Reimagining the New Student Orientation and Advising Experience through Virtualized Collaboration

The university experience can be daunting for incoming students. Historically, the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) has hosted in-person orientation and advising programs over the summer to help ease the transition. With the pandemic forcing many educational institutions to go remote virtually overnight, UMBC was faced with the sudden need to rethink its technology and processes to meet this challenge. The UMBC approach was not just to virtualize orientation and advising but to make the experience better than the in-person experience. This was a formidable goal, with only a couple of weeks to transition from design to implementation. The UMBC IT team engaged workflow transformation experts, LIFTinnovate, and quickly got to work redesigning the orientation workflow. In this session, panelists will discuss new techniques to rethink traditional orientation and advising post-pandemic and describe how UMBC was able to successfully pivot to a virtual environment and reimagine the entire student orientation, registration, and advising process, leveraging online collaboration tools, workflow redesign and process, an online orientation dashboard combining multiple data sources into a single feed, real-time tracking of student progress through the registration system, and student sentiment scores and end-user analysis.