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Higher education professionals are shifting toward a customer service model of working with students to complement more direct student success efforts and reduce barriers to access. Chief among them are experience administrators, leading the charge in streamlining and smoothing a learner’s journey through the institution.
Sarah Ball, associate vice president of user and student experience at National University, spoke with Inside Higher Ed about her role at National—which has over 25 locations in California and online degree programs—the importance of understanding learners as people and her goals on the job.
Q: What is your role at National University and how does it relate to student success?
A: I’m the AVP [associate vice president] of user and student experience, and really what that distills down to is, how can we continue to have the student at the center of what we’re doing? But have that be in a very informed way, where we don't have to continually ask students what are they thinking, what are they feeling, how’s it going?
That method of surveying experience, it’s not yielding us the largest voice, so my job really is to unearth that.
I worked for 10 years at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center as their experience leader and really found a lot of wins from helping the experience move forward using unstructured data and then, using structured data—which a lot of people think of as surveys—as I think, where people manually go to it to fill the gaps. You end up really getting this really rich view of experience.
Q: What kinds of data do you work with regarding student experience?
A: When people think about data, they think of these discrete numbers, and they think these pieces. What we’re trying to stitch together is, what is the persistence path through the key functions and the moments that matter, and what do we know about those moments that matter?
There is a lot of [data] when our students are logging in, or when our students are doing different tasks. Those are great to know. What I really want to know is the words that they’re using. When they’re on social channels, or they’re talking through different pieces and parts of their conversations and text messages and those different pieces, how do we knit together those to help create meaningful insights?
Right now, what we’re looking at, we just built our end-to-end student journey, a new version of who we are at NAU today, and the different types of students that we see as personas. Then we’re understanding, what’s in the hearts, in the minds of the students as they go through those moments that matter. From an experience perspective, we’ve asked our students in a lot of structured ways right now to start to create those nodes of where we want to dig in deeper.
Q: What is an experience strategy and how does it contribute to student success?
A: I tend to think of the experience [as] the moments that matter, persistence, how we support students with a social infrastructure. How we treat them as a whole person is very important to me, just because they are people as well as students.
We’re an access institution, and we need to be very mindful of how we support students who have this access.
I think of it metaphorically as a series of train cars. We’re trying to stack together the most effective process and support for our students be successful. Within each car is those moments that matter: How I get my financial aid, how I understand financial affordability. How I log into my classes, how I get academic support, how I do my learning in my classes, how I manage my time.
And as we stack those on, within those are two components: the structured data components, which we can manage after an event. How was that class? How was that phone call? How was that interaction? We can get understanding what the satisfaction is in that moment.
But we have to stitch that in the overall landscape of, what is the sentiment? What is the effort? What is the confusion rating of the other pieces? When you marry those together, that’s our experience strategy.
Then as you tack on those initial moments of success, and they’d go from car to car to car to car, it creates this momentum and it allows them to grow as a person, fit into their life and also persist and reach what their goal is: finishing a certificate, finishing a program, finishing their bachelor’s, finishing their master’s, moving on to their doctorate and finishing that.
We want to be that place that not only you would refer to, but you would come back to because the experience is so supportive, and [it] has the right infrastructure for alternative types of people.
Q: What is your definition of student success and how does that impact your work?
A: We’re in the beginning stages of listening to students. We really want to categorize effort—where the effort is in the journey, measuring the sentiment and how that changes.
Also [we want to] understand the barriers. What are the experience barriers, not just academic barriers, but what are the barriers at large, because I think when we dig into what those are, we can be more effective partners for their education and, hopefully, as a mentor, as a support structure, as another place to go to, to become who you need to be as a person.
I think it’s really, it’s probably not as academic. But I think that, to me, is real life.
Student success needs this is really rich infrastructure to make that happen. I think people are really competed for time and so we have to make that an easier process. I think the academic pursuit needs to stay as a very valuable process, but doing business with and feeling supported [in higher education], I think need to be more simplistic.
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