Student Engagement Hub: Production Planned to Begin 2021

In a message to campus partners who participated in the Student Digital Experience Mapping Workshops last year, Executive Director of Digital Transformation and Student and Academic Technologies Darcy Van Patten announced a "thin slice" of the Student Engagement Hub starting in 2021.

This project comes after a successful year of expanding Trellis to Support. Outreach. Success. (SOS), the Office of Scholarships & Financial Aid, the Office of Registrar, and many others. As a result, these campus units have been able to retire multiple stand-alone systems, save money, save time, and offer a more consistent and personalized student digital experience.

In the message, Van Patten reiterated specific goals that these workshop series explored.

"From the very beginning, our team wanted to inform the University of Arizona's priorities for an integrated student engagement hub that will bring together the most important information and interactions that students rely on daily. We also wanted to understand the role that individual systems have on student interactions, consider systems that could be retired as the University launched Trellis, and build a shared understanding around the student's digital journey so, collectively, we can all continue to improve our systems and services."

As a result of the collaborative workshop series, the Student Academic Technologies team and Trellis were able to identify over 100 different systems that students interact with and develop initial hypotheses for improving their digital experience, which were later vetted and confirmed in student focus groups.

Van Patten said the initial slice of the Student Engagement Hub will focus on students' #1 pain point – tracking academic due dates and ‘in class’ grades.

"Despite broad adoption of D2L Brightspace, the University's learning management system, there is still significant variation in how individual instructors use the platform, including use of structured calendar due dates and the gradebook. Our first iteration of the Hub will allow students to track due dates and grades, and also add information that may be housed in analogue syllabi and other systems."

The Student Engagement Hub also expands on the modernized UAccess Student Center, which launched this past summer and gave students a high-quality mobile experience for actions they manage most commonly during their time at the University.

Stay tuned for more information:

Subscribe to the Trellis Newsletter for up-to-date content and monthly news.