Two Global Campus staff members received the Global Campus Lightbulb Award for Innovation for their implementation of a new online student checklist learning module in a new online admissions portal. The award was presented by Cheryl Murphy, vice provost of distance education at Global Campus, at the recent July staff meeting.
"The new checklist allows prospective and enrolling online students to track their progress and receive information specific to their program and admission term and more clearly identifies the next steps in the enrollment process," Murphy said. "At the same time, Global Campus staff can monitor each student's progress and provide targeted outreach when needed. This is a massive leap forward for our online student community."
The Team
Colleen Whitman - online student support manager
Whitman leads two teams at Global Campus: Online Student Liaison and Student Success. Whitman and her teams are dedicated to helping online students successfully navigate their journey at the U of A. Over the past several years, including four years in her current position, Whitman has helped shape student support services by simplifying processes, enhancing communication across departments and creating solutions that make higher education more accessible for online learners.
Rabia Shattuck - customer relationship management coordinator
Shattuck has served as Global Campus' customer relationship management coordinator for nearly five years, having joined Global Campus in September 2021. In her role, she develops and manages functionality within Slate, supporting Global Campus initiatives through queries, emails, text messaging, portals and other student-facing tools.
The Project
The duo led development of a personalized student checklist within Slate, the university's customer relationship management system used for admissions. Together, Whitman and Shattuck transformed what had previously been a static public webpage into an interactive portal experience tailored to each admitted student.
"The project began when Colleen asked if the new student checklist could be made more visually appealing for students," Shattuck said. "At the time, there wasn't a defined vision for what that should look like, so I worked through multiple concepts and designs."
The checklist evolved into a portal that remains both interactive and easily navigable.
"Through that process, I transformed the checklist into an interactive experience," Shattuck said. "Instead of a static list, students can easily navigate between steps, track their progress and mark items as complete, creating a more user-friendly and engaging experience."
Much of the technical work involved Shattuck's use of Slate, a customer relationship management software platform used primarily in higher education. In addition to enhancing learner experience, the Slate system significantly reduces the workload for staff across various teams within Global Campus, from marketing to finance. In her role, Shattuck used Slate to build the interactive checklist, using already existing content and resources from the online.uark.edu website. In this way they could retain valuable information while presenting everything in a more personalized and accessible format.
"Slate has developed its own AI called Sparkles," Whitman said. "Rabia used it to help her write the code to provide the experience we wanted."
When approaching this project, Whitman viewed every step and instruction from the student's perspective.
"I wanted to get the entire checklist from a public web page into a portal page so that the information seen by the student is specific for that student," Whitman said. "I'm proud of the work we did to upkeep accurate information for newly admitted students on our website, but it was labor intensive, and we could not offer a personalized experience there. The recent updates to Slate gave us the opportunity to implement the type of interactive resource that we've envisioned for years."
The innovation has already attracted attention beyond Global Campus, with the undergraduate admissions team planning to adopt a similar model for use with on-campus students.
Whitman credits Global Campus' unique role as a bridge between campus departments for making improvements like these possible.
"Staff at Global Campus know how to make sure that our students receive the best service, that they receive the best experience," Whitman said. "Global Campus has a unique perspective on how campus works. I feel like we've worked for decades to break down those walls to improve the online student experience. And now that we have, we really are seen as a good partner among campus departments and recognized as people who can help."
The Lightbulb Award
In 2019, the Global Campus instituted the Lightbulb Award to honor staff members for outstanding innovation that goes above and beyond their routine job responsibilities. This award is open to appointed and hourly staff who work for Global Campus. Previous winners of the Lightbulb Award can be found by searching on the university's Arkansas News website.
The Global Campus supports the U of A academic colleges and schools in the development and delivery of online degree programs and courses, and workforce development programs. This unit provides instructional design services, learning technology support, media production services and assistance with financial administration, recruitment and marketing.
The Global Campus also supports the W.E. Manning Memorial Scholarship, which is open to undergraduate and graduate students studying in online degree programs.