Student Engagement Team Advocates for Online Orientation

The student engagement team at Salve Regina University believed in and advocated for a new online orientation system with great success. Within the realm of Higher Education, student engagement is part art, part science, and part business. When is the best time to reach out to new students and their families, what’s the best way to answer their questions, and what are the budget implications? Advantage Orientation^® is helping colleges and universities of all types and sizes improve student engagement early in the enrollment process with a comprehensive, creative, and affordable online orientation solution.

Take Salve Regina University for example. Their pilot year to launch a new orientation model, while fraught with change and uncertainty, demonstrated real, quantitative improvements. During a recent panel discussion, Ariana Bessette, Assistant Director of Student Engagement, shared her experience developing and implementing an online orientation built on Advantage Orientation^®.

“Because of the pandemic, we transitioned from a traditional two-day model and week of welcome,” Ariana recalled. Wanting to leverage the time between when students deposit and September’s events, “that’s a long time to not be engaged with the university. Much of the feedback we heard from our campus partners is this orientation is a great touchpoint. It is helping to address melt and keeps students engaged and retained over the summer.”

In that same panel discussion, Ariana shared some lessons learned from her online orientation development experience working with the designers, programmers, and video producers at Advantage Design Group^®. “If you want to relieve stress and time on your department, it’s best to invest in services, such as video production. Advantage has great customer support and great services, so we invested early to make our lives easier later.”

Most recently, the entire Student Engagement Team from Salve Regina University were featured as guest bloggers. Their article focuses on the how they were able to pivot, adapt, and plan the new student orientation experience during unknown times. Advantage Orientation^® is completely accessible any time on any device, which enabled them to embrace technology with much more confidence. Given the flexibility of their online student orientation software, it was easy to adapt the system to the many moving parts of their entire virtual onboarding program.

As discussed in their blog post, as more students participate in and complete online orientation, the interactive modules are helping to keep students engaged at a time when summer melt could have been disastrous.

WATCH the full Panel Discussion with

• Emma Montague, Director Student & Family Engagement, Bristol Community College
• Maria Santilli, Director of New Student Programs, Central Connecticut State University
• Ariana Bessette, Assistant Director of Student Engagement, Salve Regina University