Episode 114: Chrysoula Malogianni on Digital Transformation for Student Success
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How do we define student success holistically across the full end-to-end experience? How can institutions use digital transformation to catalyze improvements rather than just overlaying new technologies? How do leaders effectively manage adoption, operations, and process redesign to continuously adapt? We talk through these with Chrysoula Malogianni, the Chief Digital Experience Officer at Old Dominion University. Together, we explore actionable strategies for dismantling institutional silos and cultivating a highly connected campus ecosystem that drives long-term student retention and achievement.
Driving Student Success Through Digital Transformation in Higher Education
The landscape of higher education is undergoing a profound paradigm shift. Institutions are no longer just repositories of knowledge; they are dynamic ecosystems tasked with preparing students for an increasingly complex, technology-driven world. Central to this evolution is the concept of digital transformation (DX)—a holistic reimagining of how universities leverage technology, culture, and data to fundamentally improve institutional operations and delivery models.
When implemented strategically, digital transformation becomes a primary engine driving student success. By shifting the focus from isolated IT systems to an integrated digital student experience, universities can foster deeper engagement, modernize course delivery, and directly improve retention and graduation metrics.
Defining and Measuring Modern Student Success
Historically, higher education institutions measured student success through a narrow, lagging lens: grade point averages, semester-to-semester retention numbers, and six-year graduation rates. While these benchmarks remain important compliance markers, a modern digital student experience demands a broader, more holistic definition.
True student success encompasses a sense of belonging, digital literacy, mental well-being, and ultimate career readiness. To measure these multifaceted outcomes, forward-thinking institutions are deploying data analytics and unified digital campuses. By tracking real-time student engagement with digital learning platforms, advising systems, and campus services, administration can identify micro-indicators of student friction. Measuring how effectively a student navigates their academic and co-curricular requirements allows universities to intervene proactively, transforming passive reporting into active support.
The Role of Digital Transformation in Student Success
Digital transformation is not simply about adopting newer, faster software. It is about restructuring institutional workflows to revolve around the learner. When digital transformation is executed properly, it breaks down the long-standing silos that exist between academic affairs, student services, information technology, and enrollment management.
A seamless digital student experience acts as a collaborative bridge across these departments. For example, when enterprise applications, learning management systems, and communication channels share a unified architecture, students no longer need to navigate fragmented bureaucratic loops to register for classes, access tutoring, or apply for financial aid. This friction-free environment allows students to dedicate their cognitive energy to learning rather than solving administrative roadblocks, creating a clear pathway toward academic milestones.
Key Trends Reshaping Higher Education Technology
As colleges seek to balance traditional pedagogy with modern student demands, several distinct technology trends are redefining the educational experience.
The Demand for Accelerated and Asynchronous Learning: Today’s student demographic is changing rapidly, with adult learners and working professionals representing a massive segment of modern enrollment. These individuals require educational formats that fit around full-time jobs and family responsibilities. The integration of asynchronous platforms with accelerated course formats allows students to progress efficiently, entering the workforce or moving up in their careers at an optimized pace.
The Rise of Micro-credentials and Alternative Certifications: Employers increasingly demand proof of specific skill competencies alongside traditional degrees. Institutions are responding by embedding industry-aligned micro-credentials into their curricula. These specialized, stackable certifications allow students to showcase immediate marketability, particularly in rapidly evolving technological fields.
The Integration of Applied AI Ecosystems: Artificial intelligence is no longer a future concept; it is transforming current course delivery and institutional design. Rather than merely teaching students about AI theoretically, innovative campuses are building applied AI ecosystems. These initiatives bring students, faculty, and industry partners together to use AI tools to solve real-world operational and research problems, establishing a culture of hands-on digital proficiency.
Overcoming Roadblocks and Institutional Friction
Despite the clear benefits of a unified digital experience, implementing comprehensive DX initiatives is notoriously difficult. Higher education is traditionally built on decentralization, and changing legacy organizational structures requires significant cultural alignment.
The most common point of friction during a digital transformation rollout is cultural resistance and a lack of training. Faculty and administrative staff are often asked to adopt new platforms without a clear understanding of the overarching strategy or sufficient technical support. Furthermore, technical silos occur when separate departments buy specialized software that cannot communicate with central institutional systems, leading to fragmented data and a broken user experience for students.
