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Thursday, January 18, 2018

Eleanor’s update

Happy New Year! We are off to a running start as all the system campuses have begun spring term. Overall, things are going pretty well.

As you take a moment to read this newsletter, notice how we continue to make improvements to better serve students. In student records, a new transfer evaluation system (TES) has gone live for Twin Cities, the tracking and processing of diplomas has significantly improved for all campuses, and creation of a new curriculum analysis dashboard—part of the Student Success Analytics (SSA) efforts—is ready at Duluth. Financial aid staff have made spring disbursements across the system, sent estimated awards for next year for Morris and Rochester, and the student finance area has already implemented two of its CS PS 9.2 Upgrade Phase II projects. Not a bad way to start the new year and the new term.

Sue's update

We are in spring term and the Office of Information Technology (OIT) has added servers to handle the load on our systems. With over 300,000 sessions on MyU the first class day for Morris, Rochester, and Twin Cities, we are hoping these precautions will help keep performance on our systems adequate throughout the week. I do realize performance was not optimal since many of us couldn’t log in to MyU.

The 9.2 CS Upgrade will have a change in project leadership. Eleanor Pijut will be taking over Carrie Otto’s 9.2 CS upgrade responsibilities as she transitions over to work with Lincoln Kallsen on CRM initiatives. Carrie has done an outstanding job on the project and in ASR over the years. Eleanor has played a crucial role in both the ESUP project and the 9.2 CS project so I am confident that the project will be in good hands.

The Campus Solutions/PeopleSoft Audit’s essential finding is now closed. The statement, “Excessive user access needs to be removed and access management processes need improvement,” has been corrected and processes are in place to monitor. Thanks to everyone that contributed to correcting this finding.

Caucus night

February 6, 2018 is caucus night. Per Board of Regents resolution, the University may schedule classes or events on caucus night with the Board’s authorization, however students and/or instructors are permitted to attend their party’s caucus night if they wish. Students must notify their instructor in advance, and instructors are expected to accommodate their requests. If enough students indicate that they will be attending their caucus so that holding class becomes impractical, instructors may cancel the class or make alternative arrangements.

Capital infrastructure recommendations from the governor

In January of an even-numbered calendar year, the governor is required by statute to submit a list of capital infrastructure recommendations to the legislature for consideration in the upcoming legislative session. Governor Dayton announced his capital infrastructure bonding recommendations for the 2018 session. In his recommendations, he included nearly $300 million for the University of Minnesota.

The total for the governor's recommendation is higher than the University's request and puts the the University in a great position heading into the legislative session, however, the governor's list of recommendations is only the first step in the process leading to a capital investment bonding bill. The House and Senate will release their own recommendations during the 2018 session, which begins on February 20.

Updates to diploma ordering

Along with the upgrade to the Parchment storefront (our transcript vendor) that happened on December 5, ASR implemented online ordering of duplicate diplomas through Parchment. The Parchment form is available on the One Stop website, Forms page. Fifty-seven students placed orders online in the first month.

Diploma order status checklist items were also put into production recently. A team worked to develop data points in PeopleSoft so that users system-wide can easily see the status of a student’s initial or duplicate diploma request. A byproduct of this is that diplomas can now be ordered and shipped out weekly. Questions about these new checklist items can be directed to Dan Delaney (delan021@umn.edu) or Erik Sparby (spar0110@umn.edu).

House version of the Higher Education Act (HEA) reauthorization bill released

On December 10, republicans in the House of Representatives Committee on Education and Workforce introduced a 542-page bill that would significantly reshape how students apply for and receive federal financial aid. 

The bill to reauthorize the Higher Education Act (HEA) reflects many of the committee’s priorities over the last few years, including a move to a “one grant, one loan, one work-study” model (which eliminates the current subsidized Direct loan), increased student counseling requirements, a transition away from institutional cohort default rates to repayment rates for academic program aid eligibility, and caps on the amount that can be borrowed at the graduate level as well as the elimination of time-based loan forgiveness provisions (i.e., income-based repayment forgiveness and public service loan forgiveness). 

It also proposes eliminating the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant (SEOG) and replacing it with a Pell Grant “bonus” that students could earn if they complete over 30 credits a year. Democrats in the House are overall not supportive of the reauthorized HEA as it is written, and the Senate has not released their version of the revised HEA yet.

Twin Cities, non-resident undergraduate 15% tuition increase

In December, the Board of Regents (BOR) approved a proposal to boost tuition for Twin Cities non-resident undergraduates by more than $3,700 a year. This is the the second double-digit increase in a row for this population, whose tuition rose 12.5% in fall 2017. The change would not affect Minnesota residents, or those from Wisconsin and the Dakotas who file for reciprocity.

