STUDENT ENGAGEMENT & EXPERIENCE

Overview

Pelkwaílc-kt es knucwentwécw-kt

We come together to help one another

Student Engagement and Experience Team

Team Lead: Matt Dyck, Associate Director, Student Engagement & Experience

This team was recently established in recognition of the importance of having a team dedicated to enhancing student experience in Open Learning (“OL”). This team has sought to identify gaps in services and seek creative solutions, wherever feasible, to address these gaps. In doing so, the team aims to maximize engagement opportunities for students studying at TRU, through the OL division.

The team is the front facing team within OL for students. We serve over 15,000 students in 35,000 course registration (7,500 of whom are in full-time programs) with a diverse staff of 21 people.

Strategic Partnerships

Team Lead: Alison Dunn, Manager, Partner Relations

The goal of Strategic Partnerships has historically been to engage with communities to seek out, build, and support unique student pathway partnerships with other public and private institutions programs across Canada.

Once an agreement is developed, Strategic Partnerships then supports the recruitment and marketing around our OL partnerships through both virtual and face-to-face recruitment strategies.

Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition (PLAR)

Team Lead: Susan Forseille, Director, PLAR

The PLAR process is used to determine if knowledge, skills, and abilities acquired outside of post-secondary education can be used toward TRU credits. Note, a PLAR concept paper will be shared with the Provost in the coming week that dives deeper into the PLAR content.s Canada.

An aspiration for our teams is that services across TRU, when possible, will be available regardless of geographical location.

A FEw Stats

Where do OL students live?

PLAR Credits

The credits awarded through PLAR are summarized in this table, including OC and OL, ranging from 368 – 509 FTE. Note the Credit Bank accounts for 67% of these numbers, on average.

INCLUSIVE Excellence

PLAR offers a unique feedback loop between TRU and the structurally changing labour market learners are graduating into. Assessors have commented that their participation in PLAR has reduced the silos between post-secondary institutions and industry. They have shared that assessing learners’ acquisition of learning has provided them with windows into how the theory they teach “plays out” in the labour market. This gives them stronger insight into employment practices, new technologies, how the gig-economy is emerging, why employers are increasingly recruiting based on soft-skills, etc.

PLAR offers a unique feedback loop between TRU and the structurally changing labour market learners are graduating into. Assessors have commented that their participation in PLAR has reduced the silos between post-secondary institutions and industry. They have shared that assessing learners’ acquisition of learning has provided them with windows into how the theory they teach “plays out” in the labour market. This gives them stronger insight into employment practices, new technologies, how the gig-economy is emerging, why employers are increasingly recruiting based on soft-skills, etc.

TRU Staff PLAR Reimbursement: an initiative to support TRU employees in their career and educational development while retaining them at TRU.

Student Well Being

Program Advising

We provide coaching and academic advising to over 7000 program students in programs varying from certificate to graduate level. One of the proudest moments of the year is when advisors get to meet our graduates who travel from all over the world to celebrate their achievements at convocation.

Student Wellness Priority

The team has made it a priority to reach out to other teams across campus to integrate services for TRU students studying through OL. A recent development worth spotlighting was the inclusion of Study Abroad for students. Within a few months, we have already had 4 students take up this offer!

We have also recently rolled out services like COMM 100, our chatbot system, which allows for 24/7 support for students. We worked with Future Students and TRU World to make this seamless for students so that they get an answer regardless of where they land on the TRU website. The response to this system, which only launched earlier this year, has been incredible. Over 5200 “chats” have occurred in just over one month! 

Another recent position that we are excited about is the Learning Strategist, OL. This position has been key in identifying gaps and needs, and starting to action meaningful engagement opportunities like webinars.

Accessibility and Inclusion

This is a critical area to student wellness and also the success of TRU. We work very closely with the Accessibility Services (AS) Office at TRU to provide accessible educational opportunities to students. Half of the AS portfolio is OL. A special moment for us was when we held a webinar and a student who could not travel to Kamloops, due to a disability, thanked us for offering a virtual opportunity to connect with fellow students. The work we are doing is having an impact on improving wellness and quality of life for students.

Challenges, Barriers and Opportunities

We have had much success, but there is still more work to be done. Not all services are available to students studying through OL. What we really ask is that every team, division, department, faculty, and school at TRU asks themselves, “Can the services we offer be extended to students not located in Kamloops?”.

Some departments are primarily seeing students virtually now, regardless of location, because that’s what all students are asking for.

We ask that this can be an important consideration as we move forward with the ISP and academic planning at TRU.

Student Pathways

SP supports a total of 91 current agreements for both OL and Campus:

  • 42 public post-secondary partnerships with OL,
  • 17 Credit Bank partnerships with OL,
  • 3 MOU/POC/Licensing agreement(s) with OL
  • 10 TRU Start and TRU Start BC
  • 19 public post-secondary agreements with Campus.

Of this total, 78 are student pathway agreements with 61 public post-secondary and 17 Credit Bank. Overall, 86% of the formal agreements SP administers create pathways for accessible education and opportunity for educational growth at TRU, for mature learners across Canada.

Our Credit Bank articulation agreements also help to eliminate opportunity gaps, through the recognition of informal learning not traditionally acknowledge by public post-secondary institutions.

Enrollments From Student Pathways

Looking over the previous 3 FY’s, our public post-secondary partnerships bring an average of 1,411 OL program enrollments and our Credit Bank agreements, 76 program enrollments each year.

