Student Services Update

Hi Everyone-

Following is an update from John Schmahl of Student Services:

This is a just a quick update on how the first couple of days of the term is going from the Support Center’s standpoint. Overall, things are much, much quieter than they were for fall.

In the first 24 hours we received approximately 300 phone calls and e-mails from students (this includes possible duplicates). This is out of nearly 8,000 enrollments. During a “good” term, we are contacted by about 8% of our total enrollments via calls and e-mails. For this past Fall, we received over 300 calls alone in the first 2 hours. So, this is a definite improvement.

All calls and e-mails go through our Support Center. Debra Michel has been working very hard to get through these with the wonderful support and assistance of Roxanne, Frank, Rick, Jonathan and last, but certainly not least, David. Please give a big thanks to all of these folks for all of their efforts!!

If any of your students encounter problems, please have them contact the Support center (http://ccconline.org/support/). This is critical as it allows us to track the issues and ensure they are resolved quickly. It also allows us to catch common issues that may be impacting multiple students or courses.

The major issues we have seen so far include:

Not knowing ID/PIN – this is the most common issue; however, we have received far fewer of these calls this term, possibly due to our using a common ID/PIN across systems (Banner & Blackboard)

Missing courses – this appears to be caused by problems in uploads from Banner; however, there are far fewer of these as well this term and it is being handled. Also some of these students are taking courses through the colleges, not CCCOnline, or they are in Session 2 courses

Duplicate courses – this was caused by a combination of errors on our part and problems with the Banner uploads. All affected students (a total of about 700) have been e-mailed with the correct section to login to and Frank is working on a fix we hope to have in place within the next day

As you can see, we still have some issues, but in comparison to Fall, this has been much improved term start. Thank you once again for all of your hard work and great effort. I’m sure we have many challenges ahead, but you can’t beat the team we have at CCCOnline!

John H Schmahl
Director, Student Services
CCCOnline

Please pay special attention to the comment re duplicate sections. We have 780 enrollments (so fewer students) who may have two sections listed on their MyCCCOnline hme page. John is emailing these students with the correct section for them to participate in and Frank is working to delete them from the inaccurate section. We expect this to be corrected by early tomorrow.

I will also post regarding retention techniques later this week, but remember that if we can hold on to 88% of those students currently enrolled we will reach census day with a few more students than we had last year. Those initial welcome emails and discussion posts you send out every term really help with retention; we appreciate the time you spend on those!

Overall, we are having a much better start to the term than the fall!

Thanks!

Lisa