Twin Cities updates (March 2018)

Complete Drop Initiative - ASR Collaboration
Nate Peterson (OSSS) and Cathy Schuster (OSF) have been working collaboratively on an initiative to prevent students from dropping all classes without contact with their advisor. Starting in fall 2018, Twin Cities and Rochester degree-seeking students who attempt to drop below 6 credits will get an error message preventing the drop and prompting them to meet with their advisor.

The minimum credit threshold of 6 credits will be applied the day after the 100% refund date and remain indefinitely. Athletes and international students will be excluded from this (due to NCAA and visa requirements). The student will be warned that their action would drop them below the minimum required credits, and refer them to their college advising office, International Student and Scholar Services, or Veteran’s Services. After the advisor or college staff has contact with student, the minimum threshold can be reduced or removed so the student can complete the drop.

Once a communications plan is completed, materials will be shared with system campuses in the event that they would like to duplicate any portion of the process.

One Stop annual survey results
Each year, One Stop Student Services sends out a student satisfaction survey to students who we have served during our busy time in the fall. We seek feedback from our students so we continue to keep our finger on the pulse of how students can best be served. There is no better way than to simply ask them! View the survey infographic.

The survey consists of a rating scale for our three modes of contact (phones, walk-ins, and emails). We also determine how well we are meeting our service standards of Knowledge, Empathy, Efficiency and the our newly added standard of “Welcoming” (which has replaced “Friendliness”).

We asked students to comment on how we are doing overall. We received many comments such as "I felt that the One Stop representative was on my side and cared about my problem. Also they took care of my issue in no time. Thank you very much for friendly service." We are proud that the overall satisfaction rating is 80%!

There were some minor changes to our survey design that may have impacted our final results, which we will keep in mind as we continue to improve our survey procedure. We are taking a SWOT (Strengths, Weakness, Opportunity and Threats) approach in reviewing the students’ comments and looking to make One Stop even better in the future.

One Stop West Bank renovation
One Stop Student Services on the West Bank has a fresh look and improved functionality. Updates to the space include more privacy for counseling conversations, better accessibility for visitors in wheelchairs, triage space for periods of peak traffic, and an additional "hotel" workspace. If you are near the West Bank Skyway, stop by and check it out.







Twin Cities submitting the PPA for recertification
The Twin Cities campus will be submitting their Program Participation Agreement (PPA) for recertification to the Department of Education (ED) by March 31, 2018. The campus is allowed to administer aid through the end of June, but often the recertification review process can take several months. Recertification is required for the campus to continue to administer Title IV financial aid. Through the recertification process the campus affirms that they are still meeting the requirements set forth by ED and reflects any relevant changes to academic programs and program delivery. The Twin Cities campus anticipates hearing back from ED in early June.

Staff Updates

• ASR Student Data and Analytics has two new data analysts starting on April 2.
• Alex Rose is joining the team from the College of Biological Sciences.
• Pa Thao will be coming to us from St. Olaf College.
• Jen-Hoe Ng will be starting on April 11 in OSF undergraduate unit. Jen is a Minot State University graduate and presently works at Argosy University in Eagan. He has also worked at the Minnesota School of Business and Capella University. He volunteers at YouthLink Minnesota, providing financial aid counseling to homeless youth.
• Meghan Czarniecki will be starting April 9 in OSF undergraduate unit. Meghan is from New York and worked at the University of Rochester as the assistant director of financial aid before moving to Minnesota. She has been working at North Hennepin Community College since July as a data coordinator for financial aid.

Eleanor’s update (March 2018)

Once again I am amazed at the amount and variety of projects and initiatives we are pursuing. We have some early indicators of good news for the University's budget request with the governor showing support. Of course it is still early in the process, but we have an invitation to Support the U Day. Wouldn’t it be great if we could avoid tuition increase next year?

Several of our campuses are experiencing changes, and welcoming new staff on board. And we continue to make progress on many of our IT priorities including the Custom Solutions PeopleSoft 9.2 Upgrade project.

