Twitter: A New Way to Serve Students

What methods do you use to answer students' questions? Chance are that Twitter never crossed your mind. You most likely would have thought about answering questions over the phone, through email or face-to-face in your office. 

Twitter provides a new forum in which to find and answer questions from students. A growing number of organizations are leveraging Twitter to provide customer service. For instance Jet Blue Airways, Dell Computer (Canada) and recently the City of Toronto's 311 service have all incorporated Twitter into their service strategy.  You can follow @JetBlue, @DellHomeSalesCA and @311Toronto to see how Twitter is being used by these three organizations.  You can find more case studies on the Twitter 101 website. 

As a way to help students at Ryerson the staff at the Student Services Front Desk have added @AskMeRU to their tool box of customer service options.  To enhance the service they provide the staff are searching for comments, questions and problems on Twitter by following tweets that contain "Ryerson" or "#Ryerson" in the text. In many cases this allows the staff to proactively address concerns that are posted on Twitter.  The staff use HootSuite to monitor comments made on Twitter.

To find out more all you have to do is follow the groups above on Twitter. If your school or department uses Twitter to serve students please share your @username so others can learn from you. 

Strategic Planning Using the TEDx Approach

TED, TEDx and TEDTalks have been gaining attention rapidly in recent years. Understandably so given the inspiring nature of the presentations. Several schools have been adding life to their campus thru TEDx and I recently adopted the TED approach in strategic planning to leverage its ability to share ideas and stories.

Given that my role as a Director is smack in the middle of the management structure I see my purpose as providing clarity for my staff. Using well know models when managing is one way to provide clarity, especially when examples are readily available, popular and relevant to a wide variety of people. TED satisfies all of this criteria and the model seemed to be ideally suited as a way for my staff to share ideas, generate dialogue and help us with our strategic planning efforts.

My responsibilities involve overseeing four areas - Student Housing Services, Tri-Mentoring Program, International Services for Students and the Office of Student Community Life. In my first two years overseeing these four areas, which includes over 20 full-time staff and 150 student staff, we did not gather as a large group often. My strategic planning focus in year one and two was on each unit, but the time had come for a wider discussion. In general, staff understand a lot about their own unit, but little about other units so the logical place to start was exchanging ideas and raising awareness of the issues affecting each unit. I wanted staff to be engaged in this process which made the TED approach ideal. 


My staff were given more than three months to plan and told that we would be using the TED model. To reinforce some of the TED principles I stressed that each unit had 15 minutes to present, the material had to be relevant to their work and the sessions must encourage dialogue and the exchange of ideas. 

Our TEDx Student Community Life or TEDx SCL, which was the name we adopted, was held this past Friday. The sessions were impressive. Historical video was used in one case and hours of video captured of current students in another case  Staff spent hours in deep discussion about their purpose in third area while another group orchestrated a well choreographed presentation that allowed everyone to contribute to the unit's story. TED is known for its "extended breaks" to allow for dialogue and discussion to take place and TEDx SCL was no exception. In fact, one of the highlights of the day for me was seeing staff interact and exchange ideas in the first break. Everyone was engaged and people that did not know each other prior to our event were exchanging ideas. There was a buzz in the room.

Pre and post event surveys are being used to assess the event and help us learn how well the TED approach worked. My instinct is that the event was well received given the effort that staff put into preparing and the interest everyone exhibited throughout the day. If you are looking for a model to help your staff exchange ideas for strategic planning then I would certainly encourage you to consider using the TED approach.

Web 2.0 is Not Scary

Snakes, spiders or one of those centipedes with a what seems like a million legs can bring genuine fear to many people. Facebook, YouTube or Twitter never generate fear, or so I thought.

A few weeks back I was telling a colleague about a new feature my staff set up on a Facebook page.  The conversation when something like this,

"Are you on Facebook?" I asked
"Nope" she responded as her eyes widened and a nervous smile crossed her face "My kids are on it all the time" she added hastily
"Setting up an account is easy" I said trying to alleviate her emerging fear, "All you have to do is go to Facebook.com and click the Sign-up button"
"Well, I'm not sure I would use it and I don't really have time at work to use Facebook" she said

I was surprised to encounter this resistance. She was not anti-Facebook. Her resistance was different. It was only after I left that I began to realize that she was afraid. It is natural to be afraid of something new.

Those feelings of uneasiness, or fear, are long forgotten once you gain experience using something or knowledge about the subject. To that end, the Digital Community program at my school  has set up a blog to help people in the Ryerson community become more comfortable using Web 2.0 tools.

The blog, called RU 2.0?, is meant to provide basic information and instruction on Web 2.0 tools for students, student groups and service program staff in the Ryerson community. The content posted on RU 2.0? is easily found elsewhere online as there are several excellent resources that explain how to use tools like RSS feeds, a Wiki or a blog. RU 2.0? centralizes the information so it is easily found.

By providing this resource we hope to prove that not only is Web 2.0 not scary, but that it can open up new and exciting possibilities.

