Top of Mind with Tambellini Group
Keep pace with ever-changing education technologies. With insights and ideas from higher education executives, Top of Mind with Tambellini Group explores the people and technology innovations shaping the future of learning. New episodes monthly.
Top of Mind with Tambellini Group
Modernizing Technology to Eliminate Pain Points for Students, Faculty, and Staff
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For this month’s episode, Kathy Lueckeman joins the Top of Mind family. A tech leader within her own right, Kathy most recently served as chief strategy officer at Olivet Nazarene University (ONU). After completely transforming ONU into a modern campus, Kathy is here to give an inside scoop about the cultivation and success of that project, the relationship between digital transformation, enrollment, and retention, and how ONU’s tuition-free program is allowing its student to feel the utmost comfortability.
Hello, and welcome to the July episode of Tamini group's top of mind podcast. I'm your host, Liz Rell . Today, we are talking about how modernizing business processes through digital transformation efforts can help the droves of institutions that are struggling to enroll and retain students in what we know is a very fast changing and competitive environment. And we are lucky enough to have Kathy Luman . Today is our guest Kathy most recently served as chief strategy officer at all of it . Nazarene university in Illinois. She led the technology strategy there that built the foundation for on U's remarkably swift and successful digital transformation. She continues to consult with ONU and is currently working with various institutions across north America. And for the past 17 years, she has been working leveraging technology to drive innovation in higher ed holding roles, including managing CRM and graduate ambitions at Wayne state university leading higher education strategy, or what was then known as the Salesforce foundation and serving as chief innovation officer at Maryville university in St . Louis, Kathy clearly you've worn many different hats. So let's start by hearing a bit more about how your career has evolved . I am particularly interested in the time you spent on the higher ed strategy at Salesforce, which we know is a vendor.
Speaker 2That's true. And actually in my background, I didn't go to the vendor. There was , uh , back in before 2015 or 16 , um, Salesforce, the company, the technology company and Salesforce foundation, their charitable foundation were two very separate entities. Okay . Um , so I worked for the charitable foundation. Okay . And the charitable foundation, their , the reason that they existed was to make grants, granting technology, to nonprofits and higher EDS and to help nonprofits and higher EDS be successful in using the solution. They didn't sell things. Right. Gotcha . And they helped . And so , um, when I went to work at the foundation, I was the only higher ed person there. Uh , they were set up to be nonprofit and because this was back 2014, I got really involved in the Salesforce ecosystem, 20 11, 20 12. I held their first E first webinar in 2012. I held the first event in 2013. Um, and then they kind of grew from there, but they kind of created this position and said, Hey, cath , come work for us. And mm-hmm , <affirmative> help other higher EDS do what you did. Um, and so I did that. They decided while I worked there, I think it was maybe 2016 , um, that they were gonna become a public benefit corporation. Okay . And a public benefit corporation now is no longer a nonprofit and that really didn't fit with my mission. And it also aligned perfectly with a time that I was helping the school called Maryville university , um, architect, a solution that would put students kind of at the center of all of the service interactions that the university had taking the student from the life cycle of , um , prospective student applicant, current student and alumni and friends, so donors. And so , um, I, I was helping them with understanding what would it would take to do the architecture and the president there said, Hey, why don't you come and work for me and actually do it? And so it just worked out perfectly that , uh , it sounds terrible cuz nobody leaves Salesforce. Right. Um , but that Salesforce was moving more into a corporate kind of situation. And I wanted to stay more, a non corporate situation. I still wanted to help my, my community. Um, and president Lombardi reached out to me and, and the way he got me to move was to say, whatever you develop here at Maryville , you can give away to your friends, to your peers, the other schools using Salesforce. And they went , okay , you got me cause I'm big in the open source movement.
Speaker 1So Kathy , let's expand on that a bit just to connect the dots on what led you to take on this massive digital and business transformation project at Nazarene. I know in our previous conversation, you talked about the importance of laying the foundation for this work and how many institutions haven't yet done that.
