This breakout session will discuss transitioning from office to working remotely at home within an onboarding and advising department. Development of best practices and strategies to produce best results to have a seamless flow for onboarding and advising new and returning students at home.

The session will focus on utilizing various technology and computer equipment to drive the decisions within the department during the pandemic period. The department transitioned within days to shift work locations from office to home while producing workflows among other departments to have a logical process for the students.

Work flows created among departments within the student services division to remove enrollment barriers from an Admissions, Academics and Testing standpoint. Collection of data, brainstorming, planning, organizing, managing are all essentials to strategizing a pandemic business continuity plan. Institutions can be strengthen through addressing core problems, making process improvements, and allowing critical thinking.

Specific Mitigation Strategies for preparing a department for remote awareness, text and email message campaign preparation to share with students that telephone and face to face advising consultation available and for them not to come to the campus for advising appointments.

The College is a two year public, multi- campus institution with a student population of over 12,000
students, ten academics divisions and over 150 academic programs consisting of degrees, diplomas and certificates.

The Department of The Hub serves all new students and returning students that have not met the academic protocol to be reassigned to an academic advisor. The service includes a Navigate to Success Session to orient new students to assisting students with online resources, Desire 2 Learn (D2L), Navigate Advising platform, TTC Express, Portal, etc. The Hub Staff assist students in academic planning, registration, career/major matching through Navigate software, offer workshops for transfer students, and refer students to resources and other departments for additional assistance. Other services provided are pro-active outreach to move students through the process, receive incoming telephone calls, make outgoing calls to students in all stages to include applied, accepted or enrolled as well as returning voice messages. Communicate to students via telephone calls, emails, email campaigns, social media, robo-calls and text messaging.

Submission ID:

13589

Presenter(s):

Kathy Simmons Trident Technical College

Larry Frazier Trident Technical College

Tara Franklin Trident Technical College