Increases for continuing students will be limited to 5.5% a year, while new students would pay the higher rates next fall. The 2018-19 rates for Minnesota residents will be set by the board in the spring.

Last year, the board set a five-year goal of raising the University’s non-resident rate to the midpoint of the Big Ten—an estimated $35,000 a year by 2021. Under the new plan, however, it could reach that number by the fall of 2019.

Update on Campus Solutions PeopleSoft 9.2 Upgrade Phase II projects

Phase II is moving along as planned. Both the Escheatment Compliance initiative and part 1 of the Duplicate ID Tool Enhancement projects will wrap up in January. The new PeopleSoft FLUID functionality (new user interface) is gaining some momentum in Campus Solutions and is one of the major project objectives for the CS9.2 project. The Direct Deposit Set-up Improvement and the Gender Identity, Personal Pronouns, and Preferred Name projects are both using delivered pages in FLUID. The GPAS Exceptions Processing and Payment Plan Improvement projects will also be creating custom FLUID pages to enhance services to students. Please see the current estimated timeline for each phase II initiative here view this recent presentation.

TransForm replacement

TransForm was piloted during 2017 by OIT and several units across the University on the Twin Cities, Duluth, and Rochester campuses. Due to accessibility issues uncovered in testing activities, as of Thursday, November 16, OIT will no longer support the development of new forms in the tool and the TransForm pilot was terminated. The OIT Document Management Team has been working to identify replacement systems.

Throughout November and December, OIT and representatives from ASR, Admissions, and the Disability Resource Center, previewed demonstrations of several potential systems to replace TransForm. Vendors whose products met OIT system requirements will have the opportunity to do a second, more in-depth demonstration of their product using University-generated use cases and sample data.

Further testing and University constituent involvement and feedback opportunities will be available as this project progresses.

Recap: U of M Day of Data

Across the University many individuals and groups are developing interesting approaches to data, methods, and workflows, but don’t typically get a chance to share work across departments and units. The second annual U of M Day of Data, held on January 12, 2018, offered those opportunities.

The event connects students, faculty and staff for structured, hands-on learning sessions and open-ended networking opportunities. Topics ranged from introductory data visualization and storytelling, to data modeling and management workflows, to data mining/algorithms and plenty of things in between. The event was co-sponsored by Enterprise Data Management & Reporting (EDMR), Academic Support Resources (ASR), Office of Information Technology (OIT), Libraries, Liberal Arts Technology and Innovation Services (LATIS), and the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute.

With roughly 150 people in attendance and 25 volunteers, the event was successful. Specifically, there were significantly more students who participated this year. One student shared the following: “The best part about the groups is that there were so many different backgrounds, fields, ability levels, experience. Having a mix of undergrads, graduate students, faculty, and staff was huge. So much to learn from each of those perspectives. I have no doubt that every group of people at the tables learned new things today.”

Student Success Analytics (SSA) efforts

The University has prioritized the use of student and institutional data (enrollment statistics, student characteristics, degree progress, etc.) and analytics to enhance student success. In 2016, the University assessed available solutions and recommended building an internal system that could handle the size of the University, its complexity, and would provide transparency for users. This recommendation lead to the Student Success Analytics (SSA) initiative. The goal is to improve student success by positively affecting the student academic experience.

SSA will help the University reach the Board of Regent’s benchmarks and legislative goals to:
  • Increase student retention and timely graduation
  • Lower student debt at graduation
  • Improve curricular design, delivery, and transparency
The first phase of Curriculum Analysis has been delivered to Duluth in the form of a new Curriculum Analysis Dashboard. The dashboard analyzes courses by taking history of Duluth NHS undergrad students who earned degrees in four vs. five years. For each program, plan, and subplan, the dashboard compares when students took particular classes. Comparing these distributions, the dashboard recommends a “take by” term that aligns with historical patterns of 4-year degree completion. The benefit is that it creates actionable advice for students on how to sequence courses in order to stay on track to graduate in 4 years.

Additional sub-projects of the SSA initiative are; Undergraduate Degree Progress which will identify students at risk of not graduating in 4 years, and the Retention Risk Analysis which is defined as the probability that an undergraduate student on any campus will discontinue their academic career.

Application development, WorkflowGen enhancements

Work is underway to improve the look and feel of WorkflowGen. The new look will be more accessible, will work on more devices, and will follow current University brand standards. Initially, only new workflows will have the improved theme, but throughout the year existing workflows will also be updated.

