Annual Update Questions—First Year Experience
2013
The institution's responses should be direct and factual to provide a clear picture of its progress,
accomplishments, and challenges.
1. Describe the past accomplishments and the current status of this Action Project.
Describe concrete achievements: meetings, data gathered and analyzed, plans made or
implemented, changes in processes, and measured results. If the institution hasn't made much
progress, explain why things are moving slower than planned.

Since this project was initially launched, the college was awarded the Completion by Design
grant, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. One of the four strategic priorities
identified by this initiative was “integrated student support,” which included a move toward
mandatory orientation and advising. A great deal of work has been done to change these
processes as we move toward making them mandatory. Major milestones include:
o
September 17, 2012: work team kick-off for the academic year to identify goals and
processes.
o
October 2, 2012: visit from Boston City Connects to explore possible model for
integrating wrap-around student support and referrals. Decision was made to pursue
this. Three meetings a month took place to build this model between November of
2012 and August of 2013.
o
October 31, 2012: retention summit, which featured a poverty simulation so that
faculty and staff understood the implications of poverty on students navigating social
service agencies, employment searches, etc.
o
November 19, 2012: work team meeting to plan for move toward mandatory
orientation and advising
o
December 17, 2012: began planning for Title III grant to redesign advising and
orientation systems. Over 75 hours in meetings occurred between December 17 and
May 15, when the grant was submitted.
o
December 19, 2012: Staff professional development day for 800 staff members to
include staff role in increasing completion.
o
January 3, 2013: Department learning day for faculty which included discussions
about faculty’s role ensuring students receive important college services. Over 100
faculty attended.
o
January 8, 2013: Key leaders plan for retreat on mandatory orientation and advising.
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o
February 20, 2013: Day-long retreat at Aileron conference center to plan for
mandatory orientation and advising. A decision was made to do a soft roll-out in the
fall of 2013 (no holds on records) with plans for a full roll-out in the spring of 2014,
assuming fall term goes as planned.
o
March 22, 2013: combined work team meetings for Completion by Design in which
plans were shared with the 80 other work team members.
o
April 9, 2013: presentation on mandatory orientation and advising to President’s
cabinet.
o
Ongoing: briefings to President Johnson, Provost Dave Collins, provost’s council, etc.
to update key leaders on evolution of process.

Improving the first year experience led to the institution’s identification of major areas of
focus, all leading to optimized student support that integrates the work of all student-facing
employees of the college. Specific accomplishments include:
o
Redesign of academic pathways, using Sinclair’s My Academic Plan (MAP)
software, to lay out exactly what students need to take semester by semester,
including recommended (default) electives. This was done in response to student
feedback that navigating our curricula was too confusing. Faculty have been working
with academic advisors to develop ideal pathways for students in over 100 programs
to date. So far, 30,000 individual student MAPs have been created to take the guess
work out of students’ educational choices. Of those, 75% of students are “on map”
and another 10% are very close to being on MAP (they may have added a physical
education class that wasn’t on their original MAP, may have switched the order of
classes on their MAP, are going at a slower pace than planned, etc.).
o
Focus on helping students get through developmental education more quickly
and successfully by using the MAP tool to steer students into accelerated
developmental education programs (boot camps, Accelerated English and Math
programs, etc.).
o
Optimizing student support through a focus on integrating advising, orientation,
financial aid, and faculty support for students. Highlights of this work include:

Move toward mandatory orientation and advising: students have a
checklist, which walks them through the steps in the enrollment process
including application, financial aid, orientation and advising. 68% of new
students between May 1 – August 19, 2013 attended new student
orientation, up from 51% two years ago. As we improve these processes, we
anticipate putting a hold on students’ records, if the data continue to suggest
that orientation is beneficial, and the institution is fully prepared to handle a
mandatory process.
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
Redesign of the college’s structure: the college has applied for a Title III
grant, which seeks to divide the college into career clusters (i.e. STEM, arts,
business, public service, etc.). These clusters will be led by a steering
committee made up of representatives of orientation, advising, the faculty,
financial aid, and others. Support will be provided to students based on their
career interest, allowing for a better tailoring of services to the students’
needs.

Leveraging partnerships: the college has been funded by the local Mathile
Family Foundation to adapt a model in use by Boston’s City Connects to
provide holistic student support. This work involves assessing students
across four domains: academic, personal, career, and financial. The student
is given a tailored plan, which utilizes a range of resources from the college
and community. Although the initial pilot will only include 130 students, the
work is being designed to scale to all new students (5,000 or more) if there is
evidence that the work is successful.

