Episode 119: Closing the Experience Gap to Drive Student Success [EDUCAUSE Webinar]
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How can institutions close the gap between modern consumer tech expectations and reality? How do we connect the digital and physical campus to drive student success? In what was originally an EDUCAUSE webinar, Elliot shares insights on student experience gaps from The Connected College. Then, we talk through these gaps and how to close them with Sarah Williams from University of Utah, Melanie Hardy from Valencia College, Tom Ellett from Quinnipiac University, and Chase Williams from Pathify. The panel shares actionable strategies for mapping journeys, streamlining communication fatigue, sunsetting outdated tools, building communities, and leading the organizational change to make it all happen.
Closing the Student Experience Gap to Drive Recruitment and Retention
The modern university campus is facing a silent crisis: a growing friction between what students expect from their digital environments and what institutions actually deliver. Today’s incoming students have grown up in a world of seamless, personalized consumer applications like Spotify, Instagram, and Netflix. They expect their campus technology to operate with the same intuitive ease.
Instead, upon arriving at college, they are often met with a fragmented maze of legacy portals, disconnected apps, and overwhelming email fatigue. This friction defines the modern student experience gap.
In a recent episode of the Connected College podcast, host Elliot Felix sat down with higher education leaders to discuss how campuses can navigate campus digital transformation, break down institutional silos, and deploy meaningful higher education innovation to better connect the digital and physical campus.
Understanding the Student Experience Gap in Modern Higher Ed
The student experience gap generally manifests in two distinct ways. First, there is the disconnect between user expectations set by consumer technology versus the actual enterprise software an institution provides. Second, there is a physical-digital divide. While technology serves as the primary interface to the physical campus—guiding how students find buildings, schedule advising sessions, and join clubs—these systems are rarely coordinated.
Data shows that over the last few decades, institutions have historically adapted to new challenges by simply adding more layers. When a new student need arises, a new department, a new software tool, or a new physical facility is added. This continuous accumulation has caused administrative structures to grow at twice the rate of enrollment, and specialized professional staff to expand at nearly six times the rate.
While done with the best intentions, adapting by adding creates immense complexity. Students find themselves on an accidental "treasure hunt" just to discover basic support services, while critical departments inundate them with thousands of unread emails. To close the student experience gap, institutions must shift their philosophy from continuous addition to strategic consolidation.
The Transformation Trap: Why Institutions Get Stuck
When universities attempt to execute a campus digital transformation, they frequently fall into a few common traps. The most prominent barrier is project sequencing and resource allocation. Many information technology departments are currently consumed by multi-year migrations to cloud-based Student Information Systems (SIS).
While an SIS migration is necessary infrastructure work, focusing solely on back-end systems for five years without improving the front-end user interface leaves the student experience lagging dangerously behind consumer standards.
Another massive hurdle is institutional politics. Higher education is notoriously decentralized. Different schools, colleges, and departments have their own preferred legacy tools and unique processes. This fragmentation often results in universities maintaining multiple official mobile apps simultaneously—such as separate applications for athletics, alumni, and current students—which further confuses the end-user.
Mapping the Student Journey: Shifting from Gut to Data
To overcome these roadblocks, innovative leaders are utilizing comprehensive journey mapping to pinpoint exactly where students encounter bureaucratic friction. By examining every touchpoint from high school recruitment through graduation, colleges can identify the exact moments where communication gaps cause students to fall through the cracks.
Data-driven decision-making allows universities to move away from historical traditions or internal "gut feelings" when designing student support systems. By analyzing real utilization metrics—such as tracking event engagement via digital check-ins and QR codes—administrators can clearly identify which programs are providing a strong return on investment and which services need to be pruned to reduce noise.
High Tech Meets High Touch: Creating Digital Micro-Communities
A common fear among university administrators is that increasing digital automation will diminish the critical human elements of a college education. However, true higher education innovation demonstrates that high-tech solutions can actually facilitate high-touch human relationships.
For example, when students feel overwhelmed or isolated, technology can be leveraged to build automated micro-communities. By integrating housing data with student platforms, universities can automatically sort residential students into digital groups led by their specific Resident Advisors. These digital spaces meet students where they are, providing a low-friction environment for introverted individuals to ask questions, build peer connections, and establish a genuine sense of belonging before transitioning to face-to-face interactions.