To mitigate these challenges, leadership must shift from a tech-first approach to a human-first strategy. Change management, consistent multi-level communication, and cross-disciplinary training are essential for ensuring that every division understands how their specific digital tools contribute to the broader ecosystem of student achievement.
Actionable Strategies for Higher Education Administrators
To successfully operationalize digital transformation and elevate the digital student experience, higher education leaders should focus on three foundational practices:
First, adopt a systems-thinking framework. View your campus not as a collection of separate departments, but as an interconnected ecosystem. Every technology procurement decision should be evaluated based on how it integrates with the existing infrastructure and how it impacts the holistic student journey.
Second, foster cross-functional collaboration. Create permanent task forces that bring academic designers, IT architects, student life staff, and students themselves into the same room. Designing digital systems alongside the people who actually use them ensures higher adoption rates and more relevant tools.
Third, invest heavily in digital literacy and continuous change management. Technology is only as effective as the human beings operating it. Prioritize ongoing professional development for faculty and staff, and frame every technological shift around its capacity to empower educators and support students.
Navigating the Future of Campus Innovation
Digital transformation is an ongoing journey rather than a finite project. By aligning technology infrastructures with a holistic vision for student success, higher education institutions can move away from reactive administrative models and move toward proactive, intelligent ecosystems. Prioritizing a seamless digital student experience ensures that colleges remain resilient, inclusive, and fully equipped to guide the modern learner toward sustainable academic and professional triumph.
Episode 114 Transcript
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Chrysoula Malogianni: Digital transformation, though, is not just about technology adoption. I think digital transformation is about redesigning the whole student experience to remove friction, to increase clarity, to accelerate outcomes. You have to think of that as a system. Higher ed institutions are systems. You cannot just talk about digital transformation for the student experience and think of technology that touches the student alone. You have to think of how I'm gonna really transform the operational model of the institution and how I'm gonna transform the digital experience for students, faculty, and staff. It is a more holistic model through all the functions of the university, teaching and learning, research, but also operations.
Elliot Felix: That was Chrissa Malaggiani, the Chief Digital Experience Officer at Old Dominion University. We had a great conversation about the importance of defining student success holistically, considering the full end-to-end experience. We talked through how digital transformation is not just overlaying new technologies like AI on your existing practices, but really it's about using them to catalyze their improvement, and how you need to think through adoption, operations, redesign processes, and have the metrics to measure it all so you can continuously improve and adapt. Let's dive in. Welcome to the Connected College podcast. I'm your host, Elliot Felix. I've helped more than a hundred colleges and universities change what they offer, how they operate, and the way they're organized to enable student success. Join me for insightful interviews with higher ed innovators, sharing the stories, stats, and strategies to create better connected colleges and universities. Welcome, Chrissa. I'm so excited about our conversation on the role of digital transformation for student success.
Chrysoula Malogianni: Thank you for having me. I'm also excited. This is a topic that I am very passionate about. Student success is what we do, what we strive for, what we aim constantly in higher education.
Elliot Felix: And digital transformation is simple and easy and we can probably figure it all out in the next half an hour or so, I bet.
Chrysoula Malogianni: Absolutely not. It's not simple, it's not easy, but it's absolutely necessary.
Elliot Felix: That's true. That's true. Tell us a little bit about how you got started in higher ed and what you're up to today.