Speaker 2That's exactly right. And that's a hard thing for schools to understand. It took me 10 years to know how to do this foundation, right? <affirmative> it's not something you can do overnight. Um, but there are some repeatable solutions that have been proven out have born out over time that I know because I had to pioneer them. Right. I made the mistakes with them . I know what to do, what not to do. And so that's really where I can come in and help a school jumpstart their digital transformation because I've already done this mm-hmm <affirmative> . So what I wanna do is I come in and I say, I give you all my configuration, you have the foundation, but now we're gonna come up with a strategy in , in that situation, all that was like many public ins or private institutions that , um, are in distress. And we decided at that time, the reason they got me, I had to come work for them was because they wanted to try a new business model. Mm-hmm <affirmative> they knew that this enrollment curve is coming. They've already had struggles with discounting. Um, their online population had been dwindling. We all know online education's going up, but it's cuz of those outliers it's cuz of S N H U and WG, U it's cause of those big giants. Right . And in online program, like all of that, this tiny school in Illinois can't compete with that . So I took them through this whole series of level setting to even help them understand what's going on in the industry. Cuz they're so insular, they didn't know. And then took them through some strategic planning through that. We got to the, your way program, which is meant to be a differentiator mm-hmm <affirmative> yes, absolutely. It's meant to support students, but first and foremost, it is a differentiator to , um, compete against those big giants. And what we decided to do is , um , is alter all of our general education courses for our adult students to move them from kind of the traditional online course where people are watching lectures mostly mm-hmm <affirmative> . Um , so , uh , we , I use product called my Trailhead , which is , um, a private instance of Salesforce training program, Trailhead, which allows us to create little bite size lessons , um , in a very easy to consume format. Mm-hmm <affirmative> with some knowledge checks. Um, and then I put them in , um , a community where they can engage with the faculty, you know , with peers and that's where they can also, they have a customized list of courses that they have to take. Um, they have , uh , customized , um , syllabus so that they can see all of the homework that they have all of the tests and all of the results and take their final all in one place on that same syllabus page. Um, in addition to being able to link to all of the Trailhead trails, all of the courses online and engage in their groups in the community and submit all of their homework, kinda all in one interface. So it was a , a big, huge solution that was really targeting that , um, some college, no degree that 36 million Americans that we hear about with some college and no degree so that we could , um, switch to this group that has already been so marketed to, but with a differentiator. Yeah. Um , one of the things that we really tried to do is use technology to make it make students perspective. Students feel wanted mm-hmm <affirmative> and welcome. We wanted to make it easy for them to get through our adminis trivia and we wanted to support them. And we were able to do that using technology. Um, we knew that the barriers to students coming back to earn their degree , um, were financial in nature, right? So if they , um, either can't afford it ran out of financial aid or have a balance at another school , um, you know, that and their transcript was being held hostage. We know that that was a big barrier. So we had to remove the financial barrier. So we created this tuition free program. Um, we, that meant we had to bend the cost care for us, right. So we had to , we eliminated admissions and advising basically from the whole new student experience, automating all of that. Right. I auto communicate with them . Uh , we have every intervention. So if they log in , they get a message. If they haven't logged in, they get a message. If they complete their first homework, they get a message. I have all of that built out so that I don't have to spend staff time and resources on that. Mm-hmm <affirmative> because we can't afford to support them in the same way, but they need to be supported. Um, and we just, we keep that very minimal with just the faculty engaging. Um, and then a portion of it is we knew that other barriers where they didn't have a lot of time and so they couldn't make regular time to go to class. They couldn't be in person, it needed to be online and they, they couldn't necessarily commit to a certain schedule. And so that's why we made it self-paced so online, self-paced tuition free . And then a lot of 'em were coming back either after a long period of stop out or step out mm-hmm or with not a lot of confidence, either, not a lot of confidence cause didn't do well in school before or because it's online and it's technology based and they don't feel comfortable . They've never had that experience . So we low as possible . We had to allow them feel comfortable. So we oriented them using Trailhead to orient them to the solution, the, the modules themselves, the community, how they engage with , um , faculty and staff, the resources that they have, we give them Grammarly types of things like that, free downloads of Microsoft office. Um , and we orient them to that. Um, but we also made it , uh, low risk in the way that we allow , um , homework to be submitted in an unlimited number of times. Mm-hmm <affirmative> it just has to be pass or fail. It just has to be complete or incomplete <laugh> and they can submit it until it's complete. There's no risk with that. Right. Same thing with tests, they have to , uh , earn a 70% or better, but they can retake a test as many times as they want meaning many of 'em who get a 90% will retake it so they can get a hundred percent. Right. Yeah. So they're not , they're not hurting their grade in any way. Right. They are . They're getting back into the habit of going to class and, and doing their homework so that when they get out of their general education and get into their major , um, they're, they're on a pathway that feels really comfortable for 'em mm-hmm , <affirmative> , we've kind of oriented them back into school, given them this long runway, to be able to come up to speed with how to be a student again, to ensure that they're much more successful and get to graduation this time. Okay . It's a big solution. It's crazy.
