What | blended onboarding course with virtual and in-person, synchronous and asynchronous components

Platform | Articulate Rise

Audience | first-generation college students

Experience | 10 years

From 2013-2019, I was solely responsible for advising incoming graduate students who were working long-distance, who would never be physically on campus, and who struggled to connect to the institution and to navigate campus systems. My job was to welcome them to a community they would only experience virtually, and to help them grow a support system so they could take responsibility for their own educations (and so I would not remain their sole point of contact with the institution).

In my role as summer advisor for incoming undergraduate students at the New College of Florida, my focus was similar: yes, I help them to navigate the institutional bureaucracy, but also and perhaps more importantly, I introduce new students to an inclusive community of care, in which helping each other is built into the system.

Impact | Hard & Soft Goals

The ultimate institutional goal was to change a behavior: incoming students usually wait until the week before the term starts to register, and college administrators wanted to create a new culture in which incoming students pre-register before arriving on campus. They could not, however, implement consequences for not pre-registering, so the students’ motivation to do so had to be entirely intrinsic. I chose to crowdsource this intrinsic motivation and seeded a series of group interactions in which students could share their hopes and fears, talk about their DREAM Fall schedules, and brainstorm potential Fall courses together.

The key to this project’s success, in my opinion, was my decision to disseminate information asynchronously and before each meeting, and to reserve our virtual and in-person sessions for community-building.

Tools | Articulate Rise, Prezi, Loom, Google Spreadsheets, Google Forms, Google Drive