Adding Life to Your Campus Thru TEDx

Take a moment to imagine your community without ideas or discussion. People would be present, but emotionally distant. Daily routines would be followed... day after day after day. Dialogue would not stray beyond "How are you?" or "Nice weather eh?"

Hardly an inspiring place.

And certainly not the thriving, vibrant community envisioned by the organizers of yesterday's TEDxRyersonU, which was held at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University in Toronto. Sharing ideas that generate discussion is what TED strives to achieve and several Canadian universities are taking advantage of this popular idea exchange.

You will likely recognize TED through TED Talks which showcase videos of presenters at the annual TED events or the many TEDx events that take place around the world. The 'x' indicated that the event is an "independently organized TED event."

A large group of students, lead by Parvinder Sachdeva, organized TEDxRyersonU - the first TEDx event at Ryerson. Some other Canadian university TEDx events include:

• TEDxUBC
• TEDxYorkU
• TEDxHartHouse (University of Toronto)
• TEDxQueensU
• TEDxMcMasterU

Now imagine your community with a wide variety of activities, full of people that are mentally excited having deep meaningful conversations. 

Feels different I bet. A TEDx event can help create this feeling.

Great job TEDxRyersonU Team!

Ontario's Education Prime Minister

Two thoughts may come to mind when you read the title for this post. The first is that I made a typo by using the term Prime Minister. The second is that one or both the names Dalton McGuinty or William Davis may come to mind as they have both been described as Ontario's Education Premier. 

If you thought any of the above you would be wrong. Up until William Davis took office as Ontario's 18th Premier in 1971 the title for the leader of Ontario's government was Prime Minister.  Davis changed the title shortly after stepping into the role. William Davis and Dalton McGuinty are significant Premier's when it comes to education in Ontario, but not as significant as John P. Robarts. 

Robarts was a Minister of Education in Ontario and Ontario's Prime Minister from 1961 to 1971 which is a period of time that saw significant change to the educational landscape in Ontario. (Davis was Minister of Education during much of Robart's time as leader)  The entire Ontario College system and several universities were opened during Robart's reign. Brock University, the University of Guelph, Nipissing University and Trent University all started as universities in the 1960's. 

After leaving government Robarts served as Chancellor at both the University of Western Ontario (his alma mater) and York University. The Robarts Library at the University of Toronto is named after him along with the Robarts Research Institute at the University of Western Ontario.

No leader of the Ontario government can match this list of achievements for education in the province. 

For more on Robarts you can read Steve Paiken's Public Triumph, Private Tragedy: The Double Life of John P. Robarts.

Getting to PSE Biggest Challenge for First Gen Students

"Parental education does not appear to be a particularly good marker for determining which students are inclined to leave post-secondary education without graduating" was the most significant finding from a recently published report from the Measuring Effectiveness of Student Aid (MESA) Project.
The MESA Project was exploring how family income, the timing of funding for students and regional factors impact a teenager's decision to pursue and persist in post-secondary education (PSE).Here are the MESA Project Report's major findings:

1. First generation students are much less likely than non-first generation students to say that they always knew they would attend PSE and are more likely than others to make their decision to attend PSE during their final years of high school.
2. First generation students are less likely than non-first generation students to have family members who saved for their PSE.
3. First generation students are not very different from non-first generation students when it comes to their opinions of whether they receive support and inspiration from their parents.
4. First generation students spend somewhat fewer hours studying than non-first generation students and have moderately lower grade averages.
5. First generation students are, perhaps surprisingly, not more likely than non-first generation students to leave PSE in first or second year without graduating.

The findings support the general belief that the biggest challenge for First-Generation Students (FGS) has been gaining access and that once in PSE retention and success is on par with non-FGS.  Two unexpected points for me in the report are that females are more likely to be FGS and "students from rural communities are considerably more likely to be first generation students compared to students from larger communities."

(Inside Higher Ed highlights the MESA Project in this November 11 article: Canadian Study Finds Lower Dropout Rates for Immigrants and Minority Students)

Higher Education's Uncertain Financial Future

Could student services withstand a 40% cut to higher education funding? Watching what happens in Britain in the coming years could provide answers to that question. Massive cuts in British higher education are coming.

Inside Higher Ed reports that "The Comprehensive Spending Review unveiled [in the middle of October] includes a reduction in the higher education budget of £2.9 billion – from £7.1 billion to £4.2 billion – by 2014-5."  The government has indicated that future funding priorities will centre around science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

The article does not provide any details on how student services will be impacted, but the full Browne Report, or the Independent Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance, can be found here.

Aside from understanding the Browne Report's recommendations, an area I am interested in exploring more, and will do so in the coming weeks, is to understand how the British higher education funding model compares to other countries around the world. That being said, it is widely known that many governments, including the Canadian federal and nearly every provincial government, are struggling to manage large debts so its quite conceivable that cuts on a similar scale could be made elsewhere. If that is the case then I cannot help but wonder how student services will fair.