Chrysoula Malogianni: I have quite an interesting story here. I was born and raised in Greece. I even did all my traditional school in Greece and even college. I come from a rather impoverished educational environment. When I graduated high school from my specific municipality, I was the only one from my graduating class to go into college which was like to this day, I think my biggest accomplishment. And that shows exactly what that means from somebody coming from my environment. I didn't have anybody in my family, extended family attend college, no point of reference. I knew I wanted to study. I knew I wanted to go to college. I didn't know what I wanna be when I grow up, but I knew that my education journey wouldn't have stopped in high school and with my high school graduation. So I went to school of education, and then I completed my Greek ptukhio is the name, which the equivalent is bachelor's and master's because I took the extra coursework and so on. So it was in early childhood education and the additional course in curriculum and instruction, pedagogy practically. I worked a few years as a grade school teacher, and then I realized that was not for me. I went to the industry in training and development very quickly. Yes, within two years I was a director of that field in a rather large company, corporate world. And I had to work a lot with the tech vendors. Training and development includes a lot of coordination with tech vendors because you need to include a portfolio on how you're gonna train employees on new tools. Life happened and many things happened, and at my late 20s, I decided to move to the United States. And this is where I took a leap of faith, and I went to educational technology. This is where I found my passion. I saw a significant opportunity for working in this intersection between teaching and learning cognition and technology, and it's funny because part of my portfolio now is leading AI initiatives across my organization, and I say I started that way before it was, like, trending, the interplay of cognition and technology. And then I continued with my PhD in instructional design and technology, studied even harder that diffusion and adoption of technology, especially in higher education, since that was my passion, and not for the sake of technology, but what the impact could be for the actual learning education journey and so on. And since day one of my tenure as a student at the United States, I started working in higher education here as an instructional technologist, instructional designer, and then I got to establish fully online, fully digital programs from scratch at the different institutions, which means that you have to really take a deep look into the digital ecosystem. Looking at the digital ecosystems, you have the first realization that educational technology was not originally designed, developed, and continuously evolved with the best of both worlds. It was great technology that tried to just work as an overlay of existing practices that were developed without the use of technology, without taking that into consideration. So it was like stretching existing teaching and learning practices and even institutional practices and processes, existing processes and just tools. The lift and shift of these processes with technology is not gonna optimize the experience for any stakeholder in higher ed. Some cases it might actually have the opposite result. It might automate bad processes, so we might end up having biggest failures.
Elliot Felix: It might scale up your failures.
Chrysoula Malogianni: Yes, exactly. Exactly. So this is the short intro how I end up where I am.
Elliot Felix: It's a great story, and I wanna go back to you're the only student in your school going to college in Greece, like dreaming big. Was there like a book? Was there a hero? Was there a movie? What gave you the idea, what emboldened you to dream big?
Chrysoula Malogianni: I'm so glad you asked this question because it was not a movie or a hero or anything like that, but my mother is one of the most intelligent people I had met at the time, and she always wanted to pursue education. She was not allowed to continue, so once she graduated elementary school, she was not allowed to continue to middle school. It's, yeah, back then, Greece in the early '60s, and when she was at the age of continuing with middle school, she had five older brothers, and she was supposed to stay home and help with that instead of going to school. So I saw her reading books on her own and trying her best without formal education. And nobody, if you meet her and you have a conversation with her, you wouldn't believe that this woman is just an elementary school graduate, and she did everything on her own. So I think that she instilled this passion about education in me.
Elliot Felix: I was also intrigued, you were talking about, you're studying between technology and cognition. What were some of the things that surprised you when you're in grad school for that or diving into instructional design about how technology shapes thinking or reshapes?
Chrysoula Malogianni: At that point, I did have somebody that I worked with, an academic professor that really... He's the reason that I decided to go to the doctoral program for the PhD because I had started with a master's and with the first semester, and that was Dr. Andy Spiro, that he had developed the cognitive flexibility theory, that we have a schema of the moment. It was this affordance of the cognition of the moment and how we can evolve. Our brain has limited capacity, working capacity. It's how many things we can process at times. So with technology, we can expand this capacity. Now, for example, with AI, I think that how we can expand, how we can evolve as thinking our thinking as human beings, our brain, and so on. And thank God the technology keeps evolving, so it keeps giving us more affordances, more opportunities.
Elliot Felix: Nice. Earlier you were saying, student success is why we're here, I would love to hear your definition of student success.
Chrysoula Malogianni: It is simple. It is simple, right? What is the main reason of higher education to exist? Why did we start? Why we keep exist? Is about educating, not providing degrees, providing education. The goal is every student that comes through our door, that starts in our institution, to provide everything they need, so at the end of their journey, no matter when that is, they're gonna finish not just with a degree, with all the skills, knowledge, and the support that they needed. So it's not about, okay I have a bachelor's or a master's or a PhD in this. It's like I have the knowledge, I acquired the skill that this institution promised me, and I'm ready to enter the workforce or the next step or whatever their goals and dreams are. So the student success is like we provide to them everything, and that's not just the access to experts and content and context. Is support, systems, and additional skills soft, hard, and everything. It's the subject matter expertise, the critical thinking, the leadership, and the realization that learning doesn't stop at the end of that journey.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, it sounds like you look at it through the learning and development lens, like back to your roots. It's about developing students so they have knowledge, skills, abilities, creating the systems and the supports and the community make that possible.