Destiny One team updates


  • Family Portal has been enabled which allows a family contact (parents/guardians or spouse/partners) to create an account and manage enrollments and billing for members of their family. This feature will be beneficial to youth programs, as well as for other offerings where multiple family members would like to enroll in a single transaction. 
  • The Destiny-Canvas integration is progressing and a proof of concept is currently being developed.
  • Development work will begin in February on an integration between Destiny and Salesforce. This integration will allow non-Destiny staff users to view historical Destiny One purchase data and information collection for learners, in Salesforce, and market to them appropriately.

DARS to be upgraded to uAchieve

A long-term project is in its beginning stages as the University of Minnesota plans to upgrade its Degree Audit and Transfer Articulation (DARS) functionality. The plan is to keep our current software vendor, CollegeSource, and move from a very old, COBOL-based version of their software, DARwin 3.5.4, to their newest, java-based version, uAchieve 4.4.x.

The project is expected to last two years and will be lead by ASR and OIT. The first year will focus on the base software upgrade, and the second year will focus on redesigning our system integration with PeopleSoft in order to maximize business benefits of the upgrade. The project will rely on staff from ASR, Admissions, OIT, the vendor’s services team, and partners on all 5 campuses for expertise. We hope to begin the vendor services engagement in July 2018, although the timing depends on negotiations with CollegeSource.

The upgrade will:
  • Improve system security 
  • Add core functionality
  • Provide us the ability to better maintain this software over time
  • Retire some system customizations made over the past 10-20 years
This software has a large and complex impact on undergraduate student services, so the work will require partnership and assistance from many campus stakeholders. While upgrading the system, a few key business benefits are expected:
  • A new web-based user interface for degree audits
  • New Peoplesoft pre- and co-requisite checking for transfer courses
  • Improved consistency of business practices and data related to degree encoding
  • Better University-wide analysis of student degree progress
For questions, contact project manager Santiago Fernandez-Gimenez (ferna010@umn.edu).

ASR-IT pilots automating testing products

Testing! Testing! Testing! A big proportion of what business analysts do today is test based on the multitude of upgrades that are always occurring in order to keep systems and infrastructure current. With every upgrade we must ensure that all of our systems (e.g. PeopleSoft) work properly. In conjunction with partners from Finance, HR, Portal, and OIT, ASR business analysts will be evaluating various auto-testing products in the next six months. If we can find a tool that makes testing more efficient we will look to acquire it and roll it out more universally.

Crookston updates (January 2018)

UMC to hold Northern Great Plains Youth Institute in May 2018
Affiliated with the World Food Prize established by University of Minnesota Alumnus Norman Borlaug, (who was the recipient of the Nobel Prize for his work in alleviating hunger and is credited with saving more than a billion lives through his work in the Green Revolution), this is an event for high school students. Participants in the Northern Great Plains Youth Institute research a global issue and write a two-three page paper under the supervision of a teacher or mentor. All high school student participants in the Northern Great Plains Youth Institute who ultimately enroll at UMC will receive a $500 scholarship.

Staff news
Cynthia Prom joined the Student Financial Aid office as the new director of financial aid and scholarships on January 2. Cynthia was recently the director of financial services at Williston State College, Williston, ND, and prior to that held a business manager/analyst position at the University of North Dakota. Cynthia comes with over 15 years of higher education experience and we are excited for her to join the UMC team.

Duluth updates (January 2018)

Higher Learning Commission (HLC) recertification
UMD is in the middle of our Higher Learning Commission (HLC) recertification with an April 2018 visit anticipated.

Darland space reconfigured
Next time you visit Duluth you will see changes to the first floor of the Darland Administration building, outside of the registrar, student financial services, and financial aid offices. We are thrilled that a unisex restroom is being added to the first floor to serve our students and guests. Additionally a conference room is replacing a no longer used information desk.

OTR exploration of Google tools
OTR is exploring a couple of new Google applications/G Suite tools. One is called Data Studio and the other is Jamboard. Data Studio has powerful options for managing data and sharing it with our users. Jamboard is a google collaborative “smartboard” that saves your “jam”/work directly to the google drive which can be shared/secured the same way of docs, sheets, etc. We are using it for PS training as well as for collaborative projects.

Staff news
The athletic and academic records coordinator search is in its final stages. An offer will be extended this month.

Morris updates (January 2018)

2018-2019 estimated financial aid award notices
The first estimated financial aid award notices for the 2018-2019 academic year were sent to prospective students the week of December 11, 2017.

Staff news
  • Kim Schultz will be retiring February 2, from the Business office after almost 29 years of service.
  • Jodi Sperr has taken a position in the Grants Development office and will be leaving the Business office in February.

Rochester updates (January 2018)

Early estimated aid offers
2019 estimated financial aid offers were calculated, and notifications were sent to students the week of January 8, 2018.