Pruning the Tech Stack: Driving Efficiency and ROI
Closing the experience gap is not just an administrative ideal; it is a financial necessity. True digital transformation must simultaneously improve student satisfaction and reduce institutional costs.
Progressive institutions are achieving this by migrating away from bloated "link farms" and deploying centralized content systems that empower subject matter experts across campus to manage their own digital spaces. This removes the IT department as a bottleneck for basic updates and places engagement directly in the hands of student-facing staff.
Through aggressive consolidation, some campuses have successfully retired dozens of custom, legacy web applications. Replacing disparate systems with a single, personalized front-door hub saves significant institutional data maintenance costs while vastly clarifying the digital landscape for the student body.
Conclusion: Building a Truly Connected College
Bridging the student experience gap requires a cultural shift in higher education. It demands that institutions stop adding isolated solutions and start designing unified, student-centric ecosystems. By establishing broad-based buy-in, empowering internal champions, and focusing heavily on front-end user experiences, universities can eliminate the administrative treasure hunt. Ultimately, a well-connected digital campus is the ultimate foundation for enduring student success.
Episode 119 Transcript
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Elliot Felix: This is a special episode that I'm excited to share with you. I had the honor of moderating a webinar for EDUCAUSE on how to close gaps in the student experience, and it was really two gaps. The first is the gap between students' expectations that are largely set by consumer technology versus what an institution actually delivers. And secondly, the gap between the digital and the physical, because technology is, in a way, the interface to the physical campus, but they're often disconnected or uncoordinated. And we had a great discussion featuring Sarah Williams from Utah, Melanie Hardy from Valencia, Tom Ellett from Quinnipiac, and Chase Williams from Pathify. And by the way, if you're on Spotify, you can watch the video as well. 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. I'm Elliot Felix. I lead the Higher Ed Advisory practice at Bureau Happold, and I'm also the author of The Connected College, and I'm excited to share some of those insights today to set the table for our great conversation about closing the experience gap and driving student success. And without further ado, we'd love to hear from our panel. Let's introduce ourselves clockwise here. So maybe Sarah, let's start with you.
Sarah Williams: Sure, yeah. Sarah Williams. I'm from the University of Utah. I'm in charge of our Pathify implementation called Utah three sixty.
Melanie Hardy: Melanie Hardy. I am a web developer and the technical implementer for a lot of our systems at Valencia College, including Pathify.
Chase Williams: Hi, everyone. I'm Chase Williams, CEO and co-founder of Pathify. I've spent more than a decade now trying to help universities and colleges, primarily in the US, but across a few different continents now, close the experience gap that we'll be talking about today. Very happy to be here, and I will pass to Tom.
Tom Ellett: Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Tom Ellett. I'm the chief experience officer at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. In case you're wondering what this chief experience officer does, it is everything student-facing and non-academic in nature.
Elliot Felix: As we get into the discussion here, we're interested to hear from our audience about how that experience gap is showing up at your institution. And we've got a great poll here to take the pulse of folks, and we're interested to hear, as you think about this, is it the fact that you have multiple front doors and it's fragmented? Is it that things feel like a treasure hunt? You have the kind of the best kept secret when it comes to student support. Is it that you're taking a one-size-fits-all approach, which by the way usually ends up meaning one size fits none. Is it that you're overwhelming students with email and there's communication fatigue, channel fatigue? Or is it that you have this digital physical divide, redundant systems that don't talk to each other? And it's interesting, it looks like the treasure hunt is off to an early lead with all these best kept secrets scattered around campus and online creating these silos. With communication fatigue and multiple front doors as the close second. And communication fatigue looks like it's catching up. But not a lot of people talking about the digital physical divide, which is interesting, or the one size fits none. So this will be interesting for our discussion and panelists take note. Let's be sure we're thinking about how we bring these different functions together so it isn't so much of a treasure hunt, and how maybe we can create a single front door, and how maybe we can streamline communication as we move ahead.
