Improving the Student Experience with Consistent and Proactive Academic Advising
The advising department at Texas State University’s College of Education rose to a level of advising they didn’t know was possible thanks to TextExpander – the tool that helps their team lead effective conversations, save valuable time, and improve the student experience.
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We consider TextExpander mission-essential. I would encourage any academic advising department to give it a try – I’m confident you will like it.
Joya Konieczny, Director of Advising
A public research university with campuses in San Marcos and Round Rock, Texas State University serves more than 37,000 students in more than 200 different degree programs. An institution of this scale requires a passionate and disciplined core of faculty and staff – especially in its advising departments.
With a team of 12 advisors led by Joya Konieczny, the College of Education advising department advises thousands of students through the critical stages of their time on campus. To say this department is busy would be an understatement, but even so they continue to serve the College of Education students at the highest level thanks to their standards and systems.
We live by the words accurate, thorough, and consistent. And TextExpander helps us check those three boxes in most of the tasks we take on.
Accurate
With a single update in TextExpander, each advisor can automatically use the most up-to-date and correct information.
Thorough
Advisors are crunched for time. TextExpander helps provide a better student experience by automating the repetitive actions so they can make space for human-to-human interaction.
Consistent
In academic advising, the lack of consistency directly impacts the student experience – one mistake in registration can affect a student’s career. TextExpander ensures everything is consistent and correct.
The Value: How They Use TextExpander:
Academic advising can be especially challenging due to the specificity involved in each student’s plan. The range and sheer volume of information advisors must know or have access to is massive. And this information is constantly being updated, which means every member of Joya’s team must receive and implement these updates.
With TextExpander, Joya resolves this challenge by pushing information updates to the team snippets with a single click. This ensures the College of Education students are all receiving the same, correct information from their advisors.
Depending on the scenario, the department uses TextExpander for storing and communicating:
- Academic policies
- Course information
- Degree paths
- GPA calculations
- Staff prompts
- Customized student notifications
The College of Education’s old solution was simply training advisors, and then re-training after an error had been made.
TextExpander enabled our advising department to raise the bar. Before, we had lower expectations because our Advisors were limited to their memory and human consistency.
Joya’s team spends a lot of time communicating with other departments on campus, too. The difference in speed and efficiency between their department and other departments on campus is clear. In fact, one specific graduation requirement of their department – and others like it – takes most teams on campus two or three days to complete. For the Texas State College of Education’s advising department, that same task takes about half a day.
Joya attributes a large part of that outcome to TextExpander.
For the Texas State College of Education advising department, their impact on the student experience is meaningful and tangible.
The same can be said for TextExpander’s impact:
- The College of Education advising department nearly eliminated student appeals, in part because of TextExpander’s ability to help them stay accurate, thorough, and consistent. An absence of student appeals is not the norm in academic advising.
- With TextExpander, Joya’s entire team has gone from reactive to proactive.
- The College of Education advising department has proven TextExpander’s ability to enable more authentic conversations by minimizing administrative distractions like typing. Gone are the days of advisors searching for course information and typing out degree plans, their eyes fixed on the computer screen. With TextExpander, departments like Joya’s can automate repetitive and mundane tasks, allowing them to truly listen and genuinely engage with students.
I immediately loved TextExpander. And the moment our team received that first notification for how many hours they had saved, there was no looking back.