Rochester annual Health Care Scholars Day
Since 2015, UMR has held Health Care Scholars Day, an opportunity for invited attendees to compete for scholarship dollars. Students are asked to answer an essay explaining their passion to pursue a career in healthcare. After committee review, finalists are selected to come to campus to compete. Finalists will participate in both an interview as well as an oral presentation demonstrating their passion for health care. Scholarships will be awarded in the amounts of $1,000-$4,000. The event is scheduled for the first weekend in February.

Job opportunity
The University of Minnesota Rochester has a new job posting for our registrar. UMR is a system campus of the University of Minnesota focused on health sciences. We are an extremely collaborative campus and look forward to someone new joining our team as registrar. Please share this position: https://r.umn.edu/administration/employment-opportunities/facultystaff-employment/registrar

Twin Cities updates (January 2018)

ASR committee awarded Campus Climate Micro Grant
One Stop Student Services’ Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee, along with partners from the Office of Student Finance, recently received a Campus Climate Micro Grant. The grant will fund name tags that include personal pronouns for public-facing One Stop Student Services and Office of Student Finance staff. This project aims to increase competence about personal pronouns and also demonstrates a commitment to creating an inclusive environment for our students, staff, and community. Prior to receiving this grant, the committee laid a foundation for this project through presentations and trainings for the Academic Support Resources (ASR) community. Opportunities to expand this initiative to other interested ASR staff may be available in the near future.

Transfer Evaluation System (TES) implementation
The Transfer Evaluation System (TES) went live for the TC campus just in time for spring orientation. Courses evaluated through TES will be available for students to explore in Transferology. If a course hasn’t been evaluated, students (or advisors and staff) can submit courses for review through the Office of Admissions Submit a course for review page. ASR will manage the routing of submitted courses to departmental reviewers and entering the outcome in DARS TA tables.

Advisor training continues on Transferology and Transferology Labs, the tools that students and advisors use to understand U of M transfer course articulation. See the new web page at http://admissions.tc.umn.edu/transfer/creditevaluation.html.

Twin Cities graduation rates
Staff and faculty around campus have been working diligently to support increasing graduation rates, with an eye toward meeting the goals set by the Board of Regents. Here are this year’s graduation rates for the Twin Cities campus:
  • 4 year: 68.4% (up just over 3% from last year)
  • 5 year: 77.87%(up 0.2% from last year)
  • 6 year: 80.6% (up nearly 2% from last year)
These numbers represent NHS admits in the fall terms of 2011, 2012, and 2013. In the future we will continue to focus on increasing the five year rate as well as special student groups. There will also be increased focus on the fall 2015 cohort, as the Board of Regents have set a goal that we reach 82% for the 6-year graduation rate by 2021.

Expected Graduation Term (EGT) project
Beginning with NHS and NAS students admitted for spring 2018, OTR will populate an Expected Graduation Term (EGT) for students in their first term. Collegiate staff will edit the EGT as needed as students make progress toward their degrees. Once students have achieved 75% of their degree-applicable credits, they’ll be scheduled to graduate, eliminating the need for a graduation application. The goals of this project are to reduce financial aid compliance risks, provide useful data points for reporting, and to support student success goals and graduation rates. Questions or comments on this project can be directed to Adrienne Bricker (abricker@umn.edu).

Spring transfer student communication
Recently, 893 spring transfer students at the Twin Cities campus were sent a welcome letter, Q&A, a loan comparison chart and the “Why Graduate in 3 years” graphic. This is the first year transfer students are being sent the same information that traditionally has been sent to freshman parents prior to fall semester. Hopefully, by receiving this information, many of the their questions about the financial aid process and billing will be answered. We continually look to enhance the transfer student experience and keep them informed as they are an important part of the University community.

Staff news
  • Anthony (Tony) Thomas began working in ASR-IT on Wednesday, January 3. Tony is a Developer 3 on the Custom Solutions team, and he is located in 160 Williamson (reporting to Kristy Davis).
  • Carrie Otto will be rolling off the CS9.2 project and leaving Academic Support Resources at the end of February. You may still bump into Carrie as she will be around in a new part-time role in the U of MN Institutional Analysis department where she will focus on some strategic enterprise CRM initiatives.
  • Mona Ganatra began work in ASR on December 18. Mona is a Business/Systems Analyst 3 (Transfer Details Business Analyst), and she reports to Jenni Peterson. Mona is located in 260-B Fraser Hall.
  • Ruanne Pearson, Student Finance Counselor 3 in the Office of Student Finance, retired on January 17, 2018. She has been employed at the University for nearly 37 years.