The peak for partnership program enrollments was in 2020/21 with 1,546 public post-secondary enrollments and 91 enrollments for Credit Bank. 

To date, partnerships within the province of BC make up 65% of our student enrollments, with all other out-of-province partnerships making up 35%.

Recruitment, Marketing and Promotion

SP has historically been the only department on Campus to support marketing and recruitment for OL. This has been done through:

  • Partner-specific advertising (magazine, student handbook, and e-newsletter)
  • Attending conferences or education, and/or
  • Hosting student information sessions virtually and face-to-face with partnering institutions across Canada.

On average, SP attends approximately 12 events each year and host 10 virtual information sessions for students. We hope to expand this further with a more proactive presence in social media promotion.

Student Engagement

Prior to COVID, Partnerships had undertaken the task of meeting up with our current OL students to gain a better understanding of their experience with OL. We spoke with 64 students in 15 cities over 2 FYs:

  • Positive Experience: 33% noted flexible/accessible delivery and 55% attributed their positive experience to helpful OLFMs.
  • Challenges: 28% noted personal/procrastination, 16% with their OLFM (communication, response time) and 33% with their course structure (online instruction, challenges with Moodle, course availability, course layout, online materials).
  • How they value openness and online: 69% cited flexible delivery and 25% for personal/professional development.
  • Education wish list: 40% of students noted virtual online instruction or being able to schedule virtual meetings with their OLFM to ask questions.

TRU, Open Learning Alumni

While engaging with our OL students, we were also able to meet up with some of our OL Alumni.  It was incredible to meet with OL graduates across Canada, some which have gone on to become a Head of Risk for Google, for example, worked with NASA, or awarded for their leadership in health care. 

Program Delivery

As a pilot project this past FY, SP supported the condensed delivery of our Certificate in Business Skills program in partnership with Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc. With 7 students in the program (3 full-time, 4 part-time), we were able to deliver education directly to the community in a way that fully supported the needs of students with online, scheduled virtual instruction. Similar programs have also been supported through Nursing with our HCA program.  

Opportunities For Growth

There are two areas where SP can support future growth and opportunity for OL. 

Credit Bank: Currently, we have 68 potential partnership agreements on our waitlist.  Of this, 25+ are with private training institutions. These range from Canadian Armed Forces, Government training, professional associations, or private colleges. 

Program delivery with rural or Indigenous communities. Similar to the program delivery partnership with Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc, to date we have had three additional requests for a cohort program delivery or individual course delivery to support educating rural communities:

  • Douglas Lake FN: Looking to train Education Assistants in the community, while they are still able to work.
  • Burns Lake FN Corporation: Currently building a water treatment facility with 6 other First Nations in the region. With this, they are looking to train community members to work at the facility and stay in the community. 
  • SD 64 Adult Education: Our TRU Start BC contact through SD 64 has expressed interest in TRU-OL supporting virtual delivery of our HCA program through an Adult Community Education Centre on the Gulf Islands.

**For each of these, they are looking for a scheduled, online augmented delivery for their members. If the training is online, they would like the students to stay as one cohort with scheduled online class time. 

PLAR and Evidence-Based Programming Built on Learner Success

PLAR is aligning learner success and holds decolonization at its core. Here are a few examples.

PLAR Persistence Research: This research guided us through extensive changes in student support and resources; for example, student examples on Moodle, the creation of a 72-page handbook, redacted portfolios examples, self-assessment tools, etc.

Decolonization: Working to Bridge, Blend, and Build

How PLAR Impacts Career Development

More PLAR research, using the draw-talk protocol (Will Garrett-Petts), illustrates the transformative impact PLAR had on this student’s career development (see image on right).

Rankings

To improve our rankings, we need to consider research grants, awards, resources, reputation (highest quality, most innovative, leaders of tomorrow), student satisfaction and support, and increasing experiential learning, mental health services, student-life staff, advising, extracurricular, etc.). These images highlight some of the areas we are particularly proud of, that the province came directly to PLAR and Learning Technology and Innovation. We are reinvigorating PLIRC (Prior Learning International Research Consortium) to co-host an international conference with Ireland in 2024, which will culminate in volume II of Handbook of Recognition of Prior Learning: Turning Research into Practice. We have over 500 articles waiting to go into an open-resource repository.

Provincial and
Canadian Leadership

OUR INTERNATIONAL REPUTATION

Revitalization of PLIRC (Prior Learning International Research Consortium)

An Overview of our Worldwide Engagement

Student

“Be proud of who you are and where you come from.”

TRU-WL, 2020, 21, 22 Valedictorian

Key Takeaways

STUDENT ENGAGEMENT & EXPERIENCE TEAM:

  1. We ask that every individual team, department, division, faculty, and school ask themselves if what they are offering can be extended to students not living near campus, whenever possible.
  2. We are a team of experts in engagement and experience for learners who are studying by distance. In pursuit of the Integrated Strategic Plan, we are more than happy to meet with any group across campus, at any time, to help plan services and opportunities for those who are not present in Kamloops. To this end, we have made great strides (study abroad, co-op, Campus PLAR, Credit Bank agreements, virtual webinars, etc.), but there is still much work to be done.
  3. We are guided by the spirit of accessibility, flexibility, and respect in service to our students. Everything we do is guided by the strategic priority of “Student Wellness and Belonging Will Enable Us to Achieve the Change Goal of Eliminating Opportunity Gaps, and Honouring Truth Reconciliation and Rights.”

“Let’s meet students where they are at.”