Speaker 1It's a really big solution. And I have so many questions about it because it's like , um, you know, I noticed you also had an admissions background and you've worked in other institutions. I mean , and so you, you understand more of the levers and the pain points maybe than the average, you know, person who's doing this , um, from like we've gotta configure the solutions does . So like, I'm just thinking like when you come to a place, like all it , and you have the, you have this broad mandate, right. As you said, you start with like a nearly impossible problem. Like how much of that are you driving versus doing the technical stuff? Like, can you, can you , can we go backward a bit, like when you got there sort of how you moved the needle, what, what you were involved with, like in terms of setting, how we get to those goals or, or how much collaboration was involved in that.
Speaker 2Yeah, sure. I've , I've been really fortunate maybe , um , that my experience is so varied. Right. I've worked at a lot of universities and I've worked at almost every single department there. So I know our pains as an end user yeah . Of student information system. Yeah . Let's do the information systems and standalone ed tech. I know the pains associated with the processes, but because I've also been , um , I've led CRM initiatives. I can do the technical side as well . So I know this is a pain, I need to fix it by doing this, you know, technology solution that not many people have. They're not both users . And plus I've also been in, I mean, there's a benefit to being old. I hate to say it as much as I hate being old. There's a benefit because I've grown up in the industry so that I'm accustomed to working at a strategic level. Now I'm fortunate that I know how to work at a tactical level. Right. I've had the pains, I know how to do the technology, but where I am , where my skills lie is really at the strategic level. And so at all of that , as I said, they were pretty insular and there's nothing wrong with that. Um , they were in a small faith based school. Uh, they weren't out in the world like I was , uh , with lots of schools and sharing information back and forth. Um, and so while I did have a , a champion in a vice president who was on cabinet , um , for their adult and online programs , uh , for this initiative , um, he really deferred to me in leading the strategy. Mm-hmm , <affirmative> , uh , he had a really hard time, not want , he didn't wanna mandate it. Right. He had a hard time saying , uh , I'm gonna back up and let's, let's develop this together. Um, and it's not that he was unwilling to. He just, they were so accustomed to looking to him for everything. So I came in, he brought me in , um , specifically because I had the experience he didn't have as it related to developing , um , a , a new business model mm-hmm <affirmative> and strategic planning. And so , um, my strategic planning is a little different than most in that , um, as great as they can be, they often end up as shelfware. And I told him I'm not gonna come in and put all of this effort into something. That's gonna sit on a shelf. And so I required them to work with me to select three targets that we had to implement that we had to reach , um , by 2023.
Speaker 1Okay. And
Speaker 2Your way came out of that, that was implementing technology was one, right? Mm-hmm <affirmative> developing a pathway for adult students to do , do degree completion. You know, we had these three targets that we had to meet. And while I , uh , managed the process, if you will , of developing a strategic plan, I ensured that the stakeholders were part of this decision making mm-hmm <affirmative> I didn't make the decision. I led them there. I didn't make the decision. I then was able to , uh , develop an operational plan that is very tactical in nature. And it looks a lot like a technology project plan would kinda project plan . Like literally , this is how we're do it in this sprint. This is how we're gonna do it so that we could keep our strategy on implementing these tactics and measuring them to ensure we got them done by 2023 . Okay . That's that's not how most people do strategic planning. Right. Most people have this general idea and they have a task force . I ran it like a business <laugh> yeah . So that we could make progress. And, and to the, to all of that's credit, this team has been incredibly agile. Um, they've been on board with, you know, me changing everything about their lives. We changed the way they teach for goodness sakes. Yeah. Um , and so it's, it's been an incredible experience with, you know, a ton of changes all at once, but a really good integrated approach to recruitment, admissions onboarding, and, and actually student success. Mm-hmm , <affirmative> all as one process where usually you think of them as very different processes, ours is very integrated in our approach. Mm-hmm
Speaker 1<affirmative>. So there was , um, in terms of like, you set these, these , as you said, like a business, so we've got, this is the timeline, this is what we need to get done. Can you talk about any of the, the metrics to measure the success of it aside from like, okay, well, these were the, the tactical things we needed to do to get to say, this is now implemented. This is now the way we do business. Like, you know, you mentioned for instance, adults and continuing education learners, like has that balance of student change , is it too early for us to say on any of these things, but how are you monitoring the , the impact of effectively implementing these changes?
