Steven McCullar, left, Michele Braun-Heurung, Michael Mills and Christine Imbra (not pictured) worked together to develop a hybrid online and on-campus orientation program for students in the higher education administration program.
The Innovation award is awarded to organizations or individuals who demonstrate exceptionally creative methods or technologies to address important student needs. The Brightspace MN Connection Awards are presented by Minnesota State each year at the MN Connections Regional Conference.
The higher education administration program sought a way to convert its master’s and doctoral student orientation from completely on-campus to hybrid format to serve students better. Program administrators developed the online portion of orientation using D2L Brightspace and was provided to students who began the program in fall 2017.
The online orientation provides program information, campus resources and a discussion area for students within D2L Brightspace with information provided through short messages, links to website resources and videos.
Students gained an increased awareness of campus resources and program expectations as a result of the new format, which allowed students to review the information at any time convenient to them. In addition, the online format allows program employees to assess completion of materials, saves time in creating future orientation sessions and saves on printing costs.
The face-to-face orientation was redesigned so students have more time to get acquainted with their cohort and faculty members. The program added some ice breakers to allow students to establish a learning community with each other and to help alleviate their fears about starting a doctoral program.
The educational administration and leadership doctoral program collaborated with the higher education administration program and converted its completely face-to-face orientation to a hybrid format for its fall 2017 cohort. Its online portion of orientation was also developed using D2L Brightspace in a similar manner to higher education administration.
The higher education administration program is now collaborating with the School of Graduate Studies to assist in the development of a campus-wide graduate orientation. Plans for fall 2018 orientation include one D2L Brightspace course that can be used by all graduate programs. This eliminates the need for each graduate program to develop its own campus resource information, while allowing each program to provide its own specific information.
