Facilitating Faculty-Student Connection with Navigate

It doesn’t require a long conversation with Judi Ciampi to see how passionate she is about the success of her students. With a career of close to 3 decades at Northern Essex Community College (NECC), it’s safe to say she’s seen a lot of change. Judi has adapted to the times, ensuring that she still stays connected to her students, amidst the everchanging world of higher education, technological advances, and a global pandemic. 

The traditional appointment signup sheet on a professor’s door has certainly gone out of style. At NECC, Navigate has strengthened our community and allowed our support services to be at student’s fingertips; and Judi is one of our biggest advocates for utilizing Navigate to connect with the students in her courses. An even more admirable trait, is her desire to share the breadth of knowledge she has with other faculty. 

Here are a few ways that Judi has used Navigate to connect with her students: 

• With insight from The Persistence Project, she requires two “graded” individual check-ins per semester in her BUS-101 courses. These check-ins are for 15 mins and scheduled (in Navigate) over the course of 2-3 weeks. In these meetings, she learns about her students’ goals to see how she can best help them to be successful both in the course and at NECC.  
• Also scheduled through Navigate are appointments made during her office hours. Judi puts her Personal Availability Link (PAL) in her Blackboard course and in her email signature, so students can easily find it. 
• Remember when I said students have support right at their fingertips? I wasn’t kidding! Judi uses Navigate to text her students about missing work and if they didn’t show up for class.  

What are the benefits? We thought you might ask. 

• Relationship building shows students that you care and allows them to feel more comfortable asking for help. Having individual meetings means you can learn more about your students and what is going on in their lives both in and out of the classroom. It also means you can connect them to the right resources. (Guzzardo et al., 2020). 
• Navigate sends automatic appointment confirmations and reminders, since we know how busy you are. 
• The appointment summary feature in Navigate allows you to keep notes on each of your students (because who even knows what day it is anymore). 
• Texting is the fastest way we can get in touch with our students, and Navigate allows you to do this, with a personal Navigate phone number. Does that mean email is being thrown out the door? Probably not, but let’s meet students where they’re at. 

But what about actual data? We have that too.  

Since implementing this new practice of mandatory 15-minute meetings with her BUS 101 students in Spring 2021, Judi has noticed a significant improvement in her Successful Course Completion Rates (SCCR). At NECC, SCCR is calculated as the percentage of students that complete the course with a C or better. 

Judi notes that the only other major changes in her teaching of this course is that she now teaches online rather than face-to-face (like she used to in Academic Year 2017-2018). She was pleased to find that despite the new online modality and increased volume of coursework, the withdrawal rates for her courses are declining as well. 

“Navigate has helped me form deeper and more meaningful connections with my students, especially with my online students…I would never have tried the individual conferences with the students without Navigate because of the issues with scheduling appointments. With Navigate, students can easily make appointments with me…” – Judi Ciampi

That’s all for now. Want to learn more? Make an appointment with me! 

References 

Guzzardo, M. T., Khosla, N., Adams, A. L., Bussmann, J. D., Engelman, A. Ingraham, N., Gamba R., Jones-Bey, A., Moore, M. D., Toosi, N. R., Taylor, S. (2020). “The ones that care make all the difference”: Perspectives on student-faculty relationships. Innovative Higher Education, 46(1), 41-58.