Speaker 2So, fortunately , um, I can look to industry standards. Um, I pushed us down the recruitment , um, but I can still use enrollment as an indicator and I I'm up 1600% .
Speaker 1When you say push down the recruitment funnel, what do you mean by that?
Speaker 2Uh , usually, so I use a solution called advertising studio that works with my email marketing solution called Parda to advertise in the moment on digital property. Okay . So , uh, that advertising drives leads, leads are converted to inquiries either through a request for information or through , uh , landing page gated content. Um , that adds drive it to that adds them to a communications campaign, both email and SMS if they opt in so that we , um , push them to application the application has been completely streamlined to get them through the application process quickly. And as soon as they're admitted they're , or as soon as they're applied, we conditionally admit them automatically then that night .
Speaker 1Okay . I see you're , you're expediting the, the phases in the timeline of the admissions.
Speaker 2So application admissions admits don't mean anything. And frankly, at every school applications and admits don't mean anything, admissions directors, won't tell you this, but it's our dirty little secret because students can apply innumerable innumerable times now, but they only enroll one place. Right ? Application numbers mean nothing. Admit numbers mean nothing. Cuz if we have tons of applications, our selectivity can still go up and we admit way too many students. They're not gonna come. They're only gonna go to one place. Yeah . So if I don't care about application or admit, I pushed it down, I'm looking at enrollment and we're up 1600% and new students who are provisioned to start a course. What I care about though is because these are tuition free courses. I care about retention mm-hmm <affirmative> . So from, from tuition free to tuition bearing courses and then student success after that first retention. So I've even changed the, the meaning of retention from first year to second year mm-hmm <affirmative> , I'm going from tuition free to student success. Right. So they have to go tuition free to tuition bearing , um, and then retention every term thereafter till graduation. That's
Speaker 1That's a harder retention. I mean, now you've gotta
Speaker 2Pay for it . Yeah . So it ISN' , it isn't right. We just , okay . Tell me more that easy. We just made it easy for them to get that easy. There's still rigorous courses, more user friendly, streamlined, definitely user friendly. Yeah . I mean, you're earning, you're going through bite size , um , chunks of content and earning badges, you know, this's is like gamified. Um , so we've made it much more , uh , user friendly to get through courses. They have college credit now mm-hmm <affirmative> where are they gonna go? I mean, certainly they can transfer and if they transfer great, we still have their contact information. We can bring 'em back as grad students. Um, we do charge a transcript fee, which is a pass through cost because our , uh , outsource transcript company , um , charges it to us. Mm-hmm <affirmative> um , but it's much easier to convert somebody who already has this strong affinity to you . Cause you just help them come back to college , earn college credit in a really user friendly way. So conversion isn't as hard as you think . Now we totally expect that we won't convert most of them and that's okay, this is advertising. We couldn't really buy. Right. Right. So , uh, we, we only have to convert a small percentage, like 5% and we're way over that percentage to continue to earn money. So it's, it's been an incredible differentiator for us and a way to really rethink, do we really need to do that kind of application review? Do we really need to make all of those phone calls where people don't answer phones anymore ? And do we really have to follow those old business processes that admissions offices clean to we don't, we really don't. What we have to do is free up time to use our brain instead of using our fingers to build relationships. And it's building those relationships that are gonna make the difference in student success in graduation . I mean, there's no other way to say it. I mean, it's, it's all about those relationships and them feeling supported .