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Elliot Felix: So with that, and bearing that in mind, we wanna talk a little bit about the experience gap, and I'm excited to share some insights from the connected college on this gap, which is drawn from my work with more than 120 colleges and universities and helping more than a million students. And as we think about where this gap comes from, part of it is that institutions do these amazing things even as things change, and often the way to adapt to that change is by adding, right? There's a new need, we add a new function with new people that need new space, that need new technology. And so not surprisingly, if you look back over the last 40 years, faculty have grown more or less on par with enrollment. Administration have grown at about twice the rate of enrollment, other professionals at almost six times the rate of enrollment, which part of that, totally understandable. You've got the research enterprise, you've got compliance requirements, maybe you have to stand up a whole advancement department because you have more private funding and less public. We also know with all that change, institutions are adding space at twice the rate of enrollment over the last 20 years, which again, things are spread out and you get that treasure hunt that many of you are experiencing. We also know that over the last 10 years or so, according to EDUCAUSE's great core dataset, that spending at baccalaureate colleges is up 113% on a per person basis. So there's a lot of change, and we're in the rhythm of adapting by adding, all with great intentions, but that means things are spread out. They might be siloed, they might be redundant, which creates cost and complexity. And so now we have all these great things, this, again, the treasure hunt, only I think only 40% are aware of these services. It's not uncommon for four key departments like registrar, financial aid, financial services, admissions to send 1,200 emails in the first year. Only a quarter to a third of those get opened, not surprisingly, you all were talking about communication fatigue. And with all this communication and all this platform proliferation, the percentage of students that feel frequently overwhelmed has doubled in the last 30 years according to UCLA's Higher Ed Research Center freshman survey. We're adapting by adding, and we're adding cost and complexity, and that's also creating a gap between digital and physical, which is a shame because technology is the interface to the campus, right? It's how people find spaces, find each other, book appointments, go to events. And institutions are often duplicating those different functions, right? So there's one place to go to an instructional designer for an online course, and another for an on-campus course, and I don't know where for hybrid. They may have duplicate LMSs, they may have other tools. And this shows up when you look at the satisfaction. There's sometimes a lag between the service and the space. It's interesting students have higher satisfaction with libraries than they do with library services, or higher satisfaction with technology spaces than they do with tech support. So we wanna close these gaps because it's really hindering both recruitment and retention, and it's limiting student success. So with that in mind, we now wanna think about how we can close these gaps. Now that we understand a little bit more about what's driving them and how they show up, we wanna hear from our panel about how to close them.
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Elliot Felix: So our first question is, What is this transformation trap? How do institutions get stuck when they're trying to improve their student experience? And Melanie, maybe you could start us off.
Melanie Hardy: Certainly. I can give you the experience from Valencia College. So we are a college with 10 different campuses and activity centers, and they're spread out everywhere. One of the things that we tried to do when we were looking at a new system to help the student experience was our old system was going end of life. It had been the system in use at our college for over 20 years. So one of the things that we did was just to get started early and not let end of life for any of your old applications make the decision for you. I have been a part of a lot of RFPs where nobody understood what was needed or really understood the technology that was being communicated. In our move to Pathify, our enterprise application systems spent nearly a full year looking at everything that was out there so we wouldn't have the end of life of our other product making that decision for us.
Sarah Williams: It's funny 'cause I pretty much had the opposite experience of that. So I got brought on and I reported directly to the COO because we happened to have two big donors who were trying to help us out and build apps for us. So we had an official student app, we had an official alumni app, we had three athletics apps. And we had the stars kind of align where a lot of those things were end-of-lifing at the same time. So I was able to jump in and yeah, when you talk about the multiple front doors, that's really what we were trying to do. We were trying to consolidate so we had one front door where people could start, and even if they went in different directions and we still had legacy apps or other things, there was at least one place that the people could start from. And we were able to combine... I think we decommissioned seven different apps within the last year, but now Pathify has actually given us the opportunity because of the way that their roles work and their permissions work, we can actually squish all of those different audiences together. So I have the same app for students, the same app for alumni, the same app for visitors on campus. And because we can have a completely personalized experience for each one, so if you're a prospective student versus a parent versus a new student coming in versus a student who likes athletics, we've been able to create custom experiences but still on that same platform. I would say, yeah, the whole multiple front doors question, that really, having all those siloed different apps, we just had a really narrow window of time that we were able to take guerrilla action. I always joke it was really just me going, "Okay, let's go," and run as fast as possible. And we were able to migrate those things.
