Campus Technology Insider Podcast September 2022
Listen: At ASU Online, Empathy Is the Foundation of Student Success
00:08
Rhea Kelly: Hello, and welcome to the Campus Technology Insider podcast. I'm Rhea Kelly, editor in chief of Campus Technology, and your host.
With higher education enrollment in decline, it's more important than ever to break down barriers to student success — and for those who stop out, create clear pathways to re-entry and completion. What does that look like in practice? At Arizona State University Online, student success coaches cultivate deep relationships with students as individuals, get to know their unique life experiences and challenges, and leverage data to better understand the multitude of factors that can impact retention. For this episode of the podcast, I spoke with Nicolette Miller, senior director of student success initiatives at ASU Online, about her team's student-centered approach and what institutions should be doing to help students reach the finish line of their education. Here's our chat.
Hi, Nicolette, welcome to the podcast.
Nicolette Miller: Hi. Happy to be here.
01:14
Kelly: So I was hoping you could kind of introduce yourself and your background and tell me a little bit about your role at ASU online.
01:21
Miller: Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Nicolette Miller, and I am the senior director of student success initiatives here at ASU Online. And so really, I oversee our success coaching teams that support our ASU Online students. So a really dynamic team of student supporters that really help students not only from the moment they register for a class all the way through to graduation. So really kind of helping students along the way overcome obstacles that they might encounter, and help them get acquainted and accustomed to the university and all the resources that are available to them.
02:07
Kelly: That must be just really rewarding because you get to see like immediate effects of what you do in terms of helping students.
02:15
Miller: Yeah, it's really incredible, actually. So I feel really lucky to do the job that I do and work with the people that I work with. Our success coaches really come from a variety of different backgrounds, but really, mostly they come from backgrounds where they're really interested in that individual's success. And so they come from helping professions, and they really want to be helpful and transformative for students. And so students come to us from all walks of life and all different types of experiences, whether it be their previous academic experience, or just their life experiences. And so they're really there in such a pivotal moment for students, when they finally succeed in that class they were nervous about, they finally figured out how do I talk to my professor, or how do I finally finish that class and still was able to maintain my work schedule, and all of these other life things that come up outside of school. And so when we have students that get to the graduation point, we are truly flooded with student comments about how their coaches have impacted their lives and impacted their trajectory and their degree program. So it's certainly not hyperbole that we're changing lives, because I read about it every semester, every session as we get student feedback. So it's pretty incredible.
03:45
Kelly: So I thought we could start with kind of a big-picture look at the ongoing enrollment decline in higher education. I looked up the latest National Student Clearinghouse Research Center data, which says that higher education has lost nearly 1.3 million students since spring 2020. So kind of a bleak landscape. How is online education being affected in all of that?