Speaker 1That's that's really amazing. So how long has this program been in the, your way program been up and running? I mean, you already obviously have results of , um, how many are retaining from free to paid ?
Speaker 2Yeah, so , um , it launched January of 2020 . So just over a year ago, year and a half ago, almost year and a quarter ago. Um , amazingly, this is, this tells you how fast we were able to bring technology board . Um , I started in 20 , our strategic plan was done in March, 2020 . We redid the whole business plan, all of the technology implementation and all of the rewritten content for all of the courses to launch the next January . So nine months we launched . So it's been just over a year and that's how I have , um , metrics already .
Speaker 1Wow. So how do you get, I mean, this is, this creates a lot more work for the faculty, right? They've gotta , now you
Speaker 2Should creates less work,
Speaker 1But initially creating those courses and everything like so that they have these modules ready. How did you, I mean, yes. I , I think that makes sense. Of course it's then like infinitely scalable. And , but there's so many technology things that can make the argument will make it easier in the long run, getting people to put in the up front to get to that point is a different story <laugh>
Speaker 2We paid them .
Speaker 1Okay. All
Speaker 2Right . We paid them to create the content. Um, it's not that the content didn't exist in the courses. We had the courses, right? The content existed. We wanted it rewritten in an engaging way for a self-paced course. Right. So it had to be these six week classes became six modules. And in those modules, there were small little units. I would call lessons, right. If we were trying to do an analogy. And so we had to take content that existed, but we wanted the SMEs, our faculty to rewrite it in a way that made sense as a progression for somebody who's self-paced knowing that they may have to go back knowing that frankly, if they know the , the subject really well, they might jump forward. <laugh> right . Mm-hmm <affirmative>. So we had to have that rewritten and we paid them to do that. It was only right. To pay them to do that. Yeah. We've changed the way they teach more from didactic being didactic to what I will . I call the modern version of the Socratic method, where they're engaging in , um, uh , online community group for their, for their course, for their class . Um , and they pose questions or post articles that are modern current examples of something that they have in a lesson. It's really a modernization of, of that online experience. Mm-hmm, <affirmative> reflecting the ethos that we have on campus, but bringing it online in a new way, that's not the terrible LMS canvas based engagement. This is true kind of , uh , personal one-to-one engagement. Plus people can, can then can have things be discoverable, it's in a feed, right. Mm-hmm <affirmative> so others can chime in. It's not, it's much less risky than, you know, raising your hand in class and Chi in yeah . Or being put on the spot . Right. And so it has changed the way they teach. So to take that adminis trivia off their plate and let them just be brilliant. Mm-hmm <affirmative> , which is really kinda a cool thing.
Speaker 1Yeah. That is really cool. I mean , how did you , um, pedagogy, you know, so many questions about this because like,
Speaker 2How did you , we had to worry about that.
Speaker 1Yeah. Because you know, of all the things you've done, I haven't seen like there wasn't, I was a learning technologist, things like that, you know, here we have, there was we , oh, there was okay .
Speaker 2We , we had a curriculum team, the curriculum team , um, uh , was associated with kind of the traditional online courses , um, so that we could have that continuum and use , uh , a tool smarter measures to make sure that we were , uh , keeping our, our standards. We, we did not wanna compromise in any way, shape or form on the standards. Of course it still had to be rigorous. We still had to be able to answer our creditors. Uh , they went through all of that , um, uh , kind of compliance requirements. Okay . When we, when we did the contact , so they led the , the creation of the content with the faculty and put it through all of its rigors, right. To make sure that it met our standards, it met the accreditation standards and kind of the really high online standards that the university had already sat . Um, that was key. That was really important. Uh , not that we don't absolutely trust the faculty , but we wanted to also be able to answer any questions that we had related to compliance or accreditation or any kind of standards question .
Speaker 1Yeah. There , there were three pain points that you mentioned, or that were mentioned rather in , um, both the case study and then in your nomination. And it was like, I , I really like this framework. It was for the students, it's the admissions, it's the assignments. And then for the professors, it's like the grading , um, are those , like, when I hear you talk about this, it seems like those fit a lot into the first two, but would you say those are the three main ones that these were all designed to address?
