With NACADA 2018 coming up, we’re looking back on the highlights from the 2017 conference. DegreeSight’s team introduced our degree planning tool to over one hundred advisors, counselors, deans, and more. Overwhelmingly, we heard the same thing: “We need this!”
Anyone whose role relates to academic advising knows that institutions are always asked to do more with less. DegreeSight is a tool that allows advisors to do just that. And more. It’s about letting the system to manage the basics, like requirements and prerequisites. This allows higher education counselors and advisors to focus on providing the hands-on support students need. As a result, DegreeSight won’t reduce roles. But it will empower users on both sides to make informed decisions about education.
While we were at NACADA, we talked with attendees about their challenges and concerns around degree planning as a whole. Particularly how academic advising can ease the pain around degree planning and measuring engagement. Here’s how DegreeSight can help.
Many services out there promise to build course catalogs and sell institutions a dream of easy administration, updates and generation. The reality isn’t always quite as easy. As standalone enterprises, they usually don’t play nice with existing systems and features often overlap. DegreeSight, as a more targeted approach, eases some of those issues and payments with universities toward streamlined integration into existing systems.
In order to plan effectively, students need to know not only what courses will lead to completion, but the sequence of when and how those courses are offered. DegreeSight effectively creates template degree plans for incoming students to use and *bootstrap* their planning efforts.
It can take an extra watchful eye to know when a student is revising their plan. DegreeSight provides that extra oversight. Advisors and counselors can receive a notification any time a student revises their plan. The tool also offers analytics on student engagement with the system as well.
Many of the NACADA attendees with whom we spoke were interested in taking notes within their degree planning tools as well. Within a week, DegreeSight was able to respond to this request and added the functionality.
Between bean bag toss games, giving away an Echo Dot, and talking with the fantastic attendees, NACADA was a great experience for the DegreeSight team. And if you’re ready to learn more as well, contact us to schedule a demo today!