Sue's update (March 2018)

I want to thank everyone for their continued work on the Campus Solutions PeopleSoft 9.2 Upgrade project. We are still on target to end this project in June and Eleanor is doing a nice job of monitoring our progress.

The PeopleTools 8.56 Upgrade is next and will require work on our part. OIT will be putting together a plan on how to manage this project, so more to come. Since the navigation will change, the communication and change management portion will be the time-consuming part of this project. I have heard that it isn’t too bad from my colleagues around the country. I can tell end of term and “summer fun” are just around the corner so let’s keep focused on the student experience.

Board of Regents meeting highlights

At its February meeting, the U of M Board of Regents reviewed progress on the President's Initiative to Prevent Sexual Misconduct, which focuses on accountability, awareness, and education for the University community. The board also reviewed a report on the Twin Cities campus' five-year enrollment plan and approved a resolution related to diversity in enrollment and student success on the Twin Cities campus.


Additionally, Regents reviewed the first of five system-wide strategic planning focus area updates. February's presentation outlined ongoing efforts to improve system wide communications, outreach, and public engagement. See the news release for more.

Governor’s supplemental budget request - hold tuition flat

Governor Dayton singled out the University of Minnesota during his State of the State speech, stressing the importance of supporting higher education and urging the legislature to invest in public colleges and universities. 

As a reminder, the February forecast projected a $329 million surplus for the remainder of the biennium. The governor's supplemental recommendations include $10 million for the University of Minnesota to hold tuition flat for undergraduate residents in the 2018-2019 academic year, as requested by the Board of Regents. This would offset next years cost increases by $200-250 for all University of Minnesota resident undergraduates, approximately 31,500 students. 

The legislature soon will release its own budget "targets," outlining its priorities for spending and tax decisions this session and setting the stage for final negotiations with the governor.

Support the U Day

Support the U Day is being held on April 10 at the Capitol in St. Paul. While this is a student-driven event, faculty, staff, alumni, and supporters are also urged to attend to show support for the University. The day begins in the Capitol Rotunda at 1:30 p.m. with a rally, where participants are encouraged to bring signs and show support while listening to speakers from all five campuses. After that, meetings will be scheduled with senators and representatives as well as another social event for networking.

UMN Google Day recap - March 2, 2018

UMN Google Day was held on 3/2/18 on the Twin Cities campus. The event was the result of community feedback and focused on how to effectively use G Suite (Google) apps. It included a keynote presentation from Lauren Harrison, Senior Program Manager at Google, as well as University staff-led presentations and hands-on clinics.

Mara Schneider, Lindsay Bork Nichols, and Carin Thoms were able to attend and found these items of particular interest:

• Email security presentation
• Google Drive help from OIT
• Google Quick Draw - a fun brain break game in which a neural net tries to guess what you're drawing (an example of machine learning)

Carrell named Rochester chancellor

Lori Carrell has been named the new chancellor for the University of Minnesota Rochester. Carrell has served as UMR's interim chancellor since August 2017. "I'm delighted and honored to serve this innovative campus community," says Carrell. "UMR's legacy of collaboration and creativity will continue--carrying us onward toward our vision." Carrell’s inauguration is scheduled for September 28, 2018.

Upcoming conferences

Alliance Conference
More than 3,500 colleagues from around the world will gather in Salt Lake City, Utah March 25-28, 2018 for Alliance 2018! There will be over 350 user-driven sessions about implementation, use of applications, and knowledge sharing. Several ASR-IT staff members will be in attendance and will be presenting interest sessions.

104th AACRAO annual meeting
March 25 - 28, 2018 (Sunday-Wednesday) in the Orlando World Center Marriott Orlando, FL the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO) will hold their annual meeting. As with most annual meetings, it is a time for practitioners to share and learn from one another. Several ASR staff are presenting on topics varying from advanced FERPA application to compliance matters around classes and calendars. In addition, several ASR staff will be helping AACRAO share the learning from the annual meeting by writing during the annual meeting.

The annual AACRAO Tech/Transfer meeting will be held in Minneapolis July 8-10 at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Minneapolis. This is a great opportunity to participate in a large-scale national meeting without having to travel far from home.

