The Connected College

How do we define student success holistically across the full end-to-end experience? How can institutions use digital transformation to catalyze improvements rather than just overlaying new technologies? How do leaders effectively manage adoption, operations, and process redesign to continuously adapt? Elliot Felix talks through these with Chrysoula Malogianni, Ph.D. the Chief Digital Experience Officer at Old Dominion University. Together, we explore actionable strategies for dismantling institutional silos and cultivating a highly connected campus ecosystem that drives long-term student retention and achievement. 🎙️ Listen here: https://lnkd.in/gUYFvtkc How is your institution addressing digital transformation to improve the student experience and eliminate administrative friction next year? #highered #studentsuccess #connectedcollege #leadership #digitaltransformation #edtech #academicinnovation #digitaltransformationneverstops

🎓 How can you measure and improve college student belonging? If you are attending NASPA - Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education 's Student Success conference in Austin, I hope you'll join Jeff Doyle and me to dive into this question! Our session on 6/12 is entitled "Going Broad and Deep to Understand, Measure, and Improve College Student Belonging" 📈 I will go broad with with national research and metrics on belonging like ACHA or NSSE and then talk through best-practices on building institutional, peer, staff, and faculty connections from The Connected College and our work at Buro Happold. 💫 Jeff will go deep on his Sense of Belonging inventory touching on identity, acceptance, social capital, peer connections, and faculty/staff connections -- see link in comments for his model. 🙋 We'll have engaging discussions and workshop activities throughout so we can learn with and from each other. See you in Austin! #studentsuccess #highered #naspa #SSHE #belonging

🚀 Are your #studentsuccess efforts stuck in “pilot purgatory”? Every college and university has brilliant flashes of innovation happening right now. Maybe it’s a single faculty member bringing real-world projects for a local company into the classroom, or an alum relations staffer creatively re-engaging graduates for mentorship and recruiting. But too often, these amazing initiatives stay trapped in isolated pockets. They fail to catch fire campus-wide, ultimately burning out the very innovators who started them. At Wisconsin’s Future of Higher Ed Summit this week, Elliot Felix was asked a critical question: “How can we go from successful pilots to system change?” Tomorrow, the next edition of The Connected College newsletter drops, and we are diving deep into the answer. We’ll explore how institutions can stop reinventing the wheel by leveraging technology partners to scale success, tame digital sprawl, and learn from their peers. We’ll also be highlighting how 5 notable companies discussed in The Connected College are helping universities transition from sporadic success to campus-wide transformation: Suitable.co, Pathify, Riipen, Acadeum, and Noodle. Your students deserve more than a lucky encounter with a great pilot program; they deserve a fully connected ecosystem. 👉 Subscribe below via the link in the comments! #HigherEducation #EdTech #Innovation #StudentSuccess #ConnectedCollege #HigherEdLeadership

How are academic library staffing and services changing? 🙋♂️Last fall, I had a chance to talk about and facilitate discussions on this question with Greg Raschke at the Designing Libraries Conference sharing insights from The Connected College and our work at Buro Happold! 💫 I talked about how libraries are offering new programs and new projects and offering them with new partners - and how these means staff are playing new roles and working at a new pace, with new technologies with new processes. 📈 This means that spaces are used, measured, and managed differently and that staffing structures need to change as well. 📺 Link in comments to watch (my part of the talk)! #highered #studentsuccess #connectedcollege #libraries #academiclibraries #designinglibrariea

This was a fun one to write! Inspiring to hear from amazing speakers and apply their life lessons to #studentsuccess work with colleges and universities!

What If Commencement Speeches Aren't Just for Students? Every spring, we listen to world-class leaders, artists, and thinkers stand at the podium and offer advice to our graduating students. We nod, laugh, cry, and then send our graduates out into the world. But what if you applied this wisdom to your student success work? This week’s Connected College newsletter dives into Elliot Felix's favorite speeches so that their lessons to inform and inspire your work! Hear from Chadwick Boseman, Admiral William H. McRaven, Shonda Rhimes, David Foster Wallace, Roger Federer, Denzel Washington, Jacinda Ardern, and Justice Elena Kagan on lessons about finding purpose, developing habits, rolling up your sleeves, focusing your attention, practice, listening, breaking tradition, planning for serendipity and more! Link in comments to read and join 500+ institutions in subscribing for insights from The Connected College! ❓ How is your team translating commencement wisdom into student success? #highered #studentsuccess #connectedcollege #commencementwisdom