Faculty and Staff development: over 500 full and part-time faculty and
staff participated in completion-focused professional development in the past
year.
All of this work is being integrated under the umbrella of Completion by Design and is led by the
Associate Provost for Completion.
2. Describe how the institution involved people in work on this Action Project.
AQIP wants information about motivation and communication: how this project was kept on the
institution's priority list, how general awareness of the importance and progress of the project
was maintained, and how those working on it directly were kept active and motivated.

The accomplishments of the past year would not have been possible without leadership at all
levels. The Board of Trustees made completion a priority for the college and focused heavily
on the topic during its retreat in January. The President was vocal about his support for
improving student success and completion, speaking at national, state and institutional
events about the importance of student completion. The President’s cabinet listed
Completion as one of its top priorities for the year. Deans and directors across campus wove
completion into strategic planning and meeting agendas. Department chairs, faculty and staff
routinely discussed student achievement data and identified opportunities for improvement,
many of which were integrated continuous improvement targets in individual employees’
performance reviews. This work was aided by national, state and local partners’ visits to
campus to learn about the ground-breaking work Sinclair is doing. As one long-time
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employee recently told our Achieving the Dream coaches: “I have never seen the culture of
the college change so quickly and deeply. This is not a passing fad.” Whether the
conversation surrounds the director of facilities asking about a capital project’s potential effect
on completion, or the Chief Financial Officer, doing a return on investment analysis of a
student success initiative, completion-centered language permeates our culture.
3. In addition to formal meetings surrounding the various student success initiatives underway, the
Provost and Associate Provost have been meeting informally through “Coffee with the Provost”
events to discuss advising. In the past, the college had a decentralized advising system, where
specialists within each academic division provided advising to students within those areas. The
college moved to centralized advising about five years ago. This allowed for more consistency
in process, but created challenges as the college lost the specialized knowledge within each of
these areas. Faculty, students, and advisors have all commented on the need for advisors who
are knowledgeable about specific programs. Moving forward, as stated previously, the college
plans to redesign the advising process through dividing students into career clusters, and
providing specialized services in advising, financial aid, orientation, etc. to these groups of
students.
4. Describe the institution's next steps for this Action Project.
Be specific about the next critical steps the institution is planning to move the Action Project
ahead. If planning is vague or there is no planning at this point, explain why.

The college has applied for Title III funding to redesign its advising and orientations systems.
The following chart outlines the current state and proposed state of holistic support:
TABLE 9: SERVICE DELIVERY CHANGES RESULTING FROM THIS TITLE III GRANT
“As-Is” Model
New student orientation sessions are not required.
“To-Be” Model
New student orientation is mandatory and
contextualized for each career community.
Students feel disconnected to their future careers
and take courses in a large, impersonal institution.
Students are assigned a small career community
upon admission and make career connections
early.
Advising is not mandatory.
Advising is mandatory for the failing/floundering
Holistic advising is provided to small niches of atrisk students.
The majority of students receive holistic advising
and mentoring in-person or online.
Career advising is offered near the end of a
student’s career, focused on job search.
Career advising is offered upon admission to aid
career selection and provided ongoing as needed.
Advisors have varying levels of authority and
access to data in the college-wide information
Advisors and mentors have full, easy access to the
data needed to help students make informed
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TABLE 9: SERVICE DELIVERY CHANGES RESULTING FROM THIS TITLE III GRANT
system for advising students.
decisions through a web-based dashboard.
Students see multiple advisors providing
conflicting information.
Case managers work with students and follow them
from entry to completion.
Advising across the college is disjointed and
varies among the departments; holistic advising is
available to a fraction of student population.
Advisors and mentors use a standardized process
and software enabling holistic advising and
expands advising efficiency, and consistency.
Students self-advise, flounder, take unnecessary
courses, waste financial aid, and amass loan
debt.
Career communities provide students support
throughout their tenure focused on completion.
If this funding is not awarded, the college plans to approach foundations for funding or proceed with
planning for this major change with institutional resources. This move toward dividing the college along
career groupings would help us customize our services to students based on their long-term goals. By
having specialized knowledge in these service areas, the college hopes to ensure that students are given
more accurate information tailored for their career path.
5. Describe any "effective practice(s)" that resulted from the institution's work on this Action Project.
Share practices (or processes, policies, procedures, or initiatives) that could be adopted or
adapted at other institutions. AQIP is most interested in practices that would give value (better
educational services, cost-savings, improved morale, more satisfied stakeholders, etc.) to other
institutions if they copied them. If the institution's work on this project has little or no value for
other institutions, explain why.

