students who are unaware of or decide to disregard security precautions in using their devices, exposing their own data.” In fact: In other words, mobile users often engage in behaviors that make it easy for their data to be compromised. Accordingly, it’s possible that a little user education can go a long way. HANDBOOK: SAFETY AND PRIVACY ISSUES IN MOBILE LEARNING Order a […]

Conversations that Matter: The Other Higher Ed Bubble

In our recent paper The Other Higher Ed Bubble, we argued college and university leaders need to act now and make fundamental changes to how they operate in order to ensure a sustainable future. This will mean holding critical conversations across your campus, defining the right problems to solve in the next 5-10 years, challenging old assumptions, and focusing on factors within your institution’s control. In the following two podcasts in our series Conversations that Matter, we asked higher-education experts Bob Dickeson, Larry Goldstein, Lucie Lapovsky, John Lombardi, and Pat Sanaghan to offer practical advice for starting these conversations and review five examples of institutions that have taken bold action to redefine themselves in a changing industry. Podcast: A Call to Action for Higher-Ed Leaders Hear from the Experts:John Lombardi – at 1:25.Larry Goldstein & Lucie Lapovsky – at 9:52.Bob Dickeson & Pat Sanaghan – at 18:29. Podcast: Bold Leadership in Higher Ed: 5 Examples 5 Examples:John Lombardi discusses Arizona State University – at 0.50.Larry Goldstein discusses the University of Hartford – at 6:34.Lucie Lapovsky discusses Cedar Crest College – at 13:01.Pat Sanaghan discusses Abilene Christian University – at 18:17.Bob Dickeson discusses Rio Salado College and Western Governors University – […]

Special Edition: Boosting Retention for Ethnic Minority Students

How does your campus support the academic success and retention of ethnic minority students? In “Campus Diversity: Beyond Just Enrollment,” Mary Hinton, the vice president for planning and assessment at Mount Saint Mary College, argues that often colleges and universities have prioritized enrolling an ethnically diverse incoming class without planning for the follow-through: academic success and retention, as well as completion rates and career outcomes for minority students. “We have to realize diversity isn’t just an issue of access. It isn’t just about getting minorities in the door. That is certainly an important step, but a diverse institution isn’t just about who is enrolled. It’s about who is having successful outcomes. It’s about the quality of the student experience.”Mary Hinton, Mount Saint Mary College Yet, recently, a number of institutions have made significant strides in adopting a more holistic approach to serving ethnic minority students. Iowa’s public institutions provide an especially useful set of test cases, because over the past couple of years, the University of Iowa, Iowa State University, and the University of Northern Iowa have each piloted different initiatives to boost persistence and academic success for their ethnic minority students, particularly African Americans. In this Special Edition, we’ve […]

Is There a Financial Bubble?

by Amit Mrig

This article is an excerpt from our paper “The Other Higher Ed Bubble: The Bubble We Aren’t Talking About.” To read the rest of the paper, click here. As government-subsidized debt continues to fuel higher ed’s growth, there is increasing speculation as to whether higher ed is the next bubble to burst—following the real estate burst of 2008 and the dot-com burst in 2000. Like those industries, higher ed cannot sustain its volume of customers without large infusions of subsidized debt and equity. The financial bubble argument gained significant traction in 2010 when the total amount of student loan debt in this country surpassed credit card debt. Some have used this milestone, coming on the heels of the Great Recession, to imply that, like housing, higher education is another part of the American Dream that is going to be increasingly difficult to reach. Why It’s Not That Simple One of the primary challenges with this argument is that it paints higher ed with a single brushstroke, and the reality is that the different sectors—community colleges, independents, publicly-supported, and for-profits (to say nothing of different competitive sectors)—graduate students with very different debt loads, job prospects, and core skills. The cost of […]

Assessing Student Learning Outcomes: Surveys Aren’t Enough

In a recent Academic Impressions webcast, student learning assessment expert John Hoffman polled student affairs representatives from 200 institutions of higher education about their data collection methods for assessing student learning. Participants were asked to select their two most common methods of gathering data. The results were dismaying but perhaps unsurprising: …but, only: The reliance on surveys is telling. Surveys appear easy to design and deploy, but Hoffman cautions that there are a number of shortcomings with using surveys as your primary method of collecting data to assess student learning: KEYS TO EFFECTIVE ASSESSMENT: “ROLLING UP YOUR SLEEVES” “Surveys are valuable, but often what we get is the student’s self-report of their learning. Yes, you can test them within the survey, for instance by asking if the student can name three examples of services provided by your career development center — that invites more direct assessment of what they have learned. But to really get the data we need, we have to roll up our sleeves and collect data during interaction with the students.”John Hoffman, California State University, Fullerton KEYS TO EFFECTIVE ASSESSMENT: FOCUS ON COHORT LEARNING “You might be asking, ‘How am I supposed to assess learning in a […]

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