Speaker 2Those are three pain points. There are lots of others that we addressed , um , as it relates to grading , um , most universities require a faculty member to go and grade in the LMS and then put a final grade into the SIS using a portal. It's like double the work. Right. We didn't want them to do that. That
Speaker 1Sounds so annoying. I can't imagine
Speaker 2Every university makes faculty do this. So when I , the solution I proposed to them , I said , uh , since the homework's gonna be pass fail , um, all you have to do is , uh , you have a , we gave them an interface that brought up the homework, like what the assignment was and the , the student's response. And they, all they had to do was say complete incomplete. Um , so they could go through like one by one by one by one way , one really fast. Um, and then the, the tests are auto graded , cuz they're multiple choice. The only thing they really had to grade , um, were mastery assessments, which are our final exams and the mastery assessments , um, is we gave them an interface to actually do the grading on that as well, using the rubric. Right. And so they said for, in this rubric that this assignment, you know, met this rubric in this way. Right. Okay . So that we got a point total that auto calculated for them. They didn't have to add it up or anything. And then we pushed it right into Salesforce, right into the system. And so, because we have Salesforce , uh , integrated with our student information system, it also goes right to our student information system. So they didn't have to enter it multiple places. They just had a degree , they just had to , it, nothing else. They didn't have to calculate grades, try to say, you know, 60% of the mastery plus 40% of the average test scores. Right. They didn't have weighted and everything. Yeah. Right. We did all the waiting everything right in Salesforce. So when I, when I showed it to 'em , I swear to God, they cheered, I've never seen faculty, cheer faculty have never cheered for me. I've never seen it either. <laugh> and I didn't realize what a pain point it was , but yes , that was great. Um , this , an onboarding pain point that we really haven't talked about. Yeah. Let's hear about that. Yeah. So in our solution standard to Salesforce is the ability to provide service. We don't think of ourselves as providing service, but that's almost all we do on the administrative side. And almost all advisors do is service. And so we use the standard functionality , um, to document every touchpoint with a student. And as we were implementing this your way program , um , I had already rolled out this functionality to the advisors . And so they documented every touchpoint with a student , whether that was an advising session or if , if was phone call , they documented everything . And I made them categor . Um , every interaction was categorized three levels mm-hmm <affirmative> . So then I could say, what are the biggest pain points? Why are students reaching out to us that surfaced business intelligence for us? And the number one reason was scheduling. They wanted a schedule change. They, what is my schedule? What courses do I have to take when? And, and , uh , I wanna change my schedule. I wanna register, right. I wanna change my schedule. And so , uh , one of the things that we took on at the same time was the moment they were admitted. We created a default kind of work degree plan, personal program plan , whatever the school calls it, we created a default one. They didn't have, they no longer have to create a default one. They, we gave them the ability to, we gave students the ability to document their transfer credit. And that was brought right into their personal program time . So they don't have to take those courses. Staff can use that same interface to detail transcripts so that the , the students degree plan already show transferred credit as transferred. And they don't have to take those courses. Um , and it , then it tells them exactly in order the fastest way they're gonna get to graduation and gives them an interface and staff and interface to be able to make changes on their own. We put guardrails in place, right? You can't take a course that fulfills a major requirement by choosing an elective. Right. Right . We , we , we put , uh , rules against that . So they , they could only select another courses that were available to swap out or they could , um , reschedule to a different term . They could add as many courses they wanted take at a time or , uh , take one at a time . We gave them the ability . Anytime a student makes a change, we create a record in the system, a case in the system that alerts the advisor, that that student made a change in case the ad . Well, to let the advisor know, but also because we wanted to make sure the advisors had a visibility into it and ensure our logic was okay , mm-hmm <affirmative> they could take a look and say, did they make a mistake? Is there a problem? And at first we didn't have every guardrail in place . And as they worked those cases, we put all of the guardrails in place and it's , they don't have to check those anymore because they know that they can trust the logic, but we put it there really to give them the confidence that they no longer had to worry about students making their own scheduling changes. Yeah . Part of that schedule, we have a backend process. I do a ton of automation that mm-hmm <affirmative> creates a registration record form . That registration record is just in Salesforce until two weeks before the term. And then it goes into our, our student information system. But what that does is it gives us the ability to have a have visibility into forecasting course demand mm-hmm <affirmative> and seven years out. I know , seven years , my course demand. If a student in real time becomes an active , they transfer, they drop out . If they become an active , if they graduate , um, any future course connection, any future registration records are automat automatically deleted. If they change their schedule, that registration record is changed. Either it's swapped out for another course or moved to another term. So in real time , every single solitary moment, I know, seven years out what my course demand is.
