Division of Digital Learning
Update December 2022

Our Student Experience area focuses on student support and engagement from pre-admission to graduation. In order to create an exceptional online student experience, our services need to be tailored to fit and support the fully online student.

As we look to the future, we want to utilize standards-based integrated platforms for a consistent student experience, leverage technology and AI-enabled processes to identify at-risk students, and provide support throughout the entire student lifecycle to promote and ensure success.

So, how are we going to do this?

We’ve begun the launch of Student Success Hub, a tool in Salesforce that allows advisors to understand student behaviors, their progress, and potentials for stop outs or other risk factors. And for students it is a one stop mobile-friendly shop for all of their success needs.

The technology and integrations will allow us to quickly identify and proactively address student needs that we recognize or that their behavior predicts they will need. This includes early alerts, success scoring, ability to prioritize at-risk students as well as engage and encourage high achievers.

This is important. Often, we focus all of our attention on at-risk students and neglect those who are performing well. What if we can learn that a student can graduate earlier than expected with slight adjustments to their schedule? Recognizing these indicators and our ability to communicate with these students will continue to elevate the support that ODUGlobal provides.

Any other big news?

Yes! We’ve been working with our counterparts in SEES to take over the admissions process for the online student population. We have updated the application to more clearly delineate between face-to-face and fully online students, and, as we review standards of operations, we have the opportunity—and the responsibility—to look at pre-assessments to better understand the readiness of our applicants, as not all students are able to be successful in this space.

This will also allow us to rethink how we approach denials. Instead of just a “no, you won’t be successful” or “you don’t have what is needed to be admitted,” we want to reframe it as a "not yet."

We can use pre-assessment information to connect denied applicants with our enrollment coordinators who will then help those applicants develop a pathway to admission in the future. We will, of course, uphold the standards of admission, but also look for opportunities to streamline processes to ensure we stay competitive in the ever-growing online environment.

Anything else?

Yes! We have created a new unit within Student Experience to focus specifically on student retention and special populations in need of extra or unique support, such as non-degree seeking students, campus changers, and active-duty military students. Support initiatives will include academic continuance with early alerts and identification of stop outs for proactive engagement and support, as well as online student recognition activities such as a dean’s list.

We are also creating tailored orientations and onboarding processes for various special populations. These will ensure that the right information gets to the right student at the right time. For example, we can help our non-degree students see how their piecemeal courses can apply to a degree track, and help our military students effectively use their tuition assistance or transition to utilize their G.I. Bill benefits.

Doubling fully online enrollment in five years requires incredibly robust online offerings, and we are excited to launch new processes and approaches to better leverage faculty and staff expertise.

What’s changing? A lot!

We recently adopted the best practices standards outlined by the industry leading company known as Quality Matters. We upskilled our staff by investing in QM trainings for instructional designers and technologists, and we overhauled the course development process.

Previous development processes limited our ability to respond to rapid development needs, and our cycles offered limited entry points. We have now developed flexible design solutions to meet the various needs of our faculty, whether they need a light refresh, a complete redevelopment, a new development, or even just a quality check. In addition, we have incorporated a rolling queue where courses can enter into the development process at any time based on capacity and program priority.

What about faculty, you might ask?

Well, we’ve updated the compensation model for development of online courses. Beginning in Spring 2023, we’ve established a tiered structure where faculty can earn $7,500 for a full course development and $5,000 for a redesign. We are also offering additional supplements for Quality Matters trainings in Rubric and Peer Review for $2,500 each.

When it comes to providing professional development opportunities for faculty, we will offer:

  • Self-paced (on-demand) asynchronous workshops for design, development, and facilitation
  • QM trainings and certifications (ie. Quality Matters Teaching Certification)
  • Instructional Design & Technology Consultations
  • Digital accessibility workshops and support
  • Support for all online offerings (synchronous and asynchronous)

Clearly, we’ve been busy over the Fall semester, but some of the most exciting changes are yet to come!

For instance, we are transforming the campus experience so that our online students can also engage, enjoy, and embrace our beautiful campus, virtually.  

A virtual ODU campus can play a role in the entire student lifecycle. Before people even decide to become an ODU student, we can allow them to experience the campus. This is becoming expected by our target populations. How many open houses have been replaced by virtual tours? Our students could use this to aid in their decision-making process as they fall in love with the campus without ever having to step foot on it.

From a student experience lens, we know that many online students struggle to feel connected to the institution. We want them to be able to experience campus in the ways that many of us get to every day. From campus tours and entering campus buildings, engaging in social events, participating in student organizations as well as finding the services available, new technologies can help online students feel connected and supported in ways not previously possible. We want to leverage this to build that sense of community and support systems that will set ODUGlobal apart from the competition.

Virtual Reality – we just had to go here! We are exploring how we institute virtual reality into the classroom to deliver immersive offerings where our students can experience replicated real-world environments and have an ability to test real-world scenarios without real world consequences.

Again, let's consider our population of students and the immersive experiences they already have in their daily lives. For example, if you ride an exercise bike, you can choose to ride down a street in Paris and will be immersed in the exact scenery of that environment, potentially eyeing the Eiffel Tower during your ride. This same technology allows our healthcare student to hold a digital replica of a heart in their hand, the engineer can have a digital twin of an engine in front of them, and the art history student can actually see the era that they are learning about and engage in the artifacts of that time.

Finally, we are engaging in Drone Video Recording! A number of our videographers on staff are already working towards their commercial unmanned aircraft certification, enabling them to produce high quality images and cinematography. This new capability will allow us to produce video that was previously impossible. Would you like to share a construction site which would have previously been off limits for an individual? Now we can help! Those aerial shots of difficult-to-reach areas along with various point of view shots (ie. bird of prey view and the lens of a pilot) provide unique experiences for online students and exciting opportunities for our faculty to incorporate new ways to learn into their classrooms.

Released December 15, 2022