The challenges facing higher ed leaders are palpable. Enrollment continues to decline, placing further financial pressure on institutions. More than 50% of higher ed workers report seeking work elsewhere, exacerbating existing capacity constraints. Inequities continue to pervade higher education, but 63% of leaders report needing more insights to make informed decisions to close equity gaps.
All of this instability can feel overwhelming. The gap between what institutions want to achieve and their ability to make a difference can feel wide and scary.
The Civitas Learning product team works alongside our partners to help make what might feel unachievable possible. This year our research and development focused on building efficiencies and improving visibility to make decision-making easier and actions more meaningful, all with an eye toward equitable student outcomes.
Here’s a look at some of the latest updates:
1. Eased Workflow with a New Advisor Dashboard
The new advisor insights dashboard empowers advisors with the information they need to efficiently and effectively engage their students. It includes:
- Student Group Quick Links: Static (honors, first-time in college, etc.) and dynamic (unenrolled, high opportunity, etc.) student groups can now be pinned to the dashboard to access in one click. Making it even easier for advisors to monitor students and manage their caseloads.
- Student Communication History: Advisors can now easily see which students have received communication to allow them to prioritize outreach and monitor engagement with students without digging through their inboxes.
- Action-Oriented Dashboard: Easily access widgets to help you easily identify students (like those who haven’t enrolled or engaged with the LMS) on the dashboard.
- Easier Early Alert Workflow: Early alert enhancements help advisors better determine which alerts need immediate attention by placing them in the context of other success metrics like persistence prediction.
We’re working with our partners to make the advising dashboard the go-to resource to empower advisors to do the most efficient and effective work possible. In 2023, Civitas Learning partners can look forward to additional improvements designed to make advisors’ lives easier, like enhanced sharing capabilities, more intuitive student appointment scheduling, and continued enhancements to early alerts.
2. Empower Students to Create Accurate Academic Plans On Their Own
In several interviews and focus groups, students made it loud and clear that they crave autonomy but don’t want to make the “wrong” choices as they pursue their degrees. Similarly, institutional leaders want to provide a clear path for students without taking away student choices. To help solve this dilemma, we’ve added new academic planning capabilities, including:
- Plan Templates: Map out potential degree pathways term-by-term and class-by-class, then assign templates to specific students to keep them on track.
- Degree Requirement Mapping: Clearly define how courses satisfy specific degree requirements to eliminate confusion.
- Locked Degree Requirements: Lock courses or other degree requirements into a specific term to prevent students from making missteps.
In 2023, we’ll continue to work alongside our partners to optimize the academic planning experience to surface helpful information like whether a grade in a certain class is strongly linked to graduation. Making it easier for staff to refine course sequences and not unintentionally recommend too many challenging courses at once. We’ll also continue to ease advising workloads during peak registration by offering bulk registration capabilities.
3. Creating Clear Pathways to On-time Completion with Course Demand Forecasting
To remove barriers to on-time completion, empowering students and advisors with insight into which pathways to follow is a good start. Still, institutions also need the ability to accurately forecast which classes to offer to keep students on track. With course demand analytics, your team can:
- Plan Ahead with Demand Forecast: Don’t copy and paste last year’s courses. Predict long and short-term course demand based on historical and current enrollment and student plan data.
- Monitor Course Fill Rates: No need to constantly monitor fill rates and pull reports. Get notified immediately as courses approach the “danger zone.”
- Gain Insights with Course Data: A comprehensive view of course insights and demand to improve program offerings and sequencing. Drill down into enrollment trends, capacity reports, and course demand data.
In 2023, We’ll continue to build on this foundation with a machine learning-based forecast model and expanded ways to sort and evaluate student enrollment data to match your institutional needs.
4. Empowering Teams to Do Their Best Work with Extensive On-Demand Training
With many opportunities to impact student success, remembering all the ways your team can use the Civitas Learning tools can sometimes feel a little daunting. We’ve built a suite of easy-to-use on-demand courses to help your team identify strategies and tactics to impact student outcomes and reach institutional goals daily.
All customers have access to instructor-led training and online user guides. Inside our on-demand learning center, your teams can also:
- On-Demand Training: Access our full library of on-demand training to easily onboard new team members or refresh existing teams about opportunities to take action
- Resource Library: Explore an expansive resource library of recommended strategies and tactics to learn new ways to use the Civitas Learning platform to reach your goals
- Practice Sharing: Discover practices and approaches from fellow Civitas Learning partner institutions to gain inspiration and shorten your learning curve.
Working Together to Close the Student Impact Gap
We continually work with our partners to identify opportunities to help them do their most impactful work more efficiently and effectively. We intend to empower more and more institutions to close the gap between what they want to do, what they feel is possible, and what they can achieve. Our mission is to provide our partners with the tools they need to improve student outcomes and reach their institutional goals today and tomorrow.
Have questions or want to discuss how we can support your work to improve student success? Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at product@civitaslearning.com.
Rebecca Reid, Vice President of Product
As head of our product team, Rebecca is responsible for planning, creating, and implementing the overall product strategy for our technology. She’s also played key roles in strengthening partnerships and marketing our products.