Melanie Hardy: We still have all of these multiple systems. We just had a link farm before. And I found that even though we haven't replaced all these massive systems, it's really easy to bring stuff all into this, and the personalization, I think, really is what helps the student experience.
Tom Ellett: I totally agree with you as it relates to the personal touch piece. And the question I think when we're getting stuck for us is will it make a difference in the overall student experience? And what are the variables that we need to know that actually will allow us to say, "Yeah, we should be focused on this or that"? Additionally, we get a lot of staff from other places using other systems, and so which one is the best? And everyone has their own favorites. But when it comes down to it, it's also about budget and how much money, not only money, but time, because when you're moving into systems, it can be really hard to roll it out. On our campus, we have 10 different colleges and schools, and so very different, very professionally based, but very different in terms of their thinking about it. And again, we don't want to lose the role of human touch. That's one of the lanes I think we do very well here of an institution with about 6,200 undergrads and about 3,600 graduate students. And finally, where we get stuck and other institutions get stuck is this whole idea of privacy concerns. A lot of my generation will say, "I don't know if we can be tracking students in this way or following them," and current students expect that. They have that expectation that we're gonna know who they are, we're gonna know what they want. They wanna make things easier for them. So I think that generational piece is also a place where institutions get stuck, and something I think we've been able to move beyond in the last year or so here.
Sarah Williams: That's so interesting that you say that because that's actually exactly where we're hitting with a lot of liability concerns. Oh my gosh, what if the students say something on the platform that we're legally liable for? That's a lot of things that we're hitting as well. Yeah.
Melanie Hardy: Yep. We are too. So there are a lot of things that everybody's worried about it, so we don't have to worry about it. We don't use the functionality. So that's another one of the things I think that we can try to help change to make the student experience a lot better.
Tom Ellett: You make a great point because you don't have to use all of the functionality on a particular tool, and sometimes we get confused. "Oh, we don't like this." Don't use that part of it.
Sarah Williams: Yeah. I think it's interesting what you said about privacy and data tracking because I think you're exactly right. There's a lot of data that I as a user would expect the university to know about me, right? Especially alumni data. I shouldn't be the one telling you that I graduated with a degree from the College of Education. That should be something that is in the system of record for the university. And so there's a lot of data appending that we're trying to do to the user when they... once they log in to not only be able to personalize their experience, but just let them know we know who they are. Like you were talking about that human touch and that personalization, I think that's a key part of it too.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. And just having that continuity where you're using a platform as an alum that you are familiar with as a student, and it already has your data in there, I think that just makes so much sense. And it sounds like you all are thinking about end of life. You're thinking about your various tech stack. You're thinking about your different audiences, what has to be the same, what can be different, the metrics, the KPIs. And Chase, I'd love to hear you weigh in on this transformation trap and how you help people avoid it or get out of it and deal with these kinds of issues.
Chase Williams: Yeah, I think if we go back five years, we were still in a place as Pathify, and I think as an industry in higher ed, where we were needing to convince people of this concept. We were needing to convince people that a portal wasn't cutting it anymore, for example, and was still... It still meant you had a fragmented experience where students had to go down the treasure hunt, which was the highest poll response, right? Nowadays, when you've got students using Claude Opus 4.8 and they can find anything and do anything they want with it, and then you get to landing on a portal which is a link farm or even an outdated mobile app that might have some push notifications and some GPS and things like that, we're not having to convince institutions nowadays that there is an experience gap and there is a need to move. It's now a conversation around the when, and the big IT project right now, of course, for many institutions that they've either embarked on or are planning to embark on, is the move to cloud SaaS for their SIS. And I think our pitch around that and I'll... If I get the chance, if we have time for us to run through Pathify a little bit more later, I may belabor this a little bit, but given how fast the consumer experience is moving, to focus on a cloud SaaS migration for the SIS for five years and not really touch the front-end experience in any meaningful way is a pretty dangerous proposition, I think, right now for a lot of institutions. So that's the conversation we're having. It's less about we need to convince you that there is an experience gap. It's more there is, and can we work out with you how we can phase this in a way that you can do it in parallel with the SIS migration? So that's probably the biggest point we're seeing institutions get stuck on at the moment is resourcing and project priority.
