AACRAO Connect recently spoke with Susan Reyes, a programmer and analyst for enrollment management systems at San Diego State University, to talk about technology’s role in SEM, and student success in general.
(Reyes and Tuan Anh Do, Director of Enterprise Applications at San Francisco State University, will share their top 7 steps to bring change for student success in 2017 in a live, free webinar this Thursday at 1 P.M. EST. Learn more and register here to have the live and archived versions available to view at your convenience.)
AC: Thanks for taking time out of your schedule to talk with us, Susan. To start, how is SDSU currently using technology to help facilitate enrollment management initiatives?
Sue: For us it’s all about really being able to - in enrollment services and admissions - get all the data and sorted, collated, and arranged, and making sure the students have the best presentation of who they are in the admissions process. We seek to process all this information in a timely manner and ensure all the data is correct and available. We leverage existing and new tech to do the bulk of standard processing and we are always looking for new and useful ways to identify special cases that need special attention.
AC: How hard is it to trust your automated bulk processing? Do you find yourself compulsively checking data to ensure you don’t use it to make an ill-informed decision?
Sue: Learning to trust the technology is one of the biggest things. Being able to understand the tech, identify any bugs, doing regularly scheduled maintenance with protocols for ensuring each process works after upgrades, this is important. In terms of efficiency, with how many directions your typical ES employee gets pulled in, it’s so important to reliably know what needs manual intervention versus touching everything yourself.
AC: Can you give us a bit of background on technology that serves EM?
Sue: We started tinkering with e transcripts around the 2000 mark, but we didn’t start getting on board with tech used strategically for EM until 6 or 7 years ago when I was pulled into enrollment services under the department’s functional managers to identify the technology that we had and how to use it more efficiently in support of enrollment and student success initiatives.
In 2004 I did an imaging search for EM techs. I wouldn’t call it a nascent industry, per se, but finding something back then that you could reliably use to perform the sort of functions I described earlier was definitely more difficult at that point. A lot of the technology that we currently use actually came from more traditional business sectors, and that technology has been repurposed institution by institution to effectively communicate with the student information systems and other essential enterprise programs.
Of course, that implementation is difficult - getting those custom integration pieces into places so that your enrollment tech communicates with the SIS, receives information and makes it available to your stakeholders. So you have people like Tuan and I making sure that essential functions, like seeing a visual transcript, are still possible by translating EDI-coded transcripts housed in our SIS in a way that the EM tech understands, and then having the EM tech display that information such that it looks like a normal transcript.
AC: So you and Tuan will be covering this and more in your upcoming webinar, “Impacting Change for Improved Student Success – 7 Steps for 2017.” Can you share some of those steps in advance?
Sue: Well, it might be more accurate to say ‘7 things.’ Steps sounds better, but it does imply a chronological order. I don’t think we are going to go through the full list now, but as it relates to technology serving student success:
- Ensure you have good e-advising set up;
- Use your course scheduling software to determine your demand; and,
- Make sure data is correct and available to students and school officials in a clear and timely manner.
That last point, while it might seem obvious, is hard to get right. As we get more and more non-traditional students going through our schools, making them jump through hoops to register for classes, or to see what they have to do to fulfill the remainder of their degree requirements does wonders for retention and graduation.
AC: Thanks for your thoughtful responses! We will look forward to hearing more on the live webinar this September 22 at 2:00 pm ET.