Our projects focus on helping students persist on their educational paths, complete their degrees and advance in their professional lives.
Partnership with Office of Financial Aid, Business Affairs
Recognizing the significant financial barriers to degree completion, the Beaver Completion Grants program started in 2017 to provide micro-grants to students with financial need who are approaching graduation, but are unable to continue due to unpaid account balances. Facilitated by project lead Brian Hultgren, OSU awarded over $145,000 in micro-grants as of summer 2019. These grants helped 162 students who would have otherwise stopped out remain enrolled and moving toward graduation. The average award amount was $895, and 90.3% of the Beaver Completion Grant recipients successfully graduated or are finishing out their final one to two terms at OSU. Expanding on these UIA project efforts, the Office of Financial Aid, Business Affairs, the College of Business, and Institutional Analytics & Reporting developed a CORE report that provides data on student account balance holds by college. Multiple colleges used this data to pilot college-based micro-grant awarding.
Partnership with Office of Academic Achievement, Institutional Analytics & Reporting
The second project for the UIA, Monitoring Advising Analytics to Promote Success (MAAPS), sought to understand the effect of proactive, intensive academic advising on the retention and progression of first-generation and low-income college students. It included a supplemental, campus-based advising program and accompanying research study funded by $8.9 million First in the World grant from the US Department of Education. OSU launched its MAAPS program with a cohort of 460 first-year students in fall 2016.
Participation in MAAPS is enhancing OSU’s understanding of the needs and experiences of first-generation and low-income students as they navigate their college education. For instance, the Office of Financial Aid adjusted their communications after learning of the difficulty MAAPS students experienced interpreting and completing financial aid processes. The MAAPS advising lead, Kerry Kincanon, and the MAAPS advisors play a key role in bringing such student experiences to the attention of administrators and campus partners. The MAAPS advisors are also helping develop and test new proactive advising strategies and the technologies. MAAPS was designed with a four-year term, concluding in September 2019.
Partnership with the OSU academic advising community (colleges & central), Enterprise Computing Services, Office of the Registrar, Institutional Analytics & Reporting
The alliance’s first collaborative project in 2015 invited member institutions to utilize predictive analytics to enhance student success. OSU initially adopted EAB’s Student Success Collaborative (SSC) to provide academic advisors and administrators with predictive analytics tools to facilitate proactive advising interventions. Over time many of the features of the platform were developed by other OSU advising technologies, including CORE, MyDegrees, and Banner Self-Service. OSU discontinued use of SSC in June 2018 but continues to support proactive, data-driven advising outreach through these other tools.
Ongoing efforts related to this project seek to equip academic advisors with the framework and skills to effectively use available data and predictive analytics tools. Facilitated by the UIA Fellow, a team of advisors utilized process mapping to create a resource to help advisors integrate data-informed proactive outreach strategies into their work (read a blog post about their work). OSU also developed data tools training curriculum for academic advisors that incorporates interactive learning and practice with CORE reports, CORE dashboards, and Microsoft Excel.
Partnership with Enrollment Management, University Information and Technology
As part of the newest project launched 2019, UIA institutions are learning from each other around the design and use of chatbot technology to answer students’ basic administrative questions to help them navigate the university. At OSU, we developed and launched a custom, in-house chatbot called Chat with Benny. Chat with Benny is designed to assist incoming, domestic, first-year students with administrative tasks required after they are admitted to OSU in order to matriculate into the university. OSU experts in admissions, housing and dining, financial aid, new student programs and more contributed to content in the chatbot. Chat with Benny was first used in May 2019 in connection with text-based reminders sent by the Office of Admissions to admitted students. Since then we continued to refine content and explore other areas where a chatbot might be useful to improving the student experience. Along this road we are learning from UIA institutions who are already using chatbots to better serve students. Learn more about Chat with Benny at is.oregonstate.edu/dx/benny.
Partnership with Career Development Center, cross-campus taskforce including colleges
Launched in 2018, the Bridging the Gap from Education to Employment (BGEE) project aims reimagine the college to career pathway to improve career outcomes for low-income, first-generation college students. The three-year project funded by Strada Education Network (2018-2020) involves the application of human-centered design methods to better understand student needs, successes and challenges, as well as collaboration with a national working group of employers.
Facilitated by project lead Rachel Finch and OSU’s designated BGEE Fellow Alex Lozanoff, Oregon State formed a cross-campus team to lead this work and mapped the landscape of OSU career-related activities in spring 2018. The team continued in fall 2018 with a week-long design sprint, which identified unmet needs through interviews with students and alumni and developed initial concepts to meet those needs. We are moving forward in 2019 further developing and testing these concepts at OSU and collaborating with the other institutions and employers.