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Elliot Felix: It's interesting, and it's like the perfect segue to our next question, which is hearing from folks about where they're going next, and maybe it is this migration and juggling the different priorities and understanding what's all or nothing and what can you do in a more modular or flexible way. Tom, why don't you start us off? What are you thinking about next as you think about the student experience, and how are you adapting to change as you plan for that?
Tom Ellett: We're really thinking about how do we scale up and really understand the student experience, using a journey map process and finding out where are the barriers. So we've actually mapped out from the enrollment standpoint or even pre-enrollment from high school all the way through the alumni stage, where are the places where students find bureaucracy, find lack of information, which was talked about earlier, and fall off? Where are they ending up not finding the alignment? Because the research shows peer connections, connection with faculty, and getting involved in the campus are three of the most important variables for retention. And so if we're missing those, we gotta figure out where we're missing those. How are we ensuring that students are getting connected? So for instance, for us, we think it's really important in the process of onboarding our students to get them to be in cohorts of like-minded students before they get here from a virtual standpoint, so that they can start to connect before they even get here. So when they get here, we bring those cohorts together through the orientation process, which we're in right now. It's June. And so those students are now getting together and seeing each other as humans. And now we're facilitating that process in small groups. It's not like you're in groups of 50 to 60. You're in groups of 10 and eight. And those kind of conversations, especially for introverts or anyone who might be on the spectrum, can be really helpful in feeling welcome, feeling heard, and starting to feel a sense of belonging at the institution. So that's a little bit. Certainly what I try to do is focus on feedback. I do a lot of feedback with advisory boards. I have them for everything you can imagine and growing. Whether it be parents, whether it be high school counselors, whether it be the first year students, dining. I have advisory boards for all the groups. We're actually gonna now start a new one for the parents of club sports. We find that there's other ways we can start to segment parents in a way that we hadn't done previously. That's certainly a thing of where we're going. And finally, looking at the utilization data. Tapping in QR codes and other ways to be able to see how our students are utilizing that which we offer, and where do we need to prune, and where do we need to build up based on data, not our guts or the traditions we're holding onto year over year because we're all tightening our belts and we're trying to find the return on investment, and is it really worth that investment for that particular initiative or that particular program or that particular service?
Melanie Hardy: It's interesting that you say, Tom, about engaging students for input. I think that's one of the biggest things that we have to do to help close this gap. I think I read that 2028 will be when the first students from Gen Alpha are starting to go to college, and we know that one of the things they expect is for technology just to work, and to work right the first time. Talking to these students and finding out the things that they like, the things that they don't, can go a long way. Yeah. One of the ways that we closed this experience gap with Pathify was a completely different area. Our previous system was maintained by three of the people in our IT department, and that was it. So there was very little interaction, engagement with anybody. Basically, we got a ticket that said, "Hey, this link needs to be updated," and we updated it. What we shifted to specifically with Pathify, and this is one of the things we were looking for, was it's a distributed content system. We had moved to that on our public website a few years ago, and one of the things when we were changing over, that's what we wanted. Pathify gives us the ability to designate our subject matter experts to be the one to engage our students and to get information out there, because our IT department doesn't know when something is out of date. So putting the ability to manage the content in the hands of the people who know the content was one of our biggest experience gap closings.
Sarah Williams: Yeah, so yeah, we have the same exact model, where it's like I'm literally a team of one. I do have a part-time intern. We've done the entire implementation with just me, and the way that we did that is I act as air traffic control, and with the permissionings and the roles that we have different departments that we identify who is the audience that they're allowed to talk to, what are the things that they're allowed to do, and then we set them down their path. We're here for support and other things. But we're trying to get them to actually create the content and engage the students. And honestly, being the marketing channel. I come from out in the software industry, so it's like multi-channel marketing that you want someone else to be doing your marketing for you was the original plan. We don't, I don't do a lot of the specific marketing. But yeah, I have a whole eat your own dog food. Maybe that's not the great... If I drink my own champagne, Chase. Is that better if I don't call your product dog food? Yeah. But we actually use all of the features on Pathify to get the feedback from students. We had the forms, we had the notifications. So we actually, yeah, we sent a notification to all the students who are on the platform asking them for feedback, NPS score, that kind of thing. We could track because of all the great analytics. We had 950 people saw the announcement, 450 people actually filled out the survey. So we had a huge, a 50% response rate, which was amazing. And then what we were able to do is we were able to take those 450 users and create a cohort out of them, and we were able to then use them to A/B test the new interface. So some of the things that they wanted to reorganize the dashboard, and so we were able to make a cohort out of them. And again, like, all of this using the roles and the permissions and yeah, do an A/B test on the feedback that they had given us directly before we rolled it out to other students. It was a really great use of the tool to build the tool. It was great.
