Course Category: Free for All-Inclusive Members

Electronic communication between academic advisor and student has become more transparent with the advent of technology. The reliance upon electronic records raises substantial questions about privacy, notation, and storage. Is your campus effectively addressing the legal and ethical implications inherent in advising documentation? Join us and learn how to minimize risk and maximize student engagement using electronic advising documentation as a part of your campus’ overall retention strategy. In this online training, actual examples of entries in student records and emails will be used to illustrate ineffective communication and documentation that put an institution at risk. These examples will also be used to show how to improve your documentation’s effectiveness. Attendees will leave this online training with resources to assess and improve their institution’s electronic advising documentation process.

First-Year Student Experience (FYSE) programs have been identified as a high-impact practice for increasing student persistence and success. Yet, many student populations remain at risk for attrition because they aren’t getting connected to critical resources when and how they need them most. Are your FYSE programs doing everything they can to strategically support at-risk students to ensure they return to campus for their second year? Join us for an online training to learn how to maximize your FYSE program’s effectiveness for at-risk student populations. Our expert faculty will walk you through national trends and how to create a localized plan of action on your campus. In addition, you’ll learn how to measure, evaluate, and report outcomes data to ensure your FYSE program is having the greatest impact on student success.

Many institutions report that retention and graduation rates for students are declining due to a “stop-out” phenomenon. Employment, family, and financial issues are just some of the complex logistical concerns contributing to students’ suspension of study. Institutional stop-out programs offer the support, counseling, and procedural engagement that help these students return to school and complete their degrees. However, implementing a stop-out program carries challenges from gathering the right data to strategic outreach and creating campus-wide buy-in. Learn about the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s 49er Finish Program, an effective stop-out project in action; start taking the steps to create a program on your campus.

Approximately 25% of students begin college at a time other than fall term, yet many institutions don’t reflect this in their onboarding processes. Recent research suggests that students starting in non-fall terms encounter substantially different challenges in campus orientation, socialization, and academic performance. These challenges pose a direct threat to both student retention and success. The onboarding process for spring admits begins well before the term itself and is critical to building strategies for student success. Join us to learn about current research and hear practical examples for implementing suggested best practices.

Empowering students to mentor and advise peers can reduce staff workload and free up resources to be leveraged elsewhere on campus. However, detailed planning is required to ensure that your peer mentor programs seamlessly integrate with your first-year student programs. Before launching a program of your own, you must learn how to effectively: Identify where peer mentors can influence first-year persistence Recruit and train peer mentors Assess your program’s effectiveness Join us to learn how to build a peer mentor component into your first-year student programming. Centered on Longwood University’s model, this webcast will prepare you to design a program that utilizes a team of peer mentors to engage first-year students and positively affect student persistence.

To accommodate increasing demands for flexibility from students, many institutions offer online orientations. However, not all online orientations are effective retention tools, and they may be inferior to in-person orientations. Is your online orientation interactive, assessment based, and conducive to learning? You can increase the effectiveness of your online orientation programs by implementing research-supported online instructional strategies. This webcast will help you develop or improve your online orientation with a learner-centered approach to programming for new students. Showcasing sample online orientation activities, our expert instructor will provide tips based on research and practice, so you can develop a more effective and engaging online orientation at your institution.