Chrysoula Malogianni: But I tell you, if you think about it, most students don't drop college because of what happened in one course or one classroom, or even if they fail in one course or two or three, it's not because of the relationship in this course with this professor and so on. Of course, it plays a role, but it's never just that. Students drop because of everything else that might be happening in their life or in their school, in their college, and they don't get the appropriate, the needed support, the time they needed, the format they needed, the way they needed to be able to really move forward with their educational journey. And student success is much bigger than what is happening in one course or even in all the courses.
Elliot Felix: I'm with you on that and I like that holistic approach and the recognition that it's not just what happens in the classroom, it's everything around it. It's belonging, it's support, it's community, it's finance.
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Elliot Felix: What role can technology play in enabling that success? We're talking about digital transformation, what's the role of technology in enabling student success, and how does it need to transform?
Chrysoula Malogianni: Technology is everywhere, obviously, and it's not going anywhere, period. So we would be doing a disservice to all of our students if we tried to exclude technology from those conversations. So at the same time, it's so integrated into everything we do, not just in higher ed, and it should be integrated because how can you prepare students and talk about student success if you don't prepare them for the workforce needs? And without technology, you really don't prepare them. And technology is not just, hey, you need to have technology as a tool. It's a content, a concept, a context, technology is there. Digital transformation, though, is not just about technology adoption. I think digital transformation is about redesigning the whole student experience to remove friction, to increase clarity, to accelerate outcomes. You have to think of that as a system. Higher ed institutions are systems. You cannot just talk about digital transformation for the student experience and think of technology that touches the student alone. You have to think of how I'm gonna really transform the operational model of the institution and how I'm gonna transform the digital experience for students, faculty, and staff. It is a more holistic model through all the functions of the university, teaching and learning, research, but also operations.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, they're all clearly, they're all connected. Increase clarity, reduce friction, and accelerate outcomes is a really nice way of putting it. What's some of the friction that you're working on reducing or that you've already reduced?
Chrysoula Malogianni: Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that. This is a friction that we have tried to reduce across all three populations, and it's common. It's around the full digital ecosystem, right? Systems that they don't talk to each other, duplication of systems, redundancy of effort and so on. And it's a win-win situation for all because you don't have the student going through multiple different technologies to achieve the same outcomes. You work better together and think about that. Like student success overall is not achieved through isolated interventions. So why would we have isolated systems? The improvement of the digital experience for all stakeholders is the result of a connected, intentional ecosystem where every touch point, either academic, operational, and experiential, works together to support the student.
Elliot Felix: I hear you on that and the redundancy and the interoperability, I've worked with so many campuses on their technology service model or their support model, and inevitably we'll do a workshop where we have Post-Its on the wall or on a Miro board, and each one is a system.
Chrysoula Malogianni: Yeah.
Elliot Felix: And I have yet to facilitate one of those workshops where the CIO or someone isn't saying, "This is too much," and those two things seem really similar. Inevitably people realize there are redundancy, there isn't that clarity, there isn't the interoperability you're talking about.
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Chrysoula Malogianni: We have started this work. It's great to talk to you about digital transformation and the digital ecosystem, and we started, okay, with the goal that, okay, student success must be designed as end-to-end experience from recruitment from the very, very early stages when somebody's looking, what does ODU have to offer me? So we start from there to graduation and beyond, and every step needs to feel very connected. And from admissions to advising to teaching and learning, what is happening in the classroom, financial aid, financial services, all that, career pathways, they cannot operate in silos, right? So at the same time, there are so many different systems that do each of these parts or some of them, like multiple together. So what we did, we were not different than other institutions that had multiple systems. Every little unit or big unit had one or two or three or four systems, some of them doing something similar, some of them doing something totally different. So we started a few years ago with a technology purge, right? We called it the unified technology.
