Curation of Student Success Pieces

If you click on the Educause logo to the left, you will be taken to their collection of iPASS webinars. iPASS stands for Integrated Planning and Advising for Student Success, which was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (iPASS, 2018). Educause and Achieving the Dream helped 36 colleges and universities rework their, "...advising structures, workflows, and student support processing using technology" (iPASS, 2018). The webinars look at a lot of behind-the-scenes processes that these institutions created to make effective programs. As an aspiring academic advisor, I found the "Advisor Voices" webinar interesting. You will need to download Adobe Connect to view the webinars, or you can download the slides provided from each webinar.

Through the DEEP (Documenting Effective Educational Practices) study Kuh conducted, he highlights four of the more critical themes found throughout the study and addresses each briefly. For the sake of overview of the article, they are, "Advisors know their students well, advisors strive for meaningful interactions with their students, advisors help students identify pathways to academic and social success, and advising and student success is considered a tag team activity" (Kuh, 2006). He ends the article by posing six questions for advisors to think about, that would potentially allow them to make an impact on their school's "educational effectiveness" (Kuh, 2006).

This TEDx talk by Arel Moodie highlights some great habits that he developed in order to succeed as a student, and as a person. This video resonates with my vision of student success because Arel sees student success as an individual measurement, rather than a standard for all. When students are able to view their success as something they are satisfied with, rather than what is expected of them, they stop measuring themselves up against others. If a student is able to think about what would make them a successful student in their eyes, they empower themselves. Much like Arel was overwhelmed with his Chemistry class, I was overwhelmed in my first graduate school class: Strategic Enrollment Management. I let the professor know after the second class that none of the material was making sense to me. He said, with a grin on his face, "Don't put the forest before the trees." With that, everything clicked, and I was able to work on the class' material at my own pace, instead of comparing myself to the other more experienced students in the class.