The broad engagement of President’s cabinet, Completion by Design work teams, faculty,
staff, and department chairs has been helpful in moving this work forward. Throughout this
process, there was a lot of give and take, as administrators, faculty and staff worked together
on this onboarding process.

Sinclair has developed the My Academic Plan (MAP) software, as the latest tool in its
Student Success Plan (SSP) software suite. The tool gives students a clear, individualized,
and coherent pathway to complete their academic goals. When looking at students who
successfully complete courses, Sinclair's preliminary data indicate that they typically follow
the advice outlined on their MAPs. During the first full semester of implementation, more than
85 percent of the mapped students selected and registered for courses closely related to their
MAP. When discussing MAP, one student in Visual Communications said, "I want to see what
I can take in the future. [MAP] is a reminder to me."
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Key takeaways include:
o
By registering for MAP-recommended courses, students can ensure that their
classes both fit with their program and are well suited to their academic abilities.
o
MAPs encourage students to create long-term plans for degree completion and are
also adaptive to the specific and often complex needs of each student.
o
MAPs aggregate data across plans to give academic administrators course-demand
information that they can use to optimize course offerings for future terms.
o
Open-source SSP software is available now through the Apereo (formerly Jasig)
Foundation at https://wiki.jasig.org/display/SSP/Home. Sinclair has been using SSP
software since early 2003; the MAP component went into production in February
2011. Currently, more than 30,000 Sinclair students have active MAPs, and ideal
curricular pathways have been created for more than 100 academic programs. The
full SSP software suite is also in operation at six other community colleges. The MAP
component is being implemented at another five institutions that are participating in
North Carolina's Completion-By-Design cadre. It is highly likely that several additional
institutions will be implementing MAP in the near future as part of anticipated grant
funding.

Creation of a checklist for new students: As a result of the AQIP First-Year Experience
action team, the college has redesigned its front-end student services so that orientation and
advising are integrated into a checklist for new students:
Step 1: apply to Sinclair
Step 2: apply for financial aid
Step 3: placement or assessment through the submission of ACT scores/COMPASS scores
Step 4: meet with academic advisor or academic coach
Step 5: develop a class schedule and MAP
Step 6: attend New Student Orientation
Step 7: register for classes
Step 8: get tartan card
Step 9: pay for classes
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By creating a checklist, posting it online and providing the list as a handout to students, the
college has increased its participation rate in orientation from 51% in 2011-12 to 68% for the fall
of 2013.

Light Touch Summary: Light Touch is a program that assigns five new, first time in college
students to participating faculty and staff, who welcome and support new students through a
series of three calls. 107 employees contacted 500 students in fall of 2013.

Sinclair Talks: The college instituted “Sinclair Talks” as a way to engage students outside
the classroom. Sessions are presented on a variety of topics. 127 sessions were attended
by 2049 students in 2012-13.
6. What challenges, if any, still face the institution regarding this Action Project?
This is an opportunity to get constructive, actionable feedback and advice from AQIP's review
process. Use this question to specify blocks, gaps, sticking points, or problems. If the institution
has already fashioned strategies to deal with any challenges it faces, share both the challenges
and strategies for meeting them.

One of the biggest challenges for launching mandatory orientation and advising is the
balance needed between access and success. The college recently felt a budget crunch as
the result of semester conversion and the drop of 40% in summer enrollment in 2012.
Mandatory orientation and/or advising could not be launched if it might negatively affect
enrollment at this critical point. As a result, the group decided upon a soft-roll out, which
would allow us to study the effects of these new processes without actually putting a hold on
students’ records.

Another challenge that remains involves identifying the faculty members’ role in helping to
optimize student support. While the faculty handbook includes advising responsibilities as
part of a tenured faculty member’s role, the practice has varied widely across all academic
departments. Some departments have made great use of faculty members as academic
advisors on discipline-specific content, while others do little to no academic advising, but
provide student support in others ways. The Associate Provost will engage Faculty Senate in
crafting a process for determining how best to leverage faculty members’ discipline-specific
knowledge and easy access to students.
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