Elliot Felix: You did some kind of audit or whatever and
Chrysoula Malogianni: Yes, a very... it was a very hard effort to really... You start with what you actually have, what everything does, but you don't stop there because if you stop there, you might see that, oh, you're gonna find yourselves feeling that you have to keep most of these things because all of these things do something. They serve a purpose.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, attached to.
Chrysoula Malogianni: Then you look at the first redundancies, the first filter is the easy one 'cause you see, oh, you do this and you do this. Okay, let's pick the best one. But there is a second layer. If you just see that first, like a superficial level, you might feel that you need to keep more. But when you see that, what are the opportunities? How many of these processes can change and they're gonna be better if they change because of what technology really can provide, can afford now? So you cannot just lift and shift. You have to look deeper in the processes and say, "How I'm gonna update those processes with the student experience in mind, with everybody's experience in mind?" Because we wanna make sure that students, faculty, and staff have a much better experience so they can focus on what they actually need to do. We want the faculty to focus on teaching and learning, the researchers on research, the advisors into maintaining this close relationship with the students. So technology is there to serve them and allow them to focus on their work, so some of the processes need to change. And the next biggest project that we are establishing as a practice is the enterprise architecture, again, with the system thinking to continuously evaluate adoption and diffusion of any technology and how it impacts all the different stakeholders. So we have started that about a year now, and we're moving to the next step of full implementation as a practice, as ongoing continuous practice.
Elliot Felix: And I'm curious how that practice is going. You talked about greater clarity, less friction, accelerated outcomes. Are those your metrics? How are you measuring the digital transformation, the digital experience? What does your dashboard look like?
Chrysoula Malogianni: Yeah, actually we do measure like that. We do measure efficiencies, automations, and redundancies systems. But what we have for each and every project under digital transformation, and some of them, like there are the traditional digital transformation processes, even updating 180 classrooms, right? We're not just talking about systems level and this stuff. We are transforming the online portfolio with eight-week accelerated programs. The on-campus with, again, those 180 classrooms with additional XR labs and so on. So in everything we have the classic technology metrics that somebody might expect, the ones you mentioned, but we also have the student outcomes. This is where we are very intentional. It's because if it doesn't serve the main goal, like we mentioned earlier, like student success, then what are we doing? We have DFW rates, student evaluation surveys, with the student, faculty, and staff satisfaction surveys. So we don't have just the classic numbers, metrics, and this is something that we intentionally did, and I know that many people... it would be much easier to stay in the numbers of efficiencies. It's very easy to justify, "My God, look how much faster we work there, how much time we gained there, efficiencies." But did we really serve the target populations, the stakeholders? So we are utilizing all these metrics as well.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, it sounds like it's not just efficiency, but it's also like effectiveness and experience, you're combining those three together.
Chrysoula Malogianni: Yes. It's not just the systems. It's not about implementing tools, more tools. Sometimes actually it's less tools. It's about creating that seamless flow of data, insights, experiences across all the different areas, across all the platforms, across teaching and learning, across research, across operations, so students, faculty, and staff don't have to navigate complexity on their own.
Elliot Felix: And it strikes me that I, in a way, digital transformation is never done, right? Because it's always changing and there are new technologies and those have to be integrated and old ones have to be sunset and change. So can you talk a little bit about how you see DX changing into the future and your advice for folks to adapt to that change? I'm assuming AI is part of this.
Chrysoula Malogianni: Yeah, like especially for me, I have to tell you, last week alone I had four talks about AI. So AI is part of everything. Even for our digital transformation, AI sits at the center of this. Because it's here, it's powerful, it's everywhere. And like I said, we need to prepare all of our stakeholders, not just students, but students most of all, for this AI-enabled world. But you're right, digital transformation is not episodic. It's a continuous practice that you always have to with any technology. AI actually brought the need, I think to more people and quicker than anybody else has realized that it is at the same standards and frameworks around adoption and diffusion of any technology really. So we need to really understand that the adoption and diffusion of technology as practice and digital transformation is not new. What is new is what is the technology, which is AI now more than the quick pace, true.
Elliot Felix: The pace of change.