Elliot Felix: It's interesting to hear you're all leveraging your users in kind of co-design and co-analysis and outreach and marketing and I just I echo how I think critical and how important that is. We do a biannual student experience survey with a national representative sampling, and having a say in the direction of the school is usually among the bottom. And I think there's just such an opportunity to leverage student voice to A, know what they care about, and then B, those students can not only give you a better solution, but evangelize that to peers and, maybe there's even like work integrated learning options where then they're coaching or working with or guiding or advising peers. So I think it's just awesome to hear. Chase, what are your thoughts on where folks should go next?
Chase Williams: One of the things I think that is important to let the market know that a given company is doing is you're staying pretty focused in this environment. We're focusing on the CXP solely and the different layers of the CXP and not anything else. Because you can build things so quickly now with AI, you can start to chase things down rabbit holes and all that sort of stuff. And one of the things I wanna let the market know is we are solely focused on this problem and building on those different layers. So focusing on, for us, what is the AI agent as the topper on the CXP, then the hub which surfaces the information, and then you've got flow as the middleware that sits underneath it. Zooming in, like I'm most excited about, there's a few things, but this year we are responding to customer feedback around our middleware being quite complex and having a steep learning curve with what we've already started using internally called the Pathify Integration Agent. And it is enabling our team. It's a markdown file, effectively a skills file that you can load into Claude Code and other platforms like a Codex or Cursor, so that a customer can take that and build a new integration with the AI agent or build a new integration with the hub or against the Pathify API and just invoke that skill directly within Claude Code itself. That is going to massively flatten the learning curve and just make building new integrations and extending Pathify much simpler and easier and allow customers to do it at higher velocity. So that's gonna be really cool. It's... we've got our chief engineer over integrations doing another presentation on it at our offsite in a couple of weeks, and I'm excited to see where she's gotten to. But she and her team are already using it internally for our integration development.
Sarah Williams: This is awesome because, honestly, our model was we would have your team do custom development for us, right? And kinda do the hard parts, and then we would leverage that and be able to take your code, adapt it, whatever. So to be able to directly have that AI agent to just build the code, like, I'm so excited.
Chase Williams: Yeah, it's gonna be a massive, major unlock for Utah with Sarah and also on your side, Melanie, I think. Definitely.
Elliot Felix: And I think it also just makes sense in the larger scheme of things because it's not do you want to improve the student experience or make the cost sustainable, right? It's you have to do both of those, right? You have to close the gap, and you have to do it in a way that works with financial pressures and is more efficient and effective in terms of time, in terms of space, in terms of money. So it just makes so much sense.
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Elliot Felix: So our third question is really hearing folks' best advice for getting started closing the experience gap. And maybe Sarah, you could start us off on this one.
Sarah Williams: I think I don't have to say this to everybody here who... In higher ed, it's not usually a technology problem, it's a political problem, right? There are platforms available. They're probably implemented somewhere on campus, but who is the decider? Like, how do you identify who can make the decisions? 'Cause I think you mentioned this earlier, Elliot, right? There's gonna be silos. People have their favorite tools. How can you bring those together? That's a critical piece to it. I've actually ended up doing a weekly update email. Mine was a communication problem, right? So I literally send out an update every week on Mondays to about, I think I'm up to 30 different people now who are just letting them know what we're working on, what's coming next, who we're working with, just so that people can be informed. But that, to me, those are the biggest problems that you run into that should be addressed immediately.
