March 2, 2021 — CSU Channel Islands (CSUCI) has earned national recognition for innovative programs in the Division of Academic Affairs’ Teaching & Learning Innovations area, as well as the Division of Student Affairs.
CSUCI is one of 10 universities across the nation to garner one of the inaugural Virtual Innovation Awards: Excellence in Delivering Virtual Student Services, a newly created award program funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and presented Feb. 23 through the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA) – Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education. It carries a prize of $15,000.
The 2020 Virtual Innovation Award was announced for the Division of Academic Affairs’ Teaching & Learning Innovation (TLI) area for their imaginative efforts with the University’s chatbot, Ekhobot, and a micro-course, “Learning Online 101,” during the COVID-19 pandemic.
CSUCI’s Division of Student Affairs (DSA) earned recognition from a different awards program called the NASPA Excellence Awards, which recognizes outstanding work in 12 categories from student affairs divisions across the nation — that awards ceremony will be in March.
The DSA’s Data and Assessment Program was announced as the Gold Award winner in the “Assessment, Persistence, Data Analytics and Related” category. The program was recognized for its ability to examine which Student Affairs programs were used by students, how much they were used, and how well students benefited from them. The DSA also excelled at analyzing student demographics, student success metrics and assessing the best co-curricular and support programs.
In addition, the DSA was awarded the Grand Silver Award. The Grand Gold, Silver, and Bronze Awards are selected from the Gold Award Winners in each of the 12 respective categories.
CSUCI’s Interim President Richard Yao, Ph.D. was serving as Vice President of Student Affairs until January, said the DSA excelled at collecting and analyzing data from every DSA program.
“The way our Division of Student Affairs examines data is forward-thinking, very timely and necessary, because we know that student engagement and co-curricular programming plays a significant role in student success, closing equity gaps and meeting our Graduation Initiative 2025 goals (a CSU-wide initiative to increase graduation rates while eliminating opportunity and achievement gaps),” Yao said.
Yao believes that this approach to assessment has resulted in numerous collaborations across the University and has led to a more targeted and intentional approach to student outreach and interventions.
“I am so glad to see our campus and our Division of Student Affairs get recognized for their work,” Yao said. “When I came on in 2018, collecting and utilizing data to evaluate our programs and inform our interventions to close equity gaps and increase student success was our top priority and it really was a heavy lift for the entire division. So much credit goes out to the entire team who did all of this work in service to our students.”
Associate Vice Provost for Innovation and Faculty Development Jill Leafstedt, Ph.D, who heads TLI, said the team was “absolutely thrilled” to win a Virtual Innovation award for CSUCI’s exemplary creativity in adapting the campus support systems to a virtual platform following the large scale online shift caused by COVID-19.
Ekhobot, the University’s chatbot, was launched in Fall of 2019 to answer questions for freshmen about a new campus experience. After the pandemic hit and CSUCI went virtual, the TLI team that manages Ekhobot noticed a change in the messages they were getting from students.
Questions like “When are the library’s hours today?” and “Where do I pay my student housing fees?” changed to “Sometimes I feel very alone. I miss my roommate. I can’t seem to find the motivation for anything,” or “Feeling stressed about online classes. I feel lost.”
“As soon as we had to quickly shift to remote instruction and information was changing rapidly, you could immediately tell the students’ needs were different,” said Interim Assistant Director of Student Success Communication and Chatbot Tara Hughes. “We had to recognize the enormity of the moment. They were wondering what they would do if they couldn’t live on campus or wondering if they would still be able to get food from the Dolphin Pantry.”
The TLI team expanded Ekhobot’s reach to all students, rather than just new students, and Hughes—with input from the team—crafted her messages to offer support, empathy, up-to-the-minute information about the new normal and when needed—a laugh.
We had to offer students support and encouragement, which they got in a non-judgmental way,” Hughes said. “Because it’s a bot, it allowed students to feel more comfortable to share whether they’re mad or sad or confused.”
Meanwhile, TLI Learning Designer Megan Eberhardt modified a course called “Learning Online 101” into a micro-course to help faculty and students brush up on their virtual learning skills. After it was launched, more than 50 institutions across the nation adopted the course.