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New software assists students

Working together since October 2016, administration, faculty and staff are investing in software to assist students in scheduling appointments efficiently and increase communication with professors and advisors.

The software, the Student Success Collaborative (SSC) Campus, was created by the Education Advisory Board (EAB). Through the SSC Campus, students will be able to send the same message to multiple professors and faculty, schedule appointments with advisors, view advising reports from appointments and more.

According to Gregory Haines, the director of the Academic Success Center and the Student Affairs liaison for implementing the program, the goal of the SSC Campus is to ultimately help the campus.

We can do some outreach to help students get to graduation, Haines said.

Additionally, Haines said the SSC Campus includes data from a decades worth of past student information at Bradley which is in turn analyzed to compare it to current Bradley students.

[The software offers] an analytics tool that shows advisors if a student is more or less likely to graduate from that program theyre currently [enrolled] in based on that data [of past students], which is kind of cool and powerful stuff, Haines said.

Despite the data being readily available, Haines said it is not meant to be prescriptive, but rather informative for those looking at it.

One thing thats going to be really important for students and for advisors to remember is that just because [a student] might be less likely to graduate from that major program because of what [theyve] done in the past does not mean [they] cant turn around what [they] are doing [for] the future, Haines said.

Additionally, Haines also said the SSC Campus will not replace current software such as Sakai and Webster.

I can almost say confidently that 100 percent of the time theres going to be some overlap with another application, and thats because with the thousands of colleges and universities that are in the United States, they come in all shapes and sizes, Haines said. Theres not a one-size-fits-all solution for [all colleges].

According to Haines, no other previous software has been used in the way that the SSC Campus app will be. Haines also said the effort of administration, faculty and staff to implement a program like this has increased his pride for working at Bradley.

Ive been here for three years, Haines said. Thats not a ton of time, but to see the amount of people working together on one project who really care and believe in it, its really cool.

Haines said the software will be introduced soon, and he wants students to anticipate it. However, in order to release the app, the faculty must be comfortable with using it first.

Every single academic department on campus has used [SSC Campus] already, Haines said. So we wanted to make sure our faculty and staff are really comfortable with using this because, when a student has a question about it, theyre not going to come to me for it. Theyre going to go to their advisor or professor, and so we want them to be comfortable with it before the students get their hands on it.

Once the SSC Campus is implemented, Haines said he hopes it will achieve the goal of helping students graduate on their preferred timeline.

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