Tom Ellett: I guess I would say that it's manyfold, but I think one of the main things is getting the right people together and determining where the gap is and finding the champions and using those champions to move the process along. And certainly having someone from the IT area is very important so they can start thinking about what's in line coming up in terms of movement with our current systems or those systems we need to bring in from the outside. I think that's an important part about how do we really align ourselves and bring people together. We're certainly going through and sorting through using AI some of the data we get back from the freshman survey and from the senior survey we do, and we do an academic information form on what the expectations of our incoming students are. And then we have other data points that we're putting in there and we're really trying to gather and understand where are the experience gaps, where are the learning gaps for our students, and where are the communication gaps. And that one is really hard in a big decentralized institution sending out the messages, getting the messages, and getting the staff and faculty where you're highly relying on adjunct faculty who are here and out and aren't a part of the regular meetings that happen within programs and they come in. So that's something I think is gonna challenge higher ed for quite some time. How do we get that message out, and how do we start to have everyone pay attention to what it is that is most important? And we're all-- There may be people who very much disagree on what's important. We're going through strategic planning right now, and we're finalizing that process with six different areas we're looking at, and everyone has been able to, through our technology process, be able to put in comments, put in feedback, put in ideas. And now we have to galvanize those and start to say, "Okay, where do we wanna focus on?" That's the hard part, I think.
Melanie Hardy: So I agree. One of the biggest things to get started is to find champions. Find the people that want to help you advocate and promote this new thing. Everybody, all the employees at a college are always getting new pieces of software that they need to learn, and they're like, "Why is this important? Why do I need to do this?" So one of the things that we found really helpful was that, hey, we're going to have a champion about using communities. So we picked champions for different functionalities inside our new tool. And just to keep communicating out to everybody who is using the tool, who is helping make decisions about the tool, and communicating the right information to the right people. We also have a huge email fatigue problem. We are not only sending out tons of emails to students, but there are still, I think the number that I heard today was roughly 300 processes that basically just send a person an email when the process is done. That was one of the things that looking at how you're communicating, not just with your students but with everybody about this project or about any of your projects. That's gonna be the thing that'll help your project go forward a lot better.
Sarah Williams: Yeah, actually, again, on the dog food theme, I created a community of people who were admins on the system, and so that way again, I could post notifications. Are there updates to the tools? Office hours. We actually used the community, the group feature to make a group of the people using the tools and use that as the communication platform, so yeah.
Melanie Hardy: Yep, we're doing that too.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, it seems like thinking about the champions and auditing your communication, the channels, the cadence, the messages, the audiences is a really smart way to go 'cause you wanna get people informed and excited and prepared. But if they can't find the signal within the noise, that's not gonna, that's not gonna happen. Chase, you've now done this with lots and lots of folks. What's your best advice to help 'em get started?
Chase Williams: Yeah, I think if there is a need to develop broad-based conceptual buy-in around this, the easiest place to start is to spend a couple of hours. You can probably zoom in on the admissions to enrollment to orientation to first-year experience journey and start to map... And you can do it at a pretty high level. What are all the systems and what are the communications I know we send during that period? Quickly you will get a sense for the fragmentation and the number of different places students are sent. And take that and compare it to experiences that they have in the consumer-grade world. How is an everyday person notified of something new on Instagram or Spotify? How are they nudged towards things? How do they find information? Like at the end of the day, those tools, whether it's a YouTube or a Spotify or even a ChatGPT now, they're really navigational front ends to get to a thing you are looking for really quickly and easily. They've just done that the best way now. And higher ed institutions just are entities that hold content and information all over the place and things that students need to know they need to be prompted of across the journey. And just comparing what in that segment of the journey to the consumer-grade experience is a really good way to quickly get an idea of what I describe as the experience gap. That can then be used, I think, as fuel for we need to do something about this, and the consumer experience is moving so quickly. It's already so far ahead. It's going to move even further ahead. We need to do something in parallel to some of the other larger projects we have going on right now.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, and if you wanna move fast and you wanna meet the expectations that are set by consumer IT versus enterprise IT, the more focused you are, the more that's possible, right? If you're, like, spread thin, as everybody was saying, and you're not doing the pruning that Tom mentioned or the sunsetting that Sarah mentioned, it- I think it just becomes even harder to move.
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Elliot Felix: We were just talking about AI integration and we were also talking about personal relationships and building trust and finding champions. And I'd love to hear from the panel how are you finding that balance of high tech and high touch? How does one enable the other?