Faculty Center class roster related content

The related content on the class roster page in faculty center has been adjusted so that the related content will be moved to the bottom of the page (from the upper right) and will default to collapsed. The areas have been renamed to Photos, FERPA, Assoc. Classes, and Emails to display more clearly. These changes make the descriptions of the pages more visible and work better on smaller screens.

The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

A small group led by the Office of General Counsel has been considering the implications of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on the University’s maintenance of records. In the short term, not many changes are expected. Some small changes may be made to the University’s privacy statement on websites and some additional process documentation may be created to outline why records are maintained. AACRAO has collected a number of resources about this new regulation.

I, K, and X symbols on transcripts

In conjunction with ongoing review of the Grading and Transcripts policy, the System Registrar Council (SRC) has been examining use of the I, K, and X symbols systemwide (see the transcript key for more information). The group is considering appropriate use of these symbols and ways that the K and X symbols might be restricted to just those courses that would require them.

Direct deposit message now runs hourly

As a result of a phishing attack at the Morris campus in late January, the Student Finance group has increased the frequency of the direct deposit email message to alert students when there are changes to their account.

Previously this communication ran nightly on the batch schedule. Now this process will run hourly. Additionally, a query will be run (the exact frequency of the query is yet to be determined) to look for non-typical (i.e., not Wells Fargo, TCF, US Bank, etc.) banks being identified for direct deposit changes to assist in identifying potential re-routed direct deposit accounts that weren’t initiated by the student.

Reviewing the One Stop website financial aid pages

The System Financial Aid Council has begun doing a systematic review of the financial aid-related content on the shared One Stop website. Each campus is reviewing their own pages. If processes or policies differ campus to campus, each campus can personalize their content. The council is committed to ensuring pages are reviewed and updated at least annually.

CS PS 9.2 Upgrade status

The Custom Solutions PeopleSoft 9.2 Upgrade project continues to make progress. Here are a few highlights for this month:

Gender Identity, Pronouns, and Preferred Name project
This project is on track with various milestones. One portion went live in January that added students’ preferred names to the Waitlist pages and Permission Number pages in PeopleSoft. This helps reduce confusion for schedulers, instructors, and other staff. The other part of the project that will allow all students, staff, and faculty to add a gender identity and/or pronoun via the MyU portal is scheduled to go live in mid-June. There has been a variety of presentations and outreach happening around the campus such as aa recent article in the Minnesota Daily.

Parent/Guest Access project
The 9.2 Parent/Guest Access project continues to move forward with usability testing scheduled for the end of March. The new Parent/Guest Access landing page is scheduled to launch April 22. Nate Peterson (project lead) will be giving presentations for the following system councils to train staff/trainers from each campus: System Registrar’s Council, System One Stop Leads Council, System One Stop Website Council, System Financial Aid Council, and System Student Finance Council. If you have additional questions, reach out to Nate at pete2787@umn.edu.

Education Abroad (EA) project
Two parts of the project are moving into production in March. The addition of the Credit Type field, and the addition of the biographic and demographic information to the EA system are approved to move to production. Both of these will improve the efficiency for EA staff.

Business analysts are busy testing

What are PeopleSoft Student Records, Student Financials, Financial Aid and Campus Community Shared Data Business Analysts working on? 

As already reported in this newsletter a lot of effort is going into Campus Solutions 9.2 upgrade testing, but many other things are happening, too. Other upgrades and releases that will require testing over the next three months include:

• March PeopleSoft bug fixes/mods build (March 25)
• PeopleSoft Campus Solutions Image 8 (March 25)
• Oracle database upgrade (planned April 22)
• April build (April 22 or April 29)
• PeopleTools Critical Patch Upgrade (planned May 13)
• Axway file transfer upgrade (planned May 20)
• May build (May 20)
• PeopleSoft Campus Solutions Image 9 (June 17)
• June build (June 17)

Custom Solutions - App Dev and Destiny One

The Destiny One, Custom App Dev, and Salesforce teams are continuing to work towards an integration of learner information collected through non-credit registrations between Destiny One and Salesforce. Having purchased funnel data available in Salesforce will help colleges better understand their leads and target marketing efforts. 