Chrysoula Malogianni: Very true. But yeah, we've had some really quick pace adoption. I remember, I'm like, I'm gonna really show my age now. I remember a world before Google and now Google is a verb. Google. And yeah, I didn't use Google randomly because it became a verb and we have studied that, and we also saw how people reacted early on, especially in higher ed, when they thought that higher ed is gonna become irrelevant because now everybody can search and find content and so on. And we had to adapt and adjust and deal with that. So now with AI, I think that we need to do better. We need to learn from those mistakes that we did, and I think it's time that we move from reactiveness, reactive support to proactive design. So you proactively design about this ongoing practice of digital transformation. This is how you're gonna be able to maintain and to keep up.
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Elliot Felix: Proactive designing is such a good analogy because it reminds me... I do a lot of work in library transformation, looking at their spaces and services and systems and staffing, and the strategy that drives that. And a few weeks ago, I wrote, what can we learn as we think about AI? What can we learn from how libraries have transformed? And I think because there was a time when everyone said, "The sky is falling. No one's gonna go to a library. You can get everything you need." Actually, if you look at visitation data, libraries are the busiest they've ever been.
Chrysoula Malogianni: Right?
Elliot Felix: The great thing about the internet is it forced libraries to think about what their real value was, and it wasn't just the information, it was also the people, it was the services, it was the community, it was the technology. I think if there's one thing we should be doing as we're thinking about the future in AI, it's thinking about what our value is.
Chrysoula Malogianni: Where is our product?
Elliot Felix: Yeah.
Chrysoula Malogianni: Where is our really product, our value proposition, the return on investment, and so on? And this is not just with Google and the libraries. I think that AI is the real post-Gutenberg revolution. I think this impact is as big, because Gutenberg, the typography and so on, is what democratized education, learning, and access to all that to knowledge and content. And now with AI, we democratize that even more, right? So it's about what is our product? Access to content exists, so actually, I think it's a great opportunity to do education even better, to really advance human cognition, to advance teaching and learning, to advance what we learn, how we learn, and how we can really go to that next level, that we had to really spend time in very low-level cognitive functions that we can now offload.
Elliot Felix: Offload.
Chrysoula Malogianni: Yes, support AI, the technology, and then really move forward, and so on. So it's not about replacing us, but it's forcing us to really reevaluate our product and our offerings. And I hope that it's gonna become a constant practice. This is the practice, the constant evaluation of what we're offering. Is this the best product that we can offer? How we can make it even better, more relevant to real life, more relevant to workforce, more relevant to the actual target population, our students, our learners? And this way, higher education becomes like this lifelong learning journey, lifelong education journey. And it should, because we're gonna ... If we're talking about evolution of technology, we're gonna have to talk about upskilling and reskilling constantly, right? So okay, where is our offering there? How we are making sure we have this ongoing relationship with anybody that steps into our university to make sure we support them throughout their life as learners. So we cannot be talking about entrance to the university, one entrance, entry point and one exit point. We're gonna have to talk about multiple entry points and multiple exit points.
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Chrysoula Malogianni: So it's not students can come, "Oh, I go to college after high school. Four years, I graduate, maybe graduate school." It's no. I have some experience. I go. I get some certificates. I keep building on them, stackability, mobility, and so on, and technology to support this. Actually, this is it. Technology can support a model like this.
Elliot Felix: Absolutely. This is really inspiring stuff and thinking about what our value is, what our product is, what that experience is like now and into the future, I think is such inspiring stuff, and I appreciate all your insights today. Thank you, Chrissa.
Chrysoula Malogianni: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I enjoyed the conversation so much. I'm very passionate about this work, so I can talk about this for hours. But I appreciate your questions really reminded me why I am very excited about this work.
Elliot Felix: It's important stuff and I'm glad we're all working toward this and the greater clarity and the reducing the friction and accelerating the outcomes and using technology to do it. That sounds pretty good to me.
Chrysoula Malogianni: Thank you for hosting a podcast about student success. We should never forget that this is why we are here.
Elliot Felix: Absolutely. Thanks for listening to the Connected College podcast. Go to Elliotfelix.com for more information about my book, the Connected College, articles I've written and talks I've given. There's also tools you can download, information on upcoming events and information on booking me to speak at your institution or organization. Please support the podcast by rating it and reviewing it wherever you're listening. Let's create connected colleges where all students succeed.