What’s stifling innovation in higher education and how can you spark it instead? This was the core question Bradley Fuster and I discussed on the The EdUp Experience Innovation podcast. We had a great conversation about culture, strategy, and leadership, sharing lessons from The Connected College and our collective experiences. We talked about: 🎯 How many institutions are stuck because they have strategic plans but don’t have a strategy so they are trying to be all things to all people and do more with less ➕ How the culture of higher education is often to adapt by adding, without doing the hard work of subtracting and consolidating (especially if you lack a strategy to focus you) ✍ The need for bold leadership and more agile planning in shorter-cycles and the recognition that it means saying “no” and that some people will disagree; in fact, if they don’t, you don’t have a strategy. 🚀 Lessons from Everett Rogers Diffusion of Innovations and others in how ideas spread and scale so you can drive adoption because it's not enough to have good ideas; you need good implementation as well. Along the way, there are lots of fun observations and references (cf. The West Wing “Supremes” episode). Link to listen in the comments! #highered #studentsuccess #connectedcollege #innovation #edup #edupinnovation

Should we *hack* colleges so students link their courses, clubs, and careers on their own? Or should we *connect* colleges with strategy that breaks down silos so that students succeed? What role do culture, policies, and technology play in how easy or hard they are to navigate? When you want to make progress, where do you start – is it top-down or bottom up? In this special episode, Elliot Felix discusses these questions with Scott Carlson and Ned Laff, Ph.D. Laff, authors of Hacking College. 🎙️ Listen here (with links to wherever you get your pods): https://lnkd.in/gpa5PjZE #highered #studentsuccess #connectedcollege #leadership #designthinking #innovation #highereducationmanagement

We are currently witnessing the "Great Compression" in higher education. From UNT and Penn State to St. Cloud State and East Carolina, institutions are announcing sweeping cuts to academic programs to bridge massive budget deficits or to proactively focus and avoid them. But "cutting your way to health" is a dangerous game if you don't have the right roadmap. In this week's Connected College newsletter, Elliot Felix unpacks the data behind these decisions drawing from Robert Kelchen's new analysis and he covers how leaders can navigate this realignment without losing sight of the student experience. Here are three ways to move from reactive "swerving" to proactive "academic master planning" (h/t to Catherine Wehlburg, Ph.D.) 📊 Get the Data: You can’t manage what you don’t measure. Many universities find that a small minority of programs serve the vast majority of students. At Indiana State, for example, 50% of programs served 90% of the students. Linking cost data to enrollment is the first step in knowing where to reinvest. 🛤️ The Master Plan Approach: As Catherine Wehlberg suggests, view your academic portfolio as a road. The goal is to spot obstacles in the distance and make minor, ongoing adjustments rather than waiting for a crisis that forces a sudden, violent swerve. 📈 Top- and Bottom-Line Balance: You can’t grow your way out of every problem, but you can’t just cut either. Remember that 80% of new programs fail to reach scale (more than 5 graduates) within five years according to Robert Gray Atkins. Strategic "pruning" allows you to tell a better story: you are cutting to grow. As Ben Horowitz famously said, “The company story is the company strategy.” What is your institution’s story for the next five years? 👉 Read the full breakdown and get the tools to lead through this disruption here:https://lnkd.in/gv6rTZMK #HigherEd #StudentSuccess #Leadership #AcademicInnovation #ConnectedCollege #Strategy

How can you build the skills and habits around empathy and emotional intelligence to elevate students' EQ so that they can be effective, inspiring leaders and people who can just get stuff done and move things forward? What are the habits and norms from phones and social media that we all have to unlearn to do this? How does this help students show up differently in school, work, and life? Elliot Felix talks through these questions with Francesca Schuler, Executive Director of Dialogue Vanderbilt at Vanderbilt University. 🎙️ Listen here: https://lnkd.in/gTYB8hcK How are you helping your students move beyond "hot takes" to build the emotional intelligence habits they'll need for their careers? #highered #studentsuccess #connectedcollege #leadership #emotionalintelligence #civildiscourse #careerreadiness