The project has brought together colleges from across the University to help in defining best practices for a shared use of Salesforce while also serving as an opportunity to expand ASR-IT’s technological capabilities through the implementation of the Apache Kafka data platform that allows for real-time transformation and communication of data between different systems.

Student Data and Analytics

The Course Enrollment Long-Term Trends Dashboard and Course Statistics Report are now available in the MyU Reporting Center under the Student Services section in the Enrollment drop-down. These reports are designed to answer a broad range of enrollment questions without users having to write complex, custom queries. They are built utilizing the new Enterprise Data Warehouse and conform to standard ASR business logic. For questions about this information, contact John Vlk (jvlk@umn.edu).

Crookston updates (March 2018)

Advisors work to support graduation!
Crookston has initiated a collaborative effort to support students who are near degree completion to finish their degrees. The offices of the registrar, student finance, financial aid, and advisors have identified students who have been close to graduating but have not yet. First focusing on those from the last five years, the departments are gathering key details that may assist the student in obtaining a degree. Once the information has been collected, the academic advisor will contact the student and share the support we can offer as well as the steps needed to complete their degree. Many of these students only need one to five classes to earn their degree.

Duluth updates (March 2018)

Reorganization
Duluth’s One Stop Student Services currently serves as the frontline for the offices of financial aid, registrar, and student financial services, and will be incorporating additional campus resources. New services include new student orientation programs, success coaching, support to unique student populations, and coordination of advising technologies and tools. One Stop will be moving out of Financial Aid and into a stand-alone function and will be supported by a realignment of positions currently housed within other enrollment service areas. A One Stop director position will be posted to the University of Minnesota job site soon.

RFP process for new collection agencies
Student Financial Services (SFS) has started the Request For Proposal (RFP) process to search for collection agencies for both loans and tuition accounts. New agencies and contracts should be in place for July 1, 2018.


Staff Updates
Laura Schnell, the Office of the Registrar’s new athletic and academic records coordinator, began March 19. Welcome, Laura.

Morris updates (March 2018)

Registration opens

Summer term registration opens on March 21, and fall term registration begins on April 9.

Staff Updates

UMM Business Office/Bursar's Office Staffing 

• Congratulations to Kim Schultz, business office manager, who retired from the UMM Business Office/Bursar's Office in February. 
• Congratulations to Melissa Wrobleski who has taken on the supervisor position in the Business Office. She will be the new cluster director for Morris.
• Congratulations also go to Janine Teske for accepting the procurement/bursar position in the UMM Business Office, and to Jodi Sperr who has accepted a new position in the UMM Grants Office.
• Two new hires will also be taking place to fill vacant positions remaining in the UMM Business Office.

Rochester updates (March 2018)

Rochester hosts March Board of Regents meeting
The Board of Regents will hold their March meetings at Rochester—a first for UMR. Along with Regent members, senior leaders from the University of Minnesota System and the Duluth, Morris, and Crookston campuses will be present.

June 6-8 - Higher Education Innovation Summit
The Higher Education Innovation Summit will include keynote speaker Freeman Hrabowski, discussing the "4 Pillars of College Success in Science." (Watch his Ted Talk.) Register today to see Hrabowski live on June 8.

Staff Updates

New registrar announced
UMR has hired a new registrar, Diane Douglas, who will begin on Monday, April 30. Diane comes to UMR most recently from Norwich University, where she has held the position of registrar. Diane has been involved professionally in registrar functions, admissions, residential life, teaching and institutional research during her professional career. Before Norwich, Diane worked at Lewis-Clark State College, Rainy River Community College and University of Wisconsin-Superior. Diane completed her undergraduate degree in business administration from Winona State University, master's degree in management from St. Scholastica, and a PhD in education from Idaho State University.

Vice chancellor position opening
The Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Innovation is the chief academic officer for the campus, reporting to the Chancellor and serving in this capacity in the absence of the Chancellor. See position posting for additional details.