Speaker 1That's amazing.
Speaker 2So <laugh> , that's , that was about 70% of the manual work that advisors did according to them documenting those interactions, those cases . Um , and so we, I'm not saying we eliminated validate , there's still work that has to be done, but we eliminated a huge portion of the tedious manual work that they had to do so that they could really spend their time advising, not doing clerical work.
Speaker 1Yeah . Which for the ,
Speaker 2Makes your life so much better.
Speaker 1And it's more for then the, those one-on-one nuance situations that they have the time for that that is needed quite frankly, too.
Speaker 2Exactly. Right. Exactly. Right.
Speaker 1What were some other pain points? Like, I , I don't wanna have you like list them in a , in a complete hierarchy, but it sounds like those admissions and , um, grading and assignments, weren't what you definitely think of as the top three ones, but maybe we can just discuss, well , some of the other ones and what was done.
Speaker 2Yeah. It's depending on the , the audience. Right. So homework self-paced courses, you know , uh , finding of , uh , finances. Those were, those are student pain points, right. Mm-hmm <affirmative> that we had to address . So that that's certainly a top one, but that's a student pain point .
Speaker 1Okay .
Speaker 2Um, admissions, as it relates to students going through the process. Absolutely. We remove the fee. Um, they don't have many requirements because they're starting, they're proving themselves as our student. They , all they have to do is provide an official transcript, which is what frankly, 90% of the schools require anyway . Um , but we've made it very easy for them to do that. Um, so yes, the admissions process for students has been streamlined. What I did for staff is remove , uh , no brainer admissions, frankly. They don't almost every admissions office spends way too much on no brainer admissions. And so what are those, of course, they're going to be admitted. Why do I have to look at anything? Okay. And almost all of us, almost every school we spend most of our time on no brainer admissions, either they're gonna be admitted or they're gonna be denied, no brainer. Right? Yeah . And why, why do we do that? That's so that's such a waste of time. We should be spending our time on those ones that we really have to think about, right. To make a decision on. And frankly, yield, I don't applications don't mean anything admits don't mean anything yield means everything. And so, and frankly draw rate , but that's getting into marketing, but , um, mm-hmm , <affirmative> enrolled students is what matters. And so moving admissions down the funnel , uh , was a , a staff pain point, right? They didn't wanna spend their time on no brainer, no value , low value work. They wanted to spend it on high value work. Um , we got rid of like all of the no brainer work , which is awesome. That was a huge pain point for staff. Um , scheduling was a huge pain point for staff. Um, just getting program enrollment, created registration was a huge pain point for staff. So all of that is now literally the moment they start the application, they, we create them as a person. We create their application, REIT them. We create a program enrollment for them. We create a default schedule and give them an interface , uh , so that they can make changes. And we auto register them. We onboard them. We provision them , onboard them through an online orientation, which is a trail that takes 'em through exactly how, what they're going to experience as a student. And we customize personalize based on their transfer credit, all the courses that they have to take, give them an easy way to take those courses. And then kind of the other pain point with homework with students is give them an easy way to submit the homework in a way that they're accustomed to submitting, but with a very low risk of a bad grade, I mean, they can keep taking it until they have a good grade. Um, and then , um , making it very simple for them to convert from , uh, general education to their core courses. So we onboard them pretty well. We use the same solution. We just write onboard them, right . To tuition paying courses , um , by helping them understand the , uh , six week model that we have for taking courses and, and get them into the system for , uh , the more traditional courses work that is the core courses , um ,
Speaker 1Six weeks. Does that mean that's a deadline for them to complete everything they need to, or can it be, self-paced
Speaker 2Like , I'm sorry. Uh , so the general education courses are all 100% self-paced
Speaker 1Oh,
Speaker 2Okay . When you get into the major courses, your core courses, those are , uh , they are turn based in the turn six weeks long. So they start and end. They , they're not self-paced the core courses are not self-paced mm-hmm <affirmative> . And so we have to, we get them as we convert them into the rhythm of that six weeks, we have a little club , six , they , um, they join them . They get accustomed to working in six week cadence to get through a course. And in that way we've prepared them for their core courses. Mm-hmm <affirmative> so that they can come up to speed slowly if you will . Yeah . Um , and it doesn't necessarily have to be slowly because some students come over with only one or two gen ed courses that they have to take. Right. And they just wanna get through 'em fast to get to their core. Yeah . We don't slow 'em down in any way. Right. They're they're already way motivated to get to their core. Um , it's the, the ones who are a little less comfortable. So we had quite a few pain points to address with , um, students as well. Faculty. I mean, the biggest thing was grading , uh , getting rid of the administrative administrative associated with , um , preparation for courses mm-hmm <affirmative> right. And , and then getting rid of , um, all of the , um , I would say administra administrivia around monitoring their many classes in say in canvas, as opposed to one group with automated messaging associated with it. So the moment somebody posts something, they get an email, they can be in the feed right . At the moment, but they get an email, they can respond to that email and it posts directly to that feed. They don't even have to log in if they don't want to . Right. Yeah . So we've made it really simple for them to engage. So that's very different than the canvas experience.
Speaker 1Oh yeah. Yeah . Well, what about with the , the student body makeup now? Like the demographics, I mean, with the gen ed, it sounds like, you know, you could do all that obviously remotely on your own time. So are you seeing , uh , different ages, people from different backgrounds, income brackets areas, like how, when , when you're going up 1600%, where is that 1600% coming from? Cause we we've heard so much about the demographic cliff when you're talking about a small private school. It's like, those are the ones that seem the most sort of end danger by all this . And how do they overcome those geographical barriers or just population barriers and all that.
Speaker 2So to answer your question , um, our , all of that has a , a traditional in person experience, the coming of age experience is , um , Paula bla says , right, that's their bread and butter with , you know, a very small faith based group. Um, that means that there's not a lot of diversity, right? They tend to be Christian. They tend to be affluent. They tend to be white. I mean, there's not a lot of diversity. I'm not saying all of them are, there's some diversity, but there's not a time . Not like I worked at Wayne state university smack dab in the middle of Detroit. This at event is not diverse compared to diversity at a state university. Um, and so we saw a huge change in diversity, just from the she numbers. We didn't target the traditional aged student. I'm not saying we didn't have traditional aged student supply. We did. Um , but we didn't target them. Our advertising is all very efficiently targeted. Literally. I don't have advertising out there that is not related to standalone audience. I have this a lookalike audience based on my own , um, successful students that says only when somebody online , uh , meets these, these , this criteria show my ad. Yeah . So I really targeted the advertising. It is super efficient , um, which is unusual, but super efficient. Um, so that we were looking at an older population. Mm-hmm <affirmative> , we don't, we did have to worry about politics. You don't wanna cannibalize your freshman class. I didn't , I don't, there's plenty of people out there. I didn't need to cannibalize them . I didn't need to pull from the small community where all of that exists on campus. I needed to pull from the Midwest and greater mm-hmm <affirmative> . We even got students from overseas, who I told that they are not gonna get an I 20. Right. Usually the international students, cuz they wanna come to the us , these are the students who actually wanted to earn credit. Right. And so they knew they weren't getting an I 20. So we , our diversity, not only did we go up like a decade in average , um , age for adult study students, but our diversity was blown out the window. I mean, it , it is, it is completely diverse now and, and rightfully so. It's a wonderful way to bring a whole bunch of people in a , a pathway back to college and have them engage with, you know, all different types in a classroom, which doesn't normally happen in most schools . Yeah . Profound effect on us .
Speaker 1It certainly doesn't well , Kathy , this has truly been a fascinating conversation and I'm ever so grateful that you took the time to share this inspiring journey with our listeners, along with the impactful results that ONU has seen from its digital transformation thus far. So that concludes this month's episode of Tamini group's top of mind podcast. Thank you for listening. And as always, don't forget to check out our other episodes, blogs and resources@thetainigroup.com .