Home / News / Slug Success Update 7/27/18 - Upcoming Changes And Training Opportunities

Slug Success Update 7/27/18 - Upcoming Changes And Training Opportunities

Date: Friday, July 27, 2018

Author: Amy Hyler-Essig


Hello Slug Success users!

 

I hope all of your summer activities are going well. I'm writing today to inform you of some upcoming changes to Slug Success, and invite you to some drop-in training sessions that will be offered over the coming weeks. Please especially take note of the items highlighted in yellow below - these are potential action items for you :)

 

Training opportunities: Each of these drop-in sessions will be held in the Kerr 8 computer lab, and will have a primary focus as indicated below. You are welcome to come to any or all of these sessions, for as little or as long as you like, and I'm happy to answer other questions as time permits.

 

  • Wednesday August 1, 1-4 : Using Slug Success to communicate with students. Topics covered will include campaigns, messaging, notes, watch lists

  • Monday August 20, 1-4 : Availability and scheduling. Topics covered will include setting your own availability, editing existing appointments, appointment center, advising queues

  • Tuesday September 11, 9-12 : Reporting in Slug Success. Topics covered will include creating advising summary reports, use of notes vs advising reports, advanced search,  built-in Slug Success Reports

 

Upcoming changes (to be implemented before or during Fall quarter):

 

  • Student Facing Slug Success reasons update. In order to make the appointment-scheduling process simpler and more accessible to our students, we are going to make some changes to the reasons that students may select from when scheduling an appointment with their Adviser(s) starting Fall Quarter. This will not restrict the reasons that are available to Advisers when they fill out an Advising Summary Report in Slug Success. If you would like to offer your suggestions and feedback on what the new options should be, please complete this short survey by August 10th

  • We are moving Slug Success information off of the SSERC website and onto its own site. We are also doing some reconfiguring as part of this process which will hopefully make the site easier to access, navigate, and use.

  • Along with the website reorganization, I will be recreating/updating a lot of our existing documentation and creating new tutorials and self-help guides. If you have suggestions for a topic that you'd like to see in our staff-facing support documentation, please let me know!

  • Video tutorials are being planned for student-facing support processes. If you have a particular topic that you believe would be helpful to students in the form of a video tutorial, please let me know!

  • Text messaging option for student appointment reminders. This is a long-promised change which required help from ITS, but is very close to being available. Once this option becomes available, students will be able to login to MyUCSC and opt-in so systems like Slug Success can send SMS notifications to their phones. Once they've turned it on, they'll be able to choose to receive a text message reminder one hour before a scheduled appointment (right now they only have the option to receive an email reminder the night before). I will send confirmation to this list once this is available, along with a link to a tutorial that you can pass along to students.

  • Slug Success "Coordinated Care Units" upgrade. EAB is releasing a new and updated version of the software we call Slug Success. You may have already noticed some of the differences if you've logged into the Slug Success Training site, which was updated at the end of June. Over the next couple of months, we'll be updating each location to take advantage of some of the new flexibility offered by this upgrade, and I will be asking for feedback from each department make sure we're making the right changes to meet your individual needs. If you’d like to learn more about the Coordinated Care Units upgrade, you can view EAB’s support documentation available from within Slug Success.

  • Predictive analytics/support levels & data analytics. The system has a number of data analytics (predictive support level, institution reports for department administrators, population health dashboards, and success markers). We have been working over this past year to develop and validate these tools. The predictive model is built and will be tested internally for algorithmic bias in the fall quarter. Once tested, we will form a representative steering committee to determine the best way to implement this tool. At the same time, the SSERC will be engaging the campus community in dialogues about predictive analytics. Opportunities for engagement will be shared with you. You will likely not see the individual support level in the platform until we have gone through a careful vetting process. The other tools will be rolled out softly in the fall with a select group of pilot departments to help us determine usefulness and what is necessary to support a full campus roll out. We expect to be fully implemented by the end of the 18-19 academic year. Please stay tuned for more.

 

Future/possible changes (likely not to be implemented before Fall quarter, but on our to-do list):

  • Additional referral/case management options: We are exploring additional ways for advisers to use Slug Success to refer students to other campus offices and services, and to track these referrals

  • Progress reports: we are exploring the possibility of sending requests to faculty in key courses to identify students who need to meet with advisers (we have looked at this functionality in the past but only for LSS interventions, not advising)



As always, if you have any questions about anything in this email, please feel free to reply and I’ll do my best to answer. If you need technical support or want to schedule an in-person training, please email slugsuccess-help@ucsc.edu so we can assist you.

 

Thank you!

 

Amy