Walkthrough of the Watermark (Aviso) student app for students:
SS&E’s Student Strategy
Upon the analysis of data, Watermark Student Success & Engagement worked to ensure our campus partners could utilize added resources to expand student engagement strategies in a manner that meets students where they are.
The Watermark Student Mobile App will lead to increased engagement, provided additional data to drive impact based on the apps capabilities. In all, delivering a new platform that provides an opportunity for students and staff to actively communicate.
- With the Mobile App, students have a new channel for communication with their success team including scheduling appointments and marking assigned tasks complete.
- Students will also be able to mark their attendance, have access to campus resources and stay on schedule.
Three Items to Consider
Strategy
How does your institution want to utilize the application? Are you going to start with a pilot or small consortium or do you wish to roll it out to the entire campus for use? Outlining this will allow you to better determine the roll-out method that would be best for your particular team.
Configuration/Setup
What are the goals of the application from an institutional perspective? If they are to increase engagement, for example, it will be important for the institutions to take a look at features students are able to use in the app such as Tasks and Resources. It is also important that these features align with overall goals that are set forth by your team. Do you have all the task templates set up that you might need? Are all campus resources listed in the resource area?
Training
Student and staff training are equally important and students will likely ask the nearest staff member for assistance when navigating the app. Therefore it will be important to create and/or utilize internal training documentation to empower staff to answer questions. How do you plan to train students to utilize this tool? This leads us into a potential roll out strategy.
Roll Out Strategy
It will be important to consider, based on the business practices at your institutions, what will be the best way to introduce the application to students on campus. This may be allocated into a New Student Plan and a Returning Student Plan. Here are some examples of ways to introduce the application:
- Include as part of Orientation and On-boarding
- Introduce in the First-Year (FYE/ACA) Course as an Assignment
- Implement attendance tracking
- Reinforce Use in the Advising and Registration Process