Session Descriptions

Melissa Padfield, University of Alberta

Managing Change through Student Centered Thinking

What does it mean to be "ambitiously transformative"? How do you implement significant change in an organization with over 100 years of history, while preserving the best of that history and tradition? These and other questions dealing with change management will be explored as the Office of the Registrar at the University of Alberta shares is journey over the past seven years. Anchored in the development and launch of our Student Connect integrated service centre this interactive presentation will deal with the people, process, policy and technology aspects influencing and supporting change. Participants will come away with key learnings that can help inform change initiatives big and small, and develop an even greater appreciation for the opportunity presented by student centered thinking in registrarial practice.

Marion Hannaford, TRU

Cycling through Probation: The Rocky Road to Completion

A rewrite of the policy on Satisfactory Academic Progress at Thompson Rivers University was the impetus the System and Reporting team needed to rethink, rework, and reconfigure how we handled Academic History processes in Banner. In consultation with Ellucian, we revisited our Academic Standing codes at the end of Fall 2016 in order to align with best practices on how Academic Standing is coded, run, and reported to fit with our strategic enrolment objectives. The details of how we changed our thinking, reconfigured our codes, and changed our processes so that strategic enrolment data would be available for analysis within the constraints of Banner, and strategies for reporting will be shared in this case study. Philippe Melis, Infosilem

Intentional Scheduling with Infosilem

The expectations of today’s students demand a comprehensive approach to higher education that includes multiple degree options, world-class instructional quality, on-time completion assurance and outstanding on-campus and virtual campus experiences… all within a flexible, convenient schedule. In this session you will learn how, with the implementation of Infosilem’s Timetabler, your institution can transition to “Intentional Scheduling”. Create a more centralized scheduling process, foster a collaborative environment between the Registrar’s Office and the academic departments, and make it possible to generate a non-biased, student-focused schedule, while increasing facility utilization and scheduling efficiency. Susie Kennedy, University of Lethbridge

Managing Project Goals: How to get there from here

You have envisioned the goal, presented a business case and obtained funding. Now is the time to move forward ... and the pathway forward isn't always as clear. What questions should we ask, and what do we need to take into account, before undertaking a project? Join us for a fun, interactive session that will help you define the right questions before you embark on that initiative. Sorry, we won't have any MS project demonstrations or spreadsheets, but--Tinker Toys, anyone?

Andrew Drinkwater & Patrick Lougheed, Plaid

It is springtime and I am (no longer) blind: dashboards for the data-informed registrar

Universities are swimming (or drowning?) in data, and yet using data to inform policy and planning conversations remains a challenge within registrars' offices and in the wider institution. This dynamic presentation will show how Plaid University* uses data and dashboards to facilitate conversation amongst stakeholders around improving the student experience. We’ll highlight key principles of effective dashboards, technologies we use to bring together data from different sources, and an interactive demo of some key questions at PlaidU and how our dashboards helped us achieve results.