Melanie Hardy: Honestly, I think that we have given people the tools to keep in contact, in touch, and talk to the students in a place that they are. So not requiring all of our students to come in to talk to an advisor. A lot of this was we changed course during COVID, of course. But with the things that we have done, and especially with Pathify, we've been able to provide all of those services that we very quickly turned into a digital version into something that's longer sustaining and that we can keep using. I will also say I applaud Pathify. We have been able to retire 12 different legacy custom web applications when we started going to Pathify, and we have probably two dozen more that are planned to either be replaced by functionality in MyBC or we're just gonna make it up new in our Pathify instance, which is called MyBC.
Elliot Felix: Sarah, what do you think about this high tech, high touch?
Sarah Williams: It's, so I have an interesting perspective because I'm actually also a parent. I had a freshman last year. A very shy, very, yeah, slips through the cracks kind of student. And I used to joke that it was like if it took me more than 15 minutes to find or if he had asked me where to find something, that's, that was my criteria to add it into the app, right? But we ran into a situation where he literally called me up one day and was like, "Hey Mom, can I come home?" And I was like, "What's going on?" He's, "Oh, the SWAT team is at the dorm." And I was like, "Oh, that's interesting." And so it turned out there was a swatting incident, whatever, but there wasn't a source of truth and a little, like a community for students to really get like what is really going on. And so we worked with the housing department to have what I'm calling little micro communities with the RAs and the students. So the RAs and the students really didn't have an approved area to be able to talk about stuff or, "Hey, you left your wet laundry in the..." "Who ate my pizza?" Like, all of those little conversations weren't really happening anywhere. And we had other solutions on campus that were like, IT told them to use Teams, and then that wasn't really working. And so because of the robustness of the APIs, we were able to integrate with the housing Star Rez system. And we actually set up a system so every night it would repopulate like student data so that we knew exactly where they were located, and we automatically put them into these little micro communities and have the RAs be the admins for the micro communities. But we were creating a space where someone who may not necessarily feel comfortable knocking on your neighbor's door, their like communication pattern was supported through these little micro communities on the app, so they could ask questions, talk to each other, whatever, and create that engagement. So we piloted it in the spring, like January, February, and we're actually theoretically rolling out to all of the students in the fall. And completely automated using the data coming in, appending the data, using the roles. So that's an example of like students who really don't feel comfortable with face-to-face interactions, like supporting them where they are and creating those micro communities that hopefully will increase engagement, improve safety outcomes and have a space for them to yeah, communicate with the people who should be closest to them.
Chase Williams: I just wanna comment on Melanie's story if I can. I don't wanna gloss over replace 12 solutions and planning to replace 24 more. You're like, "Let's go back to that one." No, and... But I just wanna... There is a lot of pressure out there right now for the entire industry around ROI, and you have to have real stories like this. And I just think that's not just for us as the, on the vendor side or the software provider. You wanna have them internally, particularly if you believe in a given software. That's the kind of stuff you wanna be talking about internally at an institution. So I would encourage that. The other thing I think it's worth mentioning is, and Melanie, correct me if I'm- it is quite, it's quite organic how it comes up. It's not "Oh, we found 12 today, and we know the 24." The implementation of our platform is, I often encourage customers at our implementation team, it's the kind of platform to look at or it's the kind of solution to look at as a platform, not a one-off project, and then it sits there and you set it and forget it. And that's because you get these kind of light bulb, "Oh, we could actually do this on here, and we can replace that. That's going to bring that experience into this front-end hub and not ensure it's not all the way down there." That happens all the time with our customers. So I just thought that was a large number, and we hear those kinds of stories all the time, and maybe something worth pointing out.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. It certainly is, and it's... I think it's important to spotlight it's not just the cost savings, right? It's not just efficiency, it's also effectiveness and experience, right? Because think of how much time you're saving for people to not have to navigate among all those different things, or think about the student who was lost and now they're found, or think about all those students that that are in that cohort of feeling frequently overwhelmed at twice the rate of their peers a generation ago. I think these are all great ideas to to move the needle, and I want to thank our panelists and all our attendees. Thanks for listening to the Connected College podcast. Go to Elliot felix.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.