Dear Colleagues:
We are writing to provide an update on our university wide efforts to continually support student success.
As you may know, two years ago, a committee comprised of faculty and staff conducted an extensive review (and a formal RFP process) of available student success software. Following this review, the consensus of the committee was to stick with an application developed internally by Jeff Winston (CETL) which at the time was called Sandbox (now known as Nexus). While Sandbox had many features and users at the time, the committee also felt that to be truly effective as a university wide system, the user base needed to expand and additional features developed. And, that is precisely what has happened.
Data suggests that Nexus is being used extensively across the entire university and all campuses. Nexus is currently being used by all of the academic advising offices at Storrs and the Regional campuses with more than 1,000 active staff and faculty accounts. To provide some additional context, in the last year Nexus had more than 6 million page views and close to 300,000 emails sent to students from advising staff. In reviewing the activity related to the fall 2018 freshman cohort, we know that:
- 99% of students have advising notes in their file
- 96% checked in at a kiosk (more than 100 kiosks are deployed throughout the university at advising centers, tutoring centers, maker spaces, academic departments, and units such as global affairs, student activities
- 96% had their profile viewed by a staff/faculty member
- 87% of students booked an appointment with a staff/faculty member
- 67% checked in at a tutoring center
- 30% chose to opt-into the text messaging feature
- 10% used the GPA calculator.
Additional information about Nexus features can be found here: https://nexus.uconn.edu/about.php
In the coming months we will be rolling out additional data-informed features including predictive analytics, focused communication-nudge capabilities, and data visualization dashboards---all tools designed to provide the advising community with the information they need to more continuously and effectively engage our students. We consider ourselves fortunate to have such a highly capable system that has garnered such widespread grassroots support, and we are excited about how Nexus will allow us to take advantage of high impact opportunities related to student success.
John C. Volin Michael Mundrane Nathan Fuerst
Vice Provost for Academic Affairs Vice President and Chief Information Officer Vice President for Enrollment Planning & Management
For more information, contact: Jeff Winston at jeffrey.winston@uconn.edu