Access and the Online Academic Success Center Emily Shreve, Associate Director of Academic Transitions, University of Nevada, Las Vegas What does it take to move an entire suite of academic support services online? With tens of thousands of students to serve, how can this be accomplished within the 300-person limit of a Zoom room? On many campuses, a wide range of student success programs, from academic coaching to transfer student programming, are easy for students to access via the academic success center. These are welcoming spaces where students can be directed to the academic support services they need. The March 2020 closure of campuses made necessary the transition to remote academic success services. Potentially, such a shift would disrupt the essential work of these centers and hinder their effectiveness at a time when students deeply needed their support. The academic success centers at Arizona State University and Texas A&M University—both large, four-year, public institutions—found viable ways to offer services online and, most essentially, to communicate with the campus community about the new means of access. The impact of the remote shift will be long-lasting, as both centers have begun to reimagine their future program delivery options in light of what this move has revealed about student access needs.
The Transition The Academic Success Center (ASC) at Texas A&M provides academic coaching, tutoring, supplemental instruction (SI), developmental education courses, transfer student programming, and more for transfer students, students on academic probation, and the general undergraduate population. Staff moved all services online within two weeks of the campus closing. Academic coaches offered appointments through email, Zoom, and phone. Classes, tutoring, and SI sessions were also conducted through Zoom. Transfer student peer mentors held Zoom appointments and live chat sessions. Aside from the time needed to learn the new technologies, there was an additional financial cost associated with the transition as ASC staff had to purchase webcams, digital writing tablets, and other equipment to provide these interactive services. Similar to Texas A&M’s ASC, the University Academic Success Programs (UASP) at Arizona State offer academic support through SI, tutoring, and more across four campuses and 11 different centers. Though some UASP tutoring services had been online for more than 10 years, staff had to adapt to moving all services online with Zoom. The writing centers were given their own Zoom rooms, while all subject-area tutoring was collapsed into a single Zoom room to provide easy access for students. An informal collaboration between the Texas A&M and Arizona State centers influenced their similar approaches to online services. UASP took the lead by providing webinars on using Zoom for tutoring and SI, which were attended by ASC staff from Texas A&M.
Reaching Students Not only did academic success centers have to manage the technical transition, they also had to find ways to communicate with students and campus partners who were now widely dispersed. Informing the broader campus community of the newly online services was a major area of emphasis at Texas A&M and Arizona State. For classes and SI sessions, staff did their best to keep schedules that had been
Staff from Texas A&M’s Academic Success Center shared photos of their unofficial emotional support animals (i.e., their pets) on Twitter. set at the start of the semester; this reduced confusion, as students were already used to accessing services at those times. The websites at Texas A&M and Arizona State were updated, and targeted emails were sent to advisors and students. Students in developmental education classes were contacted by phone due to concerns about access to technology. Special social media campaigns were launched by the ASC marketing director, and several staff members were interviewed for campus publications. Engaging students was not just a matter of marketing but also of rethinking when and what services to offer. The ASC at Texas A&M added new tutoring times to expand opportunities for students to attend. It also shared tips on how to be successful during the COVID-19 outbreak. At Arizona State, UASP staff developed new content-specific workshops to provide sufficient coverage of topics where students regularly struggled. These workshops were facilitated live via Zoom and recorded, so they could be accessed at any time. Early feedback from Texas A&M students has been positive, highlighting the ease of use made possible by the new formats. Results from an ASC end-of-semester survey indicated that 81% of students who used online services after the shutdown were “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the programs. One student observed, “I enjoyed online coaching a lot because it was so simple.” With email used as a form of academic coaching, a student noted, “I feel like the coaching meetings back and forth through email were extremely helpful.” Another student commented on the convenience of having SI sessions online: “I liked SI being online because I could have a whole hour to study before it instead of getting to campus and having to find a parking spot in time. It made it more accessible to me.”
Future Considerations These new methods of reaching students are likely to continue, even after the global pandemic ends. UASP staff at Arizona State are confident the content they created in the shift to online services will continue after in-person services resume. Arizona State math faculty are